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The great seventeenth century topographer of London, Hollar, in some of his views revealed an unexpected eroticism. In an allegorical Winter scene a gorgeously furred, tippeted and becaped beauty in a black domino, the lace border of her skirt trailing almost in the mire, stands against a utilitarian depiction of High Holborn, mid-Winter, smoke curling from a hundred chimney pots.

For me sex is implicitly urban. The city, the city streets may superficially have all sorts of adventureful reverberations; man on the prowl, man as free as it is possible to get, existentially, geographically, sexually. In fact the idea of infinite opportunity is largely a myth; travel of my sort is not at all as it might seem. The adventures that supposedly appertain to lone travelling, well they don't generally happen to me. But I say generally, because, come to think of it, sometimes they do)

Whatever; of all the equations in my head the most entrenched is the "city equals sex". This for me is axiomatic.

"It was a very good year
For city girls
Who lived up the stair
With all that perfumed hair
And it came undone
When I was twenty one"

As Sinatra sings: mysterious, deeply erotic lines; the very syntax is strangely dreamy: with all that(?) perfumed hair..and (why and?) it came undone… beautifully suggestive; they evoke the heat outside, a glimpse of a rusting firestair through the window, a bed with rumpled sheets; pure Hopper again.

The city is the theatre of modern sexuality; it is the fact of, theoretically at least, the vast sexual opportunity it affords. The city is sexually a restless and tormenting place. There are days when I hardly venture out, so hard is it to be tantalised by quite so much sexual stimulus. Henry Miller enters a Times Square dance hall:

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