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I was inevitably drawn to London. At the age of twelve my friend and I would spend 14/6 on a day return ticket to London from Cambridge; we would walk around in our short trousers seeing nothing; just being there. From then on it became progressively more and more a part of my life; 1967 in Holloway, a summer above a chemist's shop in Portobello Road 1969, 1970 a bedsit in Norland Square, (three pounds a week.) But always, like any good provincial in a nineteenth century Bildungsroman, I wanted to not just live in it but to 'possess' it in some way or other, a preoccupation that would not occur to a Londoner by birth, secure in the preeminence of his own manor.

I had once had a guidebook called J'ai Paris dans ma Poche (for I had lived a whole year in Paris before I ever lived in London.) I had chanced on a flat at the end of the Boulevard S, Michel. I worked in a local bookshop which specialised in pornography (confined to its cellar). There in the 'cave' I unpacked crates of Olympia Press erotica, astonishingly (for this was after all 1970) still outlawed. Every now and then the little birdlike directrice would call down to me: "Alors monsieur, vous avez fini avec les erotiques?" "Oui Madame, toute de suite", I would reply stuffing some flagellant classic back onto the shelves.

Dans ma poche. I have a compulsion to pocket cities, to possess them in their entirety. The extent and complexity of the city taunts me. I know that to possess a city at all it must be with the near-hallucinatory instanteaneity ("In a flash my mind's eye shows me a thousand dust-tormented streets") that Durrell encapsulates Alexandria.

But the taxi driver who has done the Knowledge has achieved something of the kind. Compared to his Knowledge my obsession resembles the finicky data-docketing of the trainspotter. So it should ; for it is the same thing. And yet why this derision of the humble trainspotter? For he is responding to a passion greater than the mere accumulation of loco numbers; deep within those muffled figures with video cameras on the platforms at Crewe must burn a real passion; a passion that I, unwilling to omit a hundred yards of the Old Kent Road, would do well to respect.

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