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But the thrill is no less, coming into London more prosaically. This obsession is not about beauty; it is deeper than that, even on the meanest little station hopper, or from Gatwick airport. Oh the thrill of being sucked into the real tentacular city (for wherever the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren imagined his "villes tentaculaires" to be in 1895, the first real octopus was London.) I love to feel pulled inexorably into this, the most attenuated, mournful, doom-laden city in history, to feel cling around me that grimy, unhealthy quality of London, the sallow but intense sexuality of the city, to feel the profound
despondency of its interminable suburbs, to see the rain-wet streets glisten like PVC. Rain and neon: made for each other.)

Rain; the almost viscous rain of hot countries. At dusk I take the STAR LRT shuttle from my hotel to downtown Kuala Lumpur. The little trains are driverless; you stand in the transparent cockpit of the front carriage as you ride the elevated rail into the thick of the city. Thrill enough; but today there is a massive downpour and for the whole of my 15 minute journey my pod is like a bathysphere, its contours streaming with rain which dramatically distorts the already mobile cityscape, rocking as we are down the rails towards it. The city, like a submarine vision, like Poe's City In the Sea, waves and undulates; towers and skyscrapers liquidly distend and recoalesce as my Perspex egg rumbles ever deeper… downtown.

More thrilling still the skytrain of Bangkok, especially picking it up at the terminus of Somdet Phracho Tarsin Bridge and snaking at an improbable height across the city; the best ride in the world.

In Jakarta no skytrain to compare…but then again a sort of accidental one. I hang around Cawang station in the south east of the city, eating at a stall on the platform. Trains for the centre rumble through but since the only places left are on the roof of the train I stay put until a battered row of coaches churns in; all its doors seem to have been knocked out so I can ride round the city hanging off a handrail (with just a little attitude from the guy in the Bin Laden T shirt) looking down into the teeming streets, and across to the punchy new silhouettes of the city, all the way to Kota.

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