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George Scharf made a drawing in 1843 which shows a mobile sideshow parked in Oxford Street, punters queuing up, which contains, it is proclaimed on the side (complete with illustrations): "An enormous FAT WOMAN; the smallest man in the world; a boy born without arms and hands." That sounds like Oxford Street.

Oxford Street was recently and cleverly identified as "London High Street". It is generally abhorred. But it is absolutely honest. From Selfridges at one end to Mr Pound the Tottenham Court Road end ("Look around. It's Mr Pound" intones a repetitive cassette tape), Mr Byrite in between, what you see is what you get. And furthermore the best thing that you get is Crowd.

Oxford Street on a hot Saturday afternoon simply heaves with the entire world; wave after wave of people. Through the crowd I swim, when the sun is low at the Marble Arch end, dazzled as I breast the silvery waves of oncoming silhouettes, silhouettes that resolve themselves a thousand different ways; here, breaking into three-dimensionality, a shoal of Brazilian girls in tiny dresses fit to break your heart; now a posse of black youths in snowy trainers, two Saudi women swathed in black, their faces hidden behind strange metallic beaks, incessant waves until I am overwhelmed by the profusion of faces, the beautiful, the coarse, the hostile, the vacant.

Once in one of the great filthy downtown thoroughfares of Cairo I had to lean against a wall not for the heat or the dust; just dazed with exposure to the crowd. But not for long. Indeed the crowd is cleansing; to shed for a period one's ego; surely this cannot be bad; indeed it might be positively therapeutic, as it was for Dickens who said: "I don't seem to be able to get rid of my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds."

But sometimes inconspicuousness is important. In London I am invisible. In Moscow I was gratified repeatedly to be asked directions, liking to think it was evidence of my quarter of Russian ancestry. In the swarming centre of Sao Paulo (Praca de Rebublica, Praca da Se, in baseball cap and dark glasses I stand long enough looking over a shirt stall while the owner has popped away, to be asked three times the price of 'my' shirts.

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