Back to Hanky Panky school

I am parked by Tooting Bec Common in South London. I've got my squash gear on and I'm waiting for my opponent who's in the house opposite. The passenger-side door opens and a cloud of alcoholic breath wafts towards me as I hear someone say: 'Ello darlin.' That's not my mate. Oh no, it's a prostitute.

I'd forgotten this is a part of London where the hookers hang out. And these girls aren't high class - they're rough.

Ashamed and embarrassed, I mumble that she's made a mistake, quickly slam the door and drive around the block hoping nobody has seen.

Stereo-tights

The experience helps reinforce my conception of prostitution: the stereotyped grotty girls in short skirts and fishnet tights swinging handbags by lamp posts and getting picked up by seedy, kerb-crawling men.

It's not a profession that seems to belong in an up-market office block - a former merchant's house - overlooking the canals in Amsterdam's city centre. But it does, as that's where you'll find the Hanky Panky School.

Run by 43-year-old Elene Vis, it's a sex institute that caused an uproar around the world recently when an irreverent Dutch TV show suggested bored schoolleavers should visit it if they had nothing better to do.

Vis openly teaches sex workers to hone their skills and improve their earning potential. For £320, girls, boys and even transsexuals can take courses in turning themselves from a prostitute of the like I met in Tooting Bec into the type that Vis used to employ.

Until three years ago, she ran a chain of 35 'high-class' escort
agencies across Europe and North America and it was 20 years of doing this that led her to open the school. 'I've just extended what I used to teach the girls in the agencies,' she says.

'Most girls who go into prostitution are mentally damaged and have low selfesteem. You don't make money projecting that image. Men pay much more for someone who is confident and has a genuinely interesting personality. I teach them to develop in that way.'

Apparently, it's not about sex. As girls know, that part doesn't take most men very long. As escorts get paid by the hour, they need to be taught to drag an evening out. 'You can make much more from talking than from sex,' says Vis. 'Sex takes ten minutes. By talking to or entertaining him, you get more hours.'

So does she teach any sex at all? Vis doesn't believe you can, because sex is all about the chemistry between two people. One girl can be awful with a certain man and amazing with another. Instead, she says, she's trying to lift her students out of 'the third-floor behind' - the Dutch term for what we'd call the gutter.

In this respect, Vis believes she's doing good. 'In an ideal world, there'd be no prostitution,' she says. 'But in the real world, there is, and I help those involved to make the most of it and possibly even come out the other side not needing to be a hooker anymore.'

Pretty unlikely

Does she mean in the Pretty Woman way, where a rich man falls in love with his whore and sweeps her off her feet?

No, that's a hopelessly romantic idea. To her knowledge, it's only happened once - between a Dutch prostitute and a wealthy Belgian doctor - and is so rare, it's not worth thinking about.

Vis merely claims she can turn a behind-the-window hooker living a dangerous and poverty stricken life into one who can earn more than £2,000 a week.

You decide whether that's good or bad. But if it means I can park by Tooting Bec Common undisturbed from now on, I'm all for it.

Jamie flew to Amsterdam with KLM. Tel 08705 074 074 or www.klm.com