Concrete Pencil: Hands up if you remember spiderman

There's a book called Let The Great World Spin, about that bloke who walked on a tightrope between the World Trade Centre towers in the '70s - the one they did that film about, Man On Wire.

Actually, it's not about Philippe Petit as such, although he is in it. It's about his walk and about a pretty randomised selection of Taxi Driver-era New Yorkers - projects hookers, a radical monk, drugged-up artists - some of whom witnessed the event.

Its given added poignancy, of course, by the fact that the two towers don't exist any more, and there are plenty of more light-hearted Quantum Leap style ironies of anachronism.

By which I mean: in the time-travel saga Sam Beckett and Al come across a young Buddy Holly singing Piggy Suey and suggest a change; in the novel (by Irishman-in-New York Colum McCann) there are early computer geeks treating their hacked phone lines like a proto-internet to find out about the stunt.

It all put me in mind of the Wharf, as everything does, so riveted is my mind to the towers and trainlines here.

Hands up: who was here when the Spider Man came? The French free-climber who set himself the mission of scaling One Canada Square without ropes?

Alain Robert, he is called. Why are these people always French?

It was a Friday, October 2002. We knew he was going to try, I seem to recall. His people must have put it about. 

Security knew too, and they were watching the Tube station for him, but one man slips through that crowd pretty easily.

In the style of that novel there were, no doubt, groups of ethnically representative people talking in the ticket hall about how great it would be if one day the Olympics came to Docklands.

We heard about it while he was up about floor three. He hooked his little French hands and feet into the grooves used by the window cleaners' cradle. 

A crowd grew, among them, probably, a banker who'd just started working on his institution's new Sub-Prime Mortgage Department, and an Enron administrator here to scout their European HQ, next to the Tube.

No one could get near him - the security guards here don't look like mountaineers.

A base jumper, who that night would leap with his packed parachute from the top of the building site that would become the Marriott, was the first to notice the rain.

Robert, at floor 22, climbed past where a very handsome 24-year-old editor of this newspaper was struggling with a hangover and wondering what a great thing it would be if the DLR went to City Airport.

He gave up on the 35th floor, the climber, Robert. The wind is pretty strong up there. Those non-mountaineering security guards, in the cradle of a window cleaner, got him to the top.

The police had a word with him. Then sent him on his way.