IT SHOULD have been so simple. On Friday night, having watched Led Bib and Chik Budo play a brain-scrambling London Jazz Festival gig at the Luminaire in Kilburn, my friend Seb and I hatched a meek plan: head back home to Hackney for a quiet pint before bed.

"I know!" I said. "Instead of getting the Jubilee Line all the way to Baker Street, catching the Circle Line to Liverpool Street and finally making the tortuous journey to Hackney, let’s get the Overground!"

The Overground, sharp-eyed Londoners will have noticed, has recently made a surprise appearance on the tube map, a dark orange worm conveniently linking the extremities of north London. A neat advertising campaign, packaging the service like a Hornby train set, averts attention from the fact that the line has always been there, and was formerly known as the Silverlink.

The Silverlink, notoriously, was the most useless, least manned train line in all of London, still serviced by mule-drawn cart until 1995. But surely, we thought, given the eye-catching campaign, TfL must have revamped it accordingly, and at least phased out steam by now.

But no. The last train to Dalston, we were informed by a scrappy timetable, had left at the staggeringly early time of 11.20pm. On a Friday night!

So we wandered to the underground, and made the unhappy odyssey detailed above. By the time we reached Hackney we were thirsty indeed.

But the pub on the corner by the station was no longer there. Nor were any of the binge drinkers who have apparently flourished since the change in the licensing laws, and nor indeed was there any pub, restaurant or café open in this usually busy part of town that might have allowed us in to enjoy our quiet consolation. Except, we remembered, the Dolphin - a rather yukky sweat-pit that lay a 20 minute walk and a £5 entrance fee away.

Something like this seems to happen almost every weekend, in whichever part of town I find myself. At no time is the lie about London being a 24 hour city more apparent than at shortly after 11pm on a Friday night. Our new all hours culture has been blamed for everything from mob violence to a decline in morals. But I'm damned if I've ever seen much evidence of it existing at all.

En route to the Dolphin, Seb told me he knows the publicist who was charged with coming up with the concept of 24-Hour London. "So what did he actually set up?" I wondered. "Nothing at all", Seb replied, "he just had to promote the idea of London as a 24-hour city."

With scarcely any venues finding it viable to open late, this strikes me as nothing less than doublethink - suspiciously similar to the kind of doublethink that trumpets a new railway which is precisely as disfunctional as the old one. On a bitter November night, hot air does little to keep one warm.