SOME readers write and ask this Yorkshire lad what it's like to be living down here in the middle of the great, wild and wicked City of London.

Well, it's a lot of fun, but there are snags. Today, for example, the police - these are our local bobbies here in the Square Mile and quite separate from the Metropolitan force - sent me an email which read: "The City of London Police have deployed officers at various locations within the City in a pre-planned operation as part of the continued fight against terrorism." I didn't know whether to feel reassured or scared stiff.

Terrorism is a nuisance because, as well as being a threat to life and limb, it causes chaos. I wish our local coppers would intervene and do something about the home-grown chaos which besets our life here in the great city. Take the Tube for example. The whole of the Central Line has just reopened after being closed for months. Last Monday they shut part of it down again right in the middle of the rush hour. I have enough brain cells left to know to avoid the Tube whenever possible. It's filthy, overcrowded, smelly, hotter than Calcutta in June and always likely to break down. So last Monday I took the number eight bus up to the West End. The journey should have taken about 20 minutes.

Instead it took an hour-and-a-half. Why? Because the Central Line stations became overcrowded and the Tube's management decided that the best way to remedy the crush was to throw everybody out on to the street - where of course they just formed a new crush. Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, has imposed a £5 per day congestion charge on all cars coming into the city centre. There's now a standing joke in the Smoke: "We used to get our congestion free - now we pay £5 for it!"

So, you get the picture: travelling anywhere in London is purgatory. The best thing is to walk. But then you get culture shock when you find yourself among slouching crowds of baseball-capped yobs mouthing curses while they chomp their disgusting burgers before throwing the wrapping paper down in the street. In the city itself, the pavement rudeness takes on a slightly more refined form: here the young bankers and brokers in their uniform black suits merely bump into you and knock you into the gutter as, having slavishly answered the mindless ring tones on their mobiles, they lose all sense of direction.

Stay in the house then. You're still not guaranteed a quiet life. They say there's an economic downturn in the city, but you wouldn't credit it given the number of new banks and insurance offices being built. I've been here five years now, and it's like living on a perpetual building site. They built the new Merrill Lynch HQ right opposite my rectory. Three months pile-driving which made the house judder and wince after every thrust into the dry earth. Then six months of steel-erecting - such amplified clanging and banging night and day that it called to mind all those old dirty jokes about what skeletons get up to on corrugated iron roofs. Next the road dug up... and relaid... and dug up... while they put in the gas, the electricity and the water. Still, as I said, London can be a lot of fun. Next week I'll tell you about the Lord Mayor's Show - which has nothing at all to do with Ken Livingstone.

* Peter Mullen in Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange