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The third act of la Boheme is set at the Barriere d'Enfer. Sweepers, peasants, sellers of milk pass through customs one winter morning; there is an icy shimmer to the music. For some reason it is intensely moving; perhaps it is because only when we are on the confines of a city are we able to understand the full, perhaps shocking import of the city. Paris, albeit the fanciful Paris of feckless "bohemians", is most poignant, here at the Barriere d'Enfer.

Clearly this is a sentimental and old fashioned view of Paris, that of an English francophile; (just as the French anglophile retains an essentially Sherlockian view of London.) But I was, after all, first in Paris in 1959. (I was reminded of this
recently when I saw again A Bout de Souffle by Godard, filmed in Paris in that very year. Even at the age of twelve I responded very intensely to the city. To see Godard's film was a shock; the retro charm of it, the Citroens ('traction
avant' with their running boards), the bars! I could have passed the filmcrew of A Bout de Souffle, passed Belmondo himself, in the streets of Paris that summer!

For me the suburbs always meant a frittering away of the urban fabric into rurality; and I later realised that Paris had them too: the kind of thing you see in Utrillo or Pissarro; an intermediary view of Paris you can see in the later films
of Tati; in Mon Oncle, for example in which the almost Disney-esque profile of the old Paris, (so old that it is almost pre-haussmannian) contrasts with developments such as La Tour Montparnasse. But the real suburbs in films such as La Haine or Nuits Fauves, evocations of Parisian North Peckhams and Hackneys are new for me. I still have an idea of Paris as strictly circumscribed to some twenty-odd arrondissements.

Byron describes the walls of Constantinople: "Four miles of battlements, covered with ivy surmounted with 218 towers". I am impassioned by this idea of circumscription. City gates also have an epic, archetypal significance. While I love the anarchic sprawl of Tokyo part of me is frightened by it and responds to the idea of a containment, welcomes the definition of city walls and city gates. Standing on the city walls in Cairo above the huge and dilapidated Ba'ab el Futtuh, though nineteenth century Cairo stretches beyond and beyond again the brutal but thrilling silhouette of the twentieth century city, for all this I am moved by the thought of the city and how it once just…ended. (In a recent return I find Cairo wonderfully bigged up; huge new expressways flanked by 40 storey apartment blocks, each tower surmounted by a rash of satellite dishes creating dramatically fungoid profiles against the heat pale skies. I love, too, the English name of the new Trans-City Expressway: " The Twenty-sixth of July Corridor! Brilliant!"

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