Beware the sons of quantity surveyors ...

I was up early this weekend; the baby was a bit colicky, and needed to be walked about. So it was with warm child on one shoulder that I one- handedly turned the pages of the newspapers, and came across the sad biography of Adam Perry - the man who has slept with 3,000 women. No, not slept. Only members of the Chinese Red Army can credibly claim to having slept with 3,000 people. The man who has had sex with 3,000 women.

A male model, Mr Perry is now 33 - the age, I believe, that Jesus was when he was crucified. But while the Saviour had only a handful of miracles, a few books (none of which he wrote himself), a major religion and one resurrection to show for his time on earth, Mr Perry must have risen from the dead many, many times during his hectic sexual career.

The arithmetic is instructive. Mr Perry "lost his virginity" at the age of 15, in the year that Mrs Thatcher came to power. Since then - to arrive at the three-grand figure - he must have had congress with a new woman (I nearly used the word fresh) every 36 hours.

This is tough going. Illness alone must have interrupted coitus on, say, a score of occasions in 18 years. Also, Mr Perry is only human, and the natural desire to sleep with the same woman from time to time will - even if stoutly resisted on most occasions - have led to a dent in his average. This would all have had to have been made up later: a steady girlfriend will have meant months of especially frenetic intercourse.

Unhad shags must have stacked up, circling Mr Perry's bed like charter planes awaiting landing at a busy airport. This leaves no time for seduction at all; just the act.

Anticipation is nothing for Mr Perry - the performance is everything. (For many of us, particularly as we get older, the anticipation, by contrast, becomes practically everything. I can be positively poetic about anticipation.)

Nor is there any question of taking that wonderful, long, post-coital walk in a sunlit park, lightheadedly contemplating one's own attractiveness. It is sex with all the psychological bits taken out, reduced to sweat, grinding and orgasm. Mr Perry is to true sensuality what Ranulph Fiennes is to promenading.

The model, who lives in a council flat with a Rottweiler and a mastiff (both of whom have probably had it off with 3,000 lady dogs, and never boasted about it), is now cashing in on his fame. A book is to be published, as well as a new brand of condoms (I would suggest that each protective bear a girl's name, providing a useful reminder at critical times).

Like the writers Henry Miller and Georges Simenon, Perry is proud of his record in a way that only a man could be.

As most new men know, some deep sadness accounts for this uncomfortable promiscuity. Here is a man who is incapable of forming proper relationships with women, so forms hundreds of improper ones instead. It is little surprise that Perry comes from a broken home, and that his father is - of all things - a quantity surveyor. Had he been a quality controller, perhaps things might have been different.

But why do the women do it? After all, where is the pleasure in having what any other girl can have, and many have already had? How does it come about that, while most men approach seduction with a combination of elemental emotions and a series of quasi-mathematical calculations that would put Deep Blue - the chess computer which triumphed over Kasparov - to shame, the very same difficult women will leap into the sack with Perry at the first sound of a zip unfastening? "They come up to me two or three at a go," Mr Perry has revealed.

I think it is because a very few men possess a unique property, somehow allowing women to have sex with them uncomplicatedly.

These men are society-free zones, in whose boudoir the normal, restrictive laws of love and relationships do not run. They do not behave in excessively lascivious ways; the do not grope or fondle at parties, nor do they send their eyes darting down every cleavage like mini-cameras in keyhole surgery. The coupling is, in a real sense, animal.

When I was younger I thought this was very strange. I can recall periods of unattachment when even one girlfriend at a time would have seemed plenty. At work I made it clear to all the attractive young women that I was available; that no job was too small. Nothing. Yet there was one man that practically all had sex with. And him, I feel really sorry for.

Miles Kington is on holiday