Just walking into the place is always an adventure. On that night, I'd shouldered my way through thirty or forty people just to get to the door.

A dozen or so is not unusual - it's a good place to be, and it's just a half-block off the main road - and because of this, it's not even unusual to have police cars in the mix. It's rare, though, to have standing room only, and especially rare to have everyone in the same conversation.

Once inside, it was sparse - three teenage girls, one of whom had the watch that night. They were all trying to Steal Music Over The Internet and Peek Out The Window At Boys, pursuing these pointlessnesses with slumber-party intensity. It was a measure of the strangeness of the group just outside that I chose to stay inside with them.

The highlight of my stay there was when the girl on watch took a call from the proprietor's wife, who'd passed by on the main road and seen the chaos. The message was reassuring, there was no trouble going on, but I wondered if I was the only one struck by the irony.

I mean, it's what you do. You see suspicious activity, you call in.

But it must be brilliantly ironic to find you've called about a meeting of the neighborhood crime watch.