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Scheherezade and I go to bed. The room is not dark. Blades of sunlight through the shutters like lasers striping the tiled floor. People shout outside, donkeys yawl grotesquely as we make love. For all the mayhem outside, I hear a scratching sound at the bedroom wall. Oh it's nothing she says. OK. Afterwards I go, on my own, leaving her there. Only later, much late, do I realise what may have been happening; or what of two things had been happening; either: she had been paid by a voyeur who had not gone but been in the next room. Other possibility……well let's hope it was only Betamax.

Sometimes in a huge city, in the great cavernous delapidated streets of Cairo, ill-lit in a wan yellow dusk, or the seething markets of Bangkok, where every lane disemburdens whole shoals of pretty women. Or summertime London, heaving with women from the world over, when I have sometimes almost wept at the intensity of an abstract, almost unsexual desire.

Now, in middleage I anticipate, almost with relish, the invisibility old age confers on you in the sexual and city worlds. There is real charm, true pathos, in the twilight world of city sex; a real assertion of the human , the fallible, and, OK a fallibility that is largely male. In the eighties in Warsaw I visited the Peoples Palace of Culture, a great Stalinist edifice donated by the great man himelf to his grateful satellite, Poland. In the vast empty marble halls there was nothing to see save a few monitors relaying Madonna poncing around in a corset. OK, so out again only to happen on a little market of rudimentary proto-capitalist stalls, one with lurid, winking lights….and there in drab Warsaw was a sex aid shop with the rubberiest and sheeniest artefacts that Taiwan could deliver. A little spot of joy and audacity!

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