Editor-At-Large: Flabby arms, dimpled thighs – Ascot is like a huge Lucian Freud painting

Naked female flesh was certainly on display last week. I've seen enough cellulite, sagging bottoms and flabby upper arms to last me a lifetime. And that was just during one afternoon in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. For some reason, the Ascot dress code seems more obsessed with what's on your head than what's covering your breasts or your backside.

Consequently most women equate a day at the races with an opportunity to wear a silk petticoat dress with clashing bra – something they wouldn't even dare to sport at a daughter's wedding or the office dinner and dance. Give a British woman a square metre of blue sky and a temperature hovering in the low seventies and caution (in the dress sense) is thrown to the wind, along with most of her underwear and all sense of style. Wearing an Eley Kishimoto suit and Philip Treacy hat, I felt like someone from the Women's Institute annual jamboree. All around us businessmen's wives were downing the champers and throwing away any inhibitions.

With the "season" starting, east European hookers are arriving by the plane load ready to do several weeks of intensive business at Ascot, Wimbledon, Henley and a couple of polo matches. Then they'll probably move on to St Tropez and the yachties. You can tell the hookers at Ascot. They're the women not snorting cocaine in the ladies' toilets. They wear demure suits with matching hats, and expensive handbags.

I'd only just recovered from the acres of flab on view at Lucian Freud's retrospective exhibition which has just opened at Tate Britain. Freud might be one of the world's greatest living painters, but is there a more depressing sight than wandering through dimly lit room after dimly lit room staring at huge bruised-looking slabs of naked flesh? If you think you have funny-shaped breasts or dimpled thighs, I recommend a trip immediately.

There is a huge debate as to whether Lucian Freud's pictures of naked women lying legs apart glorify or demean our sex. Is this a celebration of our frailties or the work of a sadist who thrills in the act of portraying the ugly and repulsive? Although I am reliably told that he is a "brilliant" conversationalist, most of the people he has painted have fallen asleep during the process. So you drift past large, slumbering forms whose flesh is various shades of purple and red, and wonder why even the beautiful women are depicted looking miserable and battered. His fully clothed portraits are far more rewarding, the best being "Two brothers from Ulster 2001" in which two distrustful types sit brooding into space, wearing sky-blue cotton shirts.

Even more flesh was on display at Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical Bombay Dreams, but this was of the honey-coloured, toned variety, thank goodness. The women dancers have real, unimproved breasts, bare midriffs with not a centimetre of wobble, and beautiful hands. The music, by India's top composer A R Rahman, is simply fantastic, and so is the choreography, with plenty of ferocious pelvic thrusting and thoracic rotation. Unfortunately the show can't decide whether it is parodying the Bollywood genre, or being ironic, and there are moments when the action seems to sag in a sea of political correctness, something I never thought I'd see at a Lloyd Webber production. But Preeya Kalidas, the lead, is superb, and the evening really gets going with "Shakalaka Baby", a hilarious no-holds-barred dance number featuring fountains and wet saris.

The invitation for the opening said to wear "a touch of Indian" and just as at Ascot, the British female struggled with a dress code far beyond her creative capabilities. For Denise Van Outen it meant wearing a pelmet embroidered with scenes from the Kama Sutra. There were a few brave attempts at a sari, but in the 90 degree heat of the Apollo Theatre, whose management had obviously decided to simulate the Bombay climate, everyone started to look a bit sweaty and crumpled, myself included.

The art of noise

The Apollo might have adopted the climatic conditions of an Indian city, but not, fortunately, the smell. I was in Barcelona last Friday eating supper out of doors, when a thoroughly revolting odour suddenly drifted over our medieval square and hung over my table. Barcelona is surely one of the most beautiful and enjoyable of cities, but not when the temperature passes 30 degrees.

Like Venice and Rome it suffers from what can only be described as a summer stench, a combination of rotting rubbish and a sewage system that cannot cope with hundreds of thousands of visitors. These cities are the cultural honeypots of Europe, steeped in magnificent architecture. But they were never designed to cope with the bathing and eating needs of the 21st-century tourist.

Meanwhile an invitation summons me to a lavish party in Whitehall to celebrate the Inverness Highland bid to be adopted as the European Capital of Culture in 2008. I have already been inundated with similar literature from Canterbury. But the real question is not whether Inverness or Canterbury can compete with Barcelona's medieval city or the Grand Canal in Venice, but whether they can come up with a distinctive pong.

I was in Barcelona for the Sonar Festival, one of the largest celebrations in Europe of electronic music, with exhibitions, concerts, DJs and a record market selling those valuable vinyl antiques. At the Santa Monica Arts Centre the whole place was devoted to sound installations – if comedy is the new rock and roll, then sound is the video art of today.

It was hard to tell where the air conditioning stopped and the artwork began, but the best piece was impossible to miss. In a darkened room, a loudspeaker at the end of a long steel arm rotated menacingly, following your movements and emitting an ear-piercing series of machine-gun fire. As it built up to a deafening crescendo, coupled with fit-inducing strobing lights, several members of the trendy audience dashed for the door clutching their heads, and one man started moaning loudly. Being a plucky Brit, with years of clubbing and the valuable experience of Oxford Circus Tube station in the rush hour, I went back three times for more aural punishment. This showstopper, by Edwin Van der Heide, has already won international prizes, and I can't wait to see it installed in the middle of the Royal Albert Hall – is it too late for a late-night addition to the proms?

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Finally, this is Architecture Week, and a chance to interact with architects that's too good to miss. Go to the King's Road branch of Habitat today and buy a consultation for a £10 donation to Shelter, or donate £20 and book a conversation with an architect to discuss improving your home, by phoning 0870 050 0701. I might ask my architect why he can't get a builder to start work on my latest folly. Surely they don't think I'm an impossible client?

For information about Architecture Week visit www.architectureweek.org.uk