IT WASN'T JUST the 54 percent rent increase by a landlord who is keeping alive the spirit of Jesse James, nor even the bomb that took up where the cats left off in keeping us awake. I think it was the missing postage stamp that finally did it. Whatever, we are just about fed up to our fangs with London.

Samuel Johnson once said, "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." Mind you, old Sam's was an 18th century view of the place devoid of phalanxes of car thieves, Kosovo beggars, Irish malcontents using welfare checks to finance their Semtex habit, and an Olympic-standard system of traffic jams.

(In fact, probably the only thing about London that Johnson might recognize is the plethora of coffee houses. Except they are now called Starbucks and they don't let you smoke opium on the premises.)

Rather than Johnson's romantic setting, I subscribe to the succinct view expressed by a more modern essayist, George Mikos: "London is chaos incorporated."

This diminishing state of capital affairs began dawning upon me a few years back, when bandits with an appallingly bad taste in cars stole ours. It was a beat-up old banger, but in the trunk were several crates of cat food. With nine felines to contend with - they yowl at about 134 decibels when hungry - we decided to report the matter to the police.

Three days later, they found the car, abandoned in downtown London. My wife Elizabeth had to go retrieve it, only to find it was out of gas. It was also out of cat food. So what we were stuck with was a bucket of bolts worth about 75 bucks and stuck without was pet food worth about double that.

Along with the Jack the Ripper murders and the photo of the man with no head in the Duchess of Argyle's divorce, our case remains in the "unsolved" files of Scotland Yard.

Now fast-forward to a few days ago. We had turned on the fireplace (on a night of 74 F-plus temperatures) and filled up the food bowls at 4 in the morning to stop resident cats Teddy and Penelope from yodeling like demented Swiss in lederhosen, and had just settled down to sleep, when an explosive "whomphhh!!!" shook us out of bed.

About 50 yards down the street, what the police (presumably having taken time off from our car theft case) later determined were Irish terrorists had detonated a bomb with about five pounds of Semtex explosive at the south end of the Hammersmith Bridge that links us to mainland London (i.e. the north bank of the River Thames).

It seems that every time the Irish hoodlums get a snootful of the local kickapoo juice and turn maudlin about the failure of the latest potato crop, or the nag that ran last and took their welfare dough with it at the Curragh of Kildare, or the ale didn't have the right shade of green, they take it out for some reason on the poor old Hammersmith Bridge.

They are not very good at it. They tried to blow up the bridge back in the Thirties (a passerby spotted the sparks from the fuse and threw the suitcase bomb into the river), again in 1996 (detonators went off, bomb didn't) and this latest fumble (bomb too small, badly installed).

But what the IRA, with the connivance of Scotland Yard and London Transport, has managed is maximum inconvenience. For three days, the coppers sealed off our street and spent the day drinking tea and eating cakes and asking the locals how tall they were and the color of their eyes, while we had to resort to a network of back paths to escape to the outside world.

Once there, we found no buses were running. London Transport evidently decided not to inconvenience its own drivers and gave most of them the day off. Which meant we hiked a mile or better to the nearest operating bus stop to get us back to our jobs, shops and other accoutrements associated with civilized life.

It was on my journey about this time through Mikos's chaos incorporated that I encountered the straw that did for the camel. I stopped by a pharmacy at Waterloo rail station to purchase a book of postage stamps (they do things differently here). The gent behind the counter pulled out a book of four stamps, checked it, smiled broadly and took my cash.

A few minutes later, sitting inside a stationary tube (underground) train - some horse's derriere with oatmeal for brains had pushed the emergency button and brought the whole system to a halt - I pulled out the book of four stamps to get one for a letter. Except there weren't four stamps. There were three. And I had seen the man check it. . .

It was one of those defining moments of life when something just snaps.

I sat there pondering life, the universe and everything. There was our landlord, a practitioner of the finer arts of highway robbery, piracy on the high seas and cheating at solitaire, who a few months back socked us with the 54 percent rent increase - and hinted that he intended a really big hike when the matter comes up for debate again, next year.

And the traffic jams that mean London traffic, which moved at an average of 11 miles an hour in 1899, moved at an average of 11 mph in 1999. And the bombs! I expected to coexist with products of the munitions trade in Vietnam and Beirut and certain Ku Klux Klan-infested areas of North Carolina. I did not expect to have to do so in London.

And that missing stamp. That tore it. Elizabeth and I have a cottage in the English countryside, we have applied for planning permission to add a couple of rooms, and as soon as the final bit of plaster dries, we'll be out of here - which, given British bureaucracy, should be no later than April 17, 2009.

Meanwhile, I'll slightly paraphrase Samuel Johnson: "When a man is tired of London, it's time he got a life."

Thought for the Week: The hardness of the butter is directly proportional to the softness of the toast.

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