In Hackney, That Rose Red Empire (published by Hamish Hamilton tomorrow), Iain Sinclair brings together his fictional practices and his cultural journalism with stunning results. Sinclair has interviewed dozens of subterranean London figures such as Chris Petit and then, as he frankly admits, freely rewritten what they told him to suit his own agenda. I’ve already had hours of fun trying to work out what is true and what is made up in this book, and I’m sure once more people have read it this will generate endless pub discussions too. The transcription of an interview with me bears little resemblance to what I actually told Sinclair.

I was walking around the west end yesterday and it struck me how much recession and winter suits London. For the first time in decades London feels once again like the city I knew as a teenager in the 1970s. It was wet and everything looked dirty and shitty, not much snow left but plenty of muck where the white stuff had melted. I dived into Zavvi coz being in shops that are closing down grooves me. This particular retail chain was never very well stocked, not even the ‘superstore’ I checked out on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, and not even when it was called Virgin Records.

Having spent some time looking at my mother’s life and in particular her time from 1961 onwards in Notting Hill, I have inevitably had cause to ponder Jack The Stripper and the nude murders. At least six west London prostitutes died in a bizarre series of mid-sixties sex slayings but the killer was never caught. I have always been more interested in the victims than their murderer(s), but I felt it worth commenting on a recent book that claimed to identify the killer. My focus in this review was on the author of this travesty, since he made a number of outrageous claims without any proof to back them up.

I wasn’t planning on going to the 2009 Tate Triennial opening last night, but in my efforts to get Mister Trippy lovers all the latest London art world gossip, I had planned to attend the ‘unofficial afterparty’ organised by Tate curator and all round good guy Cedar Lewisohn. This was supposed to take place at The Double Club, 7 Torrens Street in Islington, but was cancelled due to snow. I’m sure Triennial curator Nicolas Bourriaud rolled up a hundred dollar bill and hoovered up a good quantity of snow before deciding it was too watery to give anyone a buzz… For those of you from outside the UK, several inches of snow fell in London yesterday so there were no buses, few subway trains and many roads were closed; it is unusual for it to snow here so the equipment for dealing with this kind of ‘severe’ weather just isn’t in place.

Regina José Galindo is a 34 year-old artist from Guatemala City and the major retrospective of her work that opened this weekend at Modern Art Oxford (AKA Oxford MOMA and Madam Mao’s) entitled The Body Of Others is stunning. The large upper gallery contains 3 video works: I’ll Shout It To The Wind (1999), Who Can Erase The Traces (2003) and The Fashionable Cut (2005). In the first, Galindo hangs by a harness from an arch in the centre of Guatemala City and is filmed literally shouting her poems to the wind; as she does so she drops sheets of her poetry and the crowd beneath her scramble after the paper thinking it might be money, since this is an area used for illegal currency exchanges.