Martin Rowson's cartoon of Laurie Taylor for New Humanist, September/October 2008She was always given to sententious statements – that was simply Sarah’s way – but I can still recall the moment when we were sitting outside Café Nero in Exmouth Market and she calmly announced that she had decided to become a flâneur.

How did she mean? She explained that she’d been reading Baudelaire again – Sarah made a point of never reading anything for the first time – and that she’d been enormously taken by the poet’s assertion that any proper artist should not merely walk around their home town but actively seek to immerse themselves in the urban populace, become a “botanist of the sidewalk”.

But how, I wondered, did this sort of walking around town differ from any other walking around town? The important difference, she told me, was that the flâneur strolled rather than walked. A stroller leisurely explored the city streets without having any specific purpose in mind. So it wouldn’t count as strolling if I was looking for a decent restaurant for lunch or searching for a supermarket that sold basil?

“That’s right. A stroller slowly walks the streets in order to experience the city, to gain a sense of the underlying sociological, historical and literary relationships between place and person. Of course,” she told me, “there are gender implications. I wouldn’t be so much a flâneur as a flâneuse. I’d be bringing my own gendered appreciation to the process.”

I told her it sounded rather fun. Could we try it together after we’d finished our Americanos?

It was not an unqualified success. To tell the truth, I found Sarah’s idea of “strolling” uncomfortably close to dawdling. Time after time I’d find that I had strolled several yards in front of her and would have to stand and wait for her to join me. “Can’t you stroll just a little faster?” I asked as yet another member of the urban populace brushed aggressively past me.

After a number of unsatisfactory strolls Sarah decided unilaterally that there was something contradictory about two flâneurs walking the streets together. “I keep trying to be a disengaged voyeur,” she told me, “letting the sights and sounds of the city come to me. And then you suddenly start talking about how you now have to book two weeks in advance in order to get a decent table at Moro’s.”

My relationship with Sarah is now very much in the past. We finally fell out when she developed an interest in tantric sex, a form of purposeless erotic strolling which as I understood it involved keeping very still for long periods of time (“You’re moving around again,” she’d complain) and which I found quite impossible to maintain for any significant period of time without nodding off.

But I now realise how much of a pioneer she was in the general field of flâneurship. One only has to pick up a novel by Iain Sinclair or check out the regular columns on psycho-geography by Will Self to realise that strolling aimlessly around towns and motorways has become an essential form of locomotion for today’s urban intellectual.

A vital ingredient of this activity, of course, is the insistence that we should suspend our interest in appearances. We should not allow ourselves to be seduced by the immediate attractions of the streets through which we stroll, by the new phones in the T-Mobile window, the delicious-looking cakes in the Paul café in Upper Regent Street, the rather stunning and extraordinarily low-priced sweaters in the interior of Zara in Covent Garden.

None of that. What one should try to appreciate, for example, is the contradiction between this show of consumerism and the history of the streets upon which these ever-so-tantalising shops now stand. We need to recognise that the bustling contemporary populace is walking over the very spot where prostitutes and beggars once plied their trade, and where heretics were once callously executed.

I can’t say that I’ve been any more successful at this form of flâneur-ship than I was at the art of strolling. No matter how hard I try to keep in mind that the premises currently occupied by Paul Smith lie directly over the spot where thousands of plague victims were once burned, I am still unable to disregard the fetching pair of off-white brogues in the current summer sale.

My way of handling this personal failure of imagination has not been pleasant. Instead of simply allowing that I lack the sensitivity required in a true flâneur, I’ve actively taken against those who appear to manifest such qualities. Only the other day I spotted a would-be flâneur in Old Compton Street. His stroll was perfect. His dilettante demeanour couldn’t be bettered. I strode up behind him and with a healthy nudge edged him straight into the window of a sexual appliance shop. “You want to look where you’re going, mate,” I said over my shoulder as I walked briskly on towards my pressing date with the cakes in Patisserie Valerie.