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But then in this issue of photography I am actually not qualified to say anything because I haven't got a camera; I never travel with one; and there is a reason, or rather two. I (loftily) feel that taking a picture is a substitute for looking. Worse than that: it is a substitute for remembering. With no camera you look more carefully. With no camera you remember more interestingly; your memories lock together, define themselves in patterns that are the more intense the more they are arbitrary. In short:

You want to not look at something? You want to forget something? Take a photo of it.

I remember cities in different ways: there are the vignettes… no I guess I should say clips, (as in internet clips) you can click on and activate: the tilted Ben Hur-like sweep of cars and vespas round the cobbles of the Piazza Venezia in Rome; for example. This may not be the kind of thing that Wordsworth may have wished to "flash upon the inward eye" but that (and a million others) is what I get. Some clips are bafflingly banal. Cairo comes to me repeatedly in one such cliché; a tram rumbling along the rails towards me, its wheels wobbly in the heat haze, in an utterly commonplace suburb. I have intenser, more colourful, more dramatic recollections of Cairo by far; but nothing touches the immediacy and accessibility of that one emblematic memory; no, accessibility is the wrong word. I don't access it. It visits me. And Rio. The gorgeousness of Copacabana, the fact that I was living overlooking the beach on Avenida Atlantica, and yet my intensest memory of Rio is a nondescript street corner in the unremarkable district of Leblon where I bought a mask for carnival. I see it in such detail that a description would be boring.

There is (for me at least) one other great shaper of cityscape: it is dream. The city is backdrop to most of my remembered dreams. Dreams of real cities, dreams of compound cities, dreams in which I overfly cities; dreams of street corners, new dreams, recurrent dreams. The cities usually bear a name but it is more or less a label of convenience: "Cairo" is a composite of hot, dusty third world cities; I have travelled large tracts of this pseudo-Cairo, sometimes by taxi (so clear now, through the rear window of my dream taxi: the warehouses, blocks of flats, balconies: so moving now to remember my dream it almost brings a tear to my eye.) And then there is a particular junction of scruffy streets which I have visited in several dreams. With each dream visit I penetrate a little more this network of streets; I actually have in mind, as I write, a plan as to how they link up; (there are also features of Naples in this dream A to Z, the lanes link together rather like the vicoletti of the Quartiere Spagnolo). My triumph one night was to walk further up one dream street than I had previously done, turn a corner and actually have lunch in a filthy little restaurant: Egyptian food; I can see the aluminium basin of brown beans and the water in a shared tin jug in front of me now. Since then I have gone no further up this lane. I can only sleep and wait.

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