EROTICA arrived in London last November with all the energy and confusion of your average adolescent. Torn between a mission statement (''You will be part of A UNIQUE SOCIAL EXPERIENCE that the public richly deserve''), commercial expediency (''exhibitors from within the industry displaying their products in a visual themed format''), and plain speaking (''Adult Toys, Films, Fetish Fashion'') the result was a murky trade fair with a curious clientele. No-one laughed.

Citing their respectable forbears (''Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the Carry On films''), the organisers were keen to emphasise that this is all good, honest, bawdy fun, which would appeal to those with a healthy and imaginative interest in the erotic. While that buzz word ''healthy'' makes it all OK somehow, there was, in truth, little here to excite the fully literate.

As with all trade fairs, the goods are mostly on display and here they were mostly displayed by women with very few clothes on. As they wandered around the stands, levered up on six-inch stilettos, looped with chains and displaying sizeable embonpoints in the chest region, these mobile mannequins were routinely and shamelessly ogled by every male in the hall.

Unlike most trade fairs, the observers' interest lay as much in the paying customer as in the stall-holder and they were, almost to a man, men. There was some small variation, mostly to do with degrees of body-piercing and quantity of leather clothing, but the majority were ordinary-looking middle-aged blokes whose ''healthy interest in the erotic'' gave them an unhealthy pallor and a worrying lack of social inhibition. The body-pierced men were often accompanied by body-pierced women, giving the aura of a fetishists convention.

The stands were predictable enough: several specialised in vibrators, many of which looked rather like the vegetables Esther Rantzen used to coyly, but knowingly, produce on her television show; others displayed varieties of condom with names like ''De-Lay''. One stall had what I took to be some rather pretty candles which turned out to be condom demonstrators; another had blow-up dolls, ''a super hung black stud with realistic vibrating penis'', which remained deflated in his box. Others had a range of dildos (''they don't come any bigger than this''), open crotch leotards (for men), a latex hangman's mask.

There was a great deal of latex, leather, and chains (items for the wearing of), handcuffs - some chrome, some furry - and some edible undies. All the clothing came under the generic heading of ''body wear'' but tended to focus on specific parts of the body, revealing rather than keeping warm.

Various small sets had been set up, plain white backdrops against which some of the sadder customers could pose - fully-clothed - to be photographed with a minimally-clad Page 3-type girl. Others offered more elaborate staging, a double bed with two girls, all clinically despatched onto celluloid by the photographer. The girls offered virginal, probably Chaucerian, kisses on the cheek to the paying punter.

It was the public display of this lust for lovelies, the huge envying audiences, which created the atmosphere of ''changing attitudes'' the organisers so craved. The stallholders had the measure of it. I asked one of the photographic entrepreneurs about his clients: ''Perverts? Nah they're normal, everyday blokes really. They're a bit camera shy until they've had a few beers. I think there are a few of the raincoat brigade. Most of the gentlemen don't worry about doing it in public, they don't care. Costs #7.50 for a Polaroid.''

One stall specialised in latex sheets, which the salesman described as: ''A personal thing: some people like it and some don't. You can put the pvc sheets in the washing machine, and you can iron them, but not the latex. I like a non-crease polycotton as well as the next man.''

Then there were some rather elaborate four-poster beds with added rings and spikes which the salesman, dressed in a collar with nails through it (''I'm a very effeminate man and it makes me feel masculine'') said people could hire for the weekend, for their cellars of course. This theme of private sado-masochism, of surgical steel rings, studs, and body bolts (''make an interesting alternative to the standard barbells'') was at the hard centre of what might otherwise have looked like a bit of saucy sea-side post-card fun.

Everything here can be despatched to you in a brown envelope, confidentiality guaranteed. I was handed a small packet of dream pills which promised that my night would become ''a personal paradise of complete abandonment and satisfaction''.

Ingredients: 99% sugar. Outside at last, and exhaust fumes from the traffic never smelt so sweet.

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