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Or Baudelaire who describes a man who "plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy"; (though it would be difficult to imagine Baudelaire himself, dressed all in black save for his rose-pink gloves, of doing anything as uncool as plunging.)

The sole figure of a man in the street is the modern emblem, much to the disapproval of Marx who (according to Walter Benjamin) reproached Eugene Sue's Mysteres de Paris as portraying merely a man in the street rather than the masses, the proletariat, united in intent. And of course Marx is right, because clearly the flaneur exists only in contradistinction to the crowd. His revolutionary potential is nil.

The flaneur may pride himself on his detachment; but he will never attain the purest detachment, the utter dandyisme of the real eccentric. Their utter attention to detail is a defining characteristic: Stanley Green, the Protein Man walked the length of Oxford Street for years with his meticulously painted placard: LESS PASSION FROM LESS PROTEIN: MEAT, FISH, BIRD: EGG CHEESE, PEAS, BEANS: NUTS. AND SITTING. Passing him once I noted the neat little brass hooks from which, as an afterthought, dangled a subsidiary notice, the price of his booklet (which presumably he changed over the years.) Detail! For a sure sign of the real eccentric is attention to detail. We are talking about the foresightfulness of Snakeman in providing himself with a spare snake. Or the care of the promising new street eccentric I have sighted several times along Piccadilly: he wears a full-face motorcycle crash helmet and manoevres along the pavement a tall pram-like object decorated with a floral shower curtain. On the front of this structure he has with the utmost care mounted a self-portrait by Rembrandt.

But the most meticulous precisian of the streets was the man with the world map who had his pitch on the corner of Via Roma and Via Santa Brigida in Naples. From here, each day he exposed the Ultimate Conspiracy Theory. The Pope, the Queen of England, the Sendero Luminoso, the Yakuza, the Masons, Opus Dei, the CIA, (yes, possibly even the Quakers) are all in league. Little flags sprout from the face of the globe and (sweetest of all) meticulously colour-coded threads span oceans to reveal the universality of this collusion.

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