Wandering around the tents pitched outside London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, I reflected on how fortunate the banks are in their enemies.

The protesters are friendly. A woman who tries to sell me a “peace lily” says she is a day-tripper to the camp because maternal duties take her home at night. Why is she here? She points to her young daughter, standing with her. For her future, she says. What aspect? All of it, she says. “I just hate the Tories.”

A psychiatric nurse who works in the first-aid tent says he is not anti-capitalist but consumerism has much in common with the addictive behaviour he sees at work. I gesture at a screed fixed to the fence behind him blaming the world’s ills on the Freemasons. He rolls his eyes. Yes, there are some conspiracy theorists around, he says.