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Strange encounters that actually serve to intensify your own (self-imposed) solitude. You find yourself alone in the heart of a city. You lie on your bed and think of the dizzying tissue of events and opportunities that lie at the very threshold of your room, taunted by the opportunities that are, in theory, to hand; reproaching yourself for doing nothing about them. How much better to be a hermit in a cave than an urban hermit, and yet how much more hermitic in fact is the urban hermit who actually has the facilities for corruption on his doorstep. Sometimes it is a nightmare to be alone, unknown to anyone, knowing no-one, in a hotel room in the middle of a city. Worse still to walk those streets alone, an outsider to the complicity that seems to unite the crowd.

As a veteran of hotel rooms around the world I know all too well how solitary it can be to be alone and in a hotel in the middle of a strange city. Once in Cairo, I stayed one night in a very seedy downtown hotel, a room of a nightmarish kitsch. A Louis Farouk bed, a vast sofa, prototype, perhaps, for Dali's sofa based on the lips of Mae West; a fitful overhead light like a flying saucer, crackling audibly with electric current. The noise of the traffic in the street, the TV in the next room, the voices outside, the heat; I spent a horrible dream-haunted night, dreams with a cast of thousand, congested plots, weird sexual special effects. For so much of it comes down to sex, of course!

Jean Moreas writes of

"Les fins parfums de la jupe qui froufroute
Le long du trottoir blanc....

Rustling skirts along the sidewalk....yes; and we find it in literature as early as the seventeenth century, this particular conjunction of of silk and sidewalk:

"Now when each narrow lane, each nook and cave, Signposts, and shop doors, pimp for ev'ry knave, When riotous sinful plush and tell-tale spurs Walk Fleet Street and the Strand, when the soft stirs Of bawdy, ruffled silks turn night to day;"

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