While today’s urban climbers and psychogeographers attempt to access liminal anti-spaces, those opposed to elitism in culture are taking up urban crawling – that is to say they are visiting popular and crowded tourist spots. This weekend my urban crawl took me to The Monument on the north side of London Bridge. Designed by Christopher Wren in the form of a colossal Doric column and completed in 1677, it both commemorates The Great Fire of London and celebrates the rebuilding of the city. For £3 you can climb the 311 steps to the viewing platform 160 feet above the ground. Since the Monument is a seventeenth-century construction there is no lift up and it is amusing to hear 20 year-old tourists complaining about the the effort required to get to the top.

Charles Radcliffe’s mvoing tribute to his friend Chris Gray at Housmans Bookshop in London on 4 October 2012. This would have made a great blog – since I agree completely with Charlie that to appreciate Chris you have to look beyond the situationists and King Mob and read his book on LSD too…… Opening night of the Turner Prize… and why Elizabeth Price was the only artist up for the award who I both clocked at the event and spoke with on the night. That said, I did have a conversation with Luke Fowler about a week before the opening at a Tate dinner – but I haven’t exchanged a word with Paul Noble for years and I don’t think I’ve ever said more than hello to Spartacus Chetwynd….

On Wednesday (26 September) I did an event to promote Terry Taylor’s republished novel Baron’s Court, All Change, a book I’ve been championing for the past decade. The book was first issued in hardback back in 1961 when novelists weren’t expected to make endless promotional appearances, so I could appreciate that Terry – who is a very youthful 79 – didn’t want to get involved in all that. I was, however, pleased when he decided to travel down to London for the event. I checked with Terry before we started to see if he was alright with me mentioning he was in the audience, and he said this was okay.

When I was standing on Homerton High Street in east London the other day a cyclist stopped and asked in an American accent if I could tell him how to get to Bermondsey and then Stratford. I had to explain to this psychogeographer that while Bermondsey might come before Stratford if you are travelling from central London on the Jubilee line, to get to the second location from Hackney he needed to go east and to get to the first he would have to go south. The cyclist decided he wanted to go to Stratford so I directed him east through Hackney Marshes.

One of the interesting effects of the protests against The Innocence of the Muslims film is the way they have led to the removal of data from the web. To take just one example – searches for the adult actress and model Amina Noir who appears in Innocence of the Muslims currently turn up a number of very recently dead links. If you try to see individual images of Noir on the Model Mayhem site you get a message saying: “This user is not here atm. bye.” And if you try to access her profile at Model Mayhem you get a message saying: “Unable to show profile #1201168 This member is either awaiting approval or has removed their profile from the site.