These anguished passions are less frequent now than they were before. This is not because Jomier is older and wiser but because he has moved from Kensington to Hammersmith, a borough where there are fewer attractive women. Jomier ascribes this to natural selection. Rich and successful men live in Kensington and they choose beautiful women as their brides. Pretty girls know this. They flock to London to find rich husbands. It used to be said that the most beautiful women in England lived in Nottingham. No longer. The pretty girls from Nottingham have gone to London to work in the City. They are there to attract and breed with young bankers or hedge-funders. Their plain sisters remain behind in Nottingham, or Manchester or Stoke. Or they are already in London but live outside the pale, south of the river or, like Jomier, west of Shepherd’s Bush, that bucolically named transport hub with its litter-strewn triangle of tired grass and queues of misérables waiting for buses – asylum seekers from the White City estates, schizophrenics from the halfway houses, the homeless from the bed and breakfast hotels, the long-term unemployed, the chronically sick, the clinically depressed, wearing dirty jeans and synthetic anoraks or hooded tracksuit tops, eking out their disability benefit or jobseeker’s allowance, living off TFC chicken (‘Tantalising Fried Chicken’) or doner kebabs – dour, defeated, a few white – some Poles and Slovaks and Lithuanians here to make a quick buck before they retire to a wooden chalet on the Masurian Lakes – but mostly black – Ethiopians, Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Somalis, Egyptians, the detritus from the blighted continent of Africa who will never go home.

Jomier studies them from the top of the 94 bus. They file into the Shepherd’s Bush market to buy mangos and bananas. Arabs sell falafels, Parsees kebabs, from plywood stalls. The shops on the north side of Shepherd’s Bush Green could be in Delhi or Accra. Who needs to travel to the Third World when it is here in London – the Bangladeshis in Brick Lane, the sheikhs in Mayfair, the Turks in Haringey, Hasidic Jews in Tottenham, and a mix-and-match here in Hammersmith, fifty different nationalities milling around in the street with no apparent purpose? Fire practice at the Tower of Babel!