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But often, and sometimes with almost allegorical significance individuals emerge from the crowd, and lay claim to you. I am sitting in a little café in Rio. An old old woman comes in and points to a bubbling pot of goggling eyes and says to me "Buy me a fish head". Nothing else; no please, no thankyou. I do. She sucks every bit of sustenance, eyes and all, out of this object and shuffles out.

Individuals emerge out of the city crowd as portentously as Wordsworth's Leech Gatherer. In Clapham Common Station an old man possibly in his eighties sways on the steps. I catch him and attach his hands to the banister. Are you OK? I ask. He replies: "I've just come from the hospice. My son's dying in there." You might have thought that at eighty you would at least not have to watch the slow death of your son.

At two o clock at night I walk quite lost through a massive rainstorm in Jakarta looking for my flat (in Jalan Komando 3.) Out of the shadows steps my saviour: Iceman. Naked to the waist, a turban round his head, on his shoulder he bears a great dripping girder of ice wrapped in sacking. With an eloquent free hand he points in silence the way I must go and disappears into the storm.

And then there are the encounters with the very, very famous; indeed the most famous woman in the world and the most famous man in the world.

I take my son across Green Park to show him Buckingham Palace. We are surprisingly alone there. A car rolls out. The Queen is inside. She waves to my son. My son waves back. She hums off up the Mall. " See?! you've seen the Queen!" "OK Dad; but she could have been wearing her crown."

I find a corner of Leicester Square seething with people, policemen, bodyguards, photographers. In their midst, like a circus bear, lost but foursquare, stands Mohamed Ali.

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