Blaine's new disciples

"It's always when you think something's transparent," my father who was a magician used to warn me, "that it isn't. Never trust a glass box." You don't forget advice like that.

So it's going to take a lot to persuade me, though I can see him with my own eyes, that that really is David Blaine up there. Or any other flesh and blood person come to that. Sceptics suggest that what we're looking at is in fact a hologram, a projection of a shyster who is right now tucked up in his New York bed, gorging himself on chocolates and champagne. But I go one step further - I think it's all illusion: the man, the box, the crane, and maybe even us gawping up at him.

The taxi driver who brought me to this scrap of ground - over which Blaine's box hangs like a magic lantern suspended from the moon - reckoned they were putting something in his water. "Like what?" I asked. "A steak sandwich?"

But it was the money that got the driver's goat. "Three and a half million," he muttered. "How much did the Irish hunger strikers get?"

"They weren't doing it for money," I reminded him. "Exactly" he said, writing me out a receipt.

There are several hundred people here, though it isn't anywhere near pub-closing time yet and I'd supposed that Blaine-baiting and having nothing else to do were closely associated activities.

In fact there is no aggression in the crowd at all. On my previous visit, between restaurants, there had been fractiousness. "Wake up, David, you lazy bastard!" people had shouted. But he was comatose then, with his splayed fingers pressed against the glass window of his box, like one of the undead clawing his way out of an unmade grave.

But he is wide awake tonight, breezy even, waving royally to his fans, smiling, looking fitter with every day that passes.

Fans! Explain that. What are they fans of? "We love you, David," a little girl calls out. She is on her mother's shoulders, holding up pieces of paper with messages scrawled in kindergarten crayons. "I love you" and "Sexy". She is eight or nine, wearing jokey phosphorescent ear muffs, like antennae for a Disney ant. She should be in bed. But her mother, also wearing phosphorescent antennae, is encouraging her to spell out the word "Sexy" in baby crayons.

She is not the only person wanting David Blaine to know how deeply she is devoted to him. Hundredsof others have left their billetsdoux on the wire fences surrounding the site - "David, you're our hero", "David, we came from B-ham 2 CU", "The butterfly will emerge from its cocoon: Harry and Phoebe" - together with sheets, cards, soft toys, balloons and (for some inexplicable reason) a Welsh flag, the rubbish we now expect to find at any site made sacred to celebrity, the detritus of worldly worship.

A handsome teenage girl, just old enough not to be in bed at this hour, makes a megaphone of her hands. "Can you guess my number, David?" "Shush," her friend says, "you're taking his vital energy." The magician blows a kiss and signals with his fingers, a complicated movement suggestive of making an assignment (ie "See you in 10 minutes, round the back at the corner of Tooley Street"). But that cannot be, can it, even if he has magically guessed her number?

An Annie Hall-like woman in a slippery beret asks me if I too don't admire the man. "He's doing his job," she tells me. "He's amazing." I smile at her. I'm doing my job; why doesn't she think I'm amazing?

"Do you know what I reckon drives this guy?" she goes on. "His mother. I reckon he lives for his mother's approval." So what's new? Except that I thought Blaine's mother was dead. " Precisely," Annie Hall tells me with a spooky smile.

The other spooky thing is how many of the spectators are demonstratively devout. There are orthodox Jews here, orthodox Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, One World Jamaicans and (presumably, given the flag) Welsh nationalists.

What I can't decide is whether these are people who are accustomed to watching holy men lying on beds of nails and otherwise testing the limits of our fleshly incarceration (and therefore feel Blaine's stunt to be, spiritually speaking, home from home), or whether there is simply something about the event that attracts people of restless religious yearnings. The longer this show goes on, one feels, the more quasi-religiosity attaches to it.

GONE now the City louts who pelted Blaine's crystal cage with eggs; gone the girls who took their tops off, mistaking Bermondsey for Ayia Napa. Instead, any number of alternative lifestylers and itinerants of the soul are drawn here, a particularly shaggy one of whom writes me a gnomic message - "I'd rather B one of the sacred than one of the scared" - before disappearing into the dark of south London.

And who's to say that the celebrity hankering isn't part of the same emotional agitation? Isn't that a giant swaying television that Blaine lies in, the shrine we do obeisance to each night, but offering the illusion this time that it can see us back and respond to our desires?

"David," we call the illusionist. As though we know him, and as though he knows us. "Love you, David!" That's if he's there at all.

The taxi driver who takes me home believes a body double is brought up in the cherry-picker that cleans the windows every morning. "You can see the false bottom," he tells me.

And, as for those who go along to worship and be taken in? "Deeply disturbed, the lot of them."