But there are fears that panic may be just around the corner, so it throws cold water on certain activities. Someone will come by just for you.London itself has never been in a state of panic, which is astonishing - not during the Gordon Riots, not during the Blitz, not even during the unbuttoning of Swinging London, when the whole place levitated in a cloud of rainbow chiffon. A social life has to be deliberately constructed and sustained: take your eye off it for a second and it vaporises. The whole town can sometimes seem like a hyper-anxious cruising joint, everyone simultaneously yearning and rejecting. In London, everyone hungers to be involved but nobody wants to get too involved because where will it end? And if all this nervous ambivalence gets too much, just relax - everyone but everyone passes through this town. Since you drown in London if you don't know what you want, you fairly quickly decide what your key objectives are, always remembering that you are too polite to mention them. Londoners concentrate on their destinations as though these precious certainties might vanish if they didn't.It is a bad city for lateral activities such as flirting, but a good city for highly focused activities, such as picking up.

I love watching the professional people-watchers who are flown in from New York specifically to spend two hours trend-spotting in Old Compton Street and dictating reports into voice recorders: "spotted: blue anoraks - major trend; nine people with nose rings, four with green hair; tattoos particularly strong."everywhere rapidly. If you sit outside the Cafe Boheme on Old Compton Street, one moment a multi-pierced and tattooed pop-star will walk past, followed by someone who asks you for money for a cup of tea telling you that "credit cards are accepted". There is not much piazza culture, but there's plenty of street activity, which involves hurrying past others to your destination, glancingDaniel Poole, designerIt's the unique street theatre. Therefore, London is a secret city - of clubs, societies, in-groups, street cults, telephone numbers Privacy is a London fetish.