One week before its ill-fated opening, BAA’s Press Officer hobbled around after me in Heathrow’s new Terminal 5, wincing.

“Please don’t photograph the baggage”, she pleaded desperately. “It could be taken out of context!“

Probably twice her age, I had only 60 minutes in situ. I raced around the Departures concourse of practice suitcases, trolleys, digital information boards and self-check in stations leaving her to trail behind, frantically calling and texting contacts. Her bosses had put her up in a local hotel, allowing her to work from 5am till late the week prior to the grand unveiling. She was exhausted, sore and months behind in her work. “We could do with twice as many in our office”, she bleated.

From a gantry overlooking the land-side area, some of the 60,000 hard-hats and invisible fluorescent-jacketed workers who have gained employment here, often East European fitters, lounged on spanking new passenger couches during a lunch break. If Londoners have been scouring the Yellow Pages under Plumbers or Carpenters, this was their pay-roll hideout. High above in the 40 metre single-span roof, the Nokia info-board boasted “Hand built by Heroes!”

Airports are halfway houses, midpoints between a Here and a There; ‘Almost-places’ as the artist Martha Rosler calls them in her book ‘Observations of a Frequent Flyer’ or Tom Hanks in no-mans’-land. If the Warsaw-based Centre for International Relations can be believed, 51% of Polish émigrés currently in the UK plan to move back to the Motherland after making meagre fortunes. Enough perhaps to plough their cash back into cheap property or business start-ups. The Zloty is on the slide against the Pound so they’d better be quick if their savings are to build anything but a log cabin.

After their last shift, they may well return to T5 laden with angielski gifts for grandma for the early flight to Poznan or Krakow as fare-paying punters rather than Amish volunteers who have just erected a new community barn before sun-down.

BAA reckon their new state-of-the-art baggage system can handle 12,000 bags per hour but if I were an evacuee watching the spoils of my migration rattle down the conveyor belt, I wouldn’t lose my receipt.

Surrounded by the rolling hills and scrub of Salisbury Plain, the media strode towards a low hillock where red MoD firing range flags on paint-peeled poles, twitched in the breeze.

“Snipaahrs!” came the Crufts bark from a Sergeant-Major and three soldiers wearing bracken camouflage rose up from near our feet. Then, crouching again they adopted sniping positions: one eye open like Nelson at Trafalgar and legs spread like Boney’s marksmen up in the rigging.

Clamped in ear defenders as well as ear plugs, we too looked like Best in Breed – long-eared Spaniels hoping for a treat or two after a mammoth journey around the M25 and down the M3. Photographers went native alongside the soldiers, laying intimately on the ground to parody the Shooter.

Squinting down 25x scopes into the crosshairs of the army’s secret L115A3 long range the Sniper rifle, the soldiers squeezed off clips of 5 Swiss-made 16g 8.59mm Lapua Magnum rounds exiting the rifles’ suppressors at the speed of Concorde in a mid-Atlantic headwind. One second later they arrived down-range onto the targets 1,100 metres away. What a hallucinogenic journey they are making as they plummet – just for that second - through time and space, to puncture and deliver these would-be humans to their God, had they not been created in the Kingdom of B&Q.

Sniping is both Zen and Psychology. Stealthy calm and fearlessly imaginative is seemingly what your above-average infantryman needs to be to get even a whiff of this 8-week course here in Wiltshire. To top it all, their favoured £23,000 toolbox is what a 21st Century sharpshooter will soon carry in Helmond Province to similarly help pepper the upper-body of an Islamist teenager shouldering an RPG.

Just imagine, you might otherwise be meandering innocently along the wadi and the next you’re a pulpy puddle in the poppy-rich dust. War is dirty alright but if Terry Taliban can be dastardly in their killing habits, then so can we. Commanding Officer of the Support Weapon School Lt. Col X (Anon for security reasons, he tells me), is very excited about the new kit for his boys. In a Carlsberg moment, he says carefully, “This is probably the best sniper rifle in the world, it avoids collateral casualties because of its precision .. even the US Army at Fort Benning have been impressed.”

I’m not sure why the US Army are so interested with accuracy all of a sudden but 1km in 1 second and the death of the wrong human makes a big difference between good PR and a crap headline.

As an introspective young chap, pretending to be a nocturnal aviation meteorologist meant seeking ways to an easy life. At Southend airport in the late 70s, the RVR therefore became a magic number.

It might have been a night when England’s south-east airfields closed their fences to incoming airliners and freighters to henceforth divert en-masse over our provincial runway fence, a few miles from the Thames mud and cockle boats? Or might the estuary fog close in to totally envelope our intimate airport too, forcing tons of newspapers destined for Charles de Gaule and Belfast to be pulped by the fussy man at Higgs Air Agency. A few hours of quiet loneliness ransacking unwanted crew meals to the buzz of overhead neons was what I inevitably yearned.

For two days last week I again stared out into the mire, this time from Gravesend. I stood timing the Tilbury Dock horns that sent 5-second blasts in every 60 reverberating across an invisible river and along the Thames Gateway, soon to have flood-plain housing laid across the brown fields.

Claustrophobically, the second day’s pea soup took 2 hours longer to clear than the first and I waited for the brief photography-window. Between blue sky appearing overhead and the burned-off mist before me, clearing to reveal eerie, muffled activity and form: The to-and-fro of Ro-Ro container shipping, War of the World tripod cranes and gulls dipping over the rising tide.

Where the Queen Elizabeth Bridge takes the M25 high over the Thames at Dartford, traffic slowed. Approaching the toll, drivers tossed their coins into baskets before accelerating off towards offices, wharves or even airports long-closed to air operations – with RVRs of 100m or less.

Grabbing whiffs of riverside effluent and moments of visual glory, I thought of those airport people I worked with all those years ago: Gonzo, Trev, Cousins, Wuds, Marianne .. all away on the four winds.

A quiet cappuccino and croissant in Bar Italia, Frith Street.

Featured on the wide-screen is Sky News live from Westminster with Gordon. Later that day in Lisbon he is to be reported as a naughty schoolboy who didn’t get to class on time - his European-urchin classmates tut-tutting as if he had missed the register.

A shout goes up and I sense a commotion near the entrance. In fact, we punters have been invaded by members of Sky News in the flesh who have claimed this sanctuary of ours in the name of current affairs, having established News Camp Four on Everest’s South Col. As if in tribute to Shackleton’s mum, the sound lady has her earphones clamped to her bobble hat and the team’s producer appears to have a coiled USB cable wound around her face, so lathered up is she before air-time. She and her baby-faced reporter are desperately recruiting anyone close-by resembling an archetypal Latin-type whose ancestors might have once roamed one of the Seven Hills. Oh, and who know anything remotely interesting about the Three Lions.

“Any Italians here speak English?” yells the reporter across the café, half in panic and boredom. I could scrape in with the first condition and we did visit Ostia Antica last year but I looked up from my froth with a slow shake of the head. More from pity than the exclusion itself.

(I read that book once, the one by Edward Behr, when I wanted to back-pack round the world in search of adventure, love and photography - though not necessarily in that order).

“Blah-blah-Little-Italy-blah-blah-Fabio-Capello-blah-blah-what-do-you-think? .. blah,” urged the nodding reporter, nervously looking around for someone else to lasso.

“Good-news-blah!,” offered the rotund gentleman who just wanted this nonsense to cease and get back to running his business next door.

Meanwhile, on the back wall Gordon sulked in the Commons Select Committee like Clement Freud’s Bloodhound. Surrounded by tinsel, tongue and groove.

To our Saxon ancestors, cankers were treatable with ointments made of goats gall and honey. For those afflicted with malarial quivers on the East Anglian marshes it was the Quake Doctor who waved his wand.

Wart-charmers recommended rubbing a piece of meat on one’s crusty infection. When the flesh was decaying, so the wart disappeared. Or, you could prick the warty growth with a pin and stick it into an Ash tree while reciting the following rhyme:

Ashen tree, ashen tree, Pray buy these warts from me.”

The warts then download to the tree like a pagan PayPal transaction.

Daubed with a bubonic red cross, our proud Ashes have been condemned to become urban amputees, their flattened stumps sawn across by the chainsaw gangs of Lambeth’s tree surgeons. Citing disease as the reason for this cull, they have felled 6 of our 64 century-old monoliths, reducing their 60-foot reach towards the south London’s airliners to barely breaking out out from mother earth’s surface.

If a red cross were perfect targets for the saw to zip through, it’s also an epicentre for a local ritual. Each Saturday morning youth teams stud across the grass for minor league footie. But before the first whistle from the fatty referee who pants across the pitch to make that snappy foul decision, the boys line up around our side of the trees and piss sugary Isotonic juice up the trunk like Parisiennes in a pissoir. I’ve long-wanted to photograph this ritual of indecent exposure but my own kids reckon I could be reported for indecency myself by an accompanying touch-line dad. I reckon the council might be interested seeing as they’ve only this year renovated toilets less than one hundred metres away.

If ash yellows or verticillium wilt aren’t killing Lambeth’s 15,000 ash tree park population, perhaps it’s adolescent urine or just long-term neglect by urban councils who have recently awoken to slap on Tree Preservation Orders. Winter storms are becoming fiercer, bringing down trunks or minor boughs so they can’t afford the blame of passers-by or car driver deaths as happened at King’s Heath, Birmingham in 1999 when three were crushed by a terminally-ill Ash.

Art voyeur John Ruskin, whose name is given to this Edwardian arboretum, must be peeing himself against the rusty Pearly Gates.

The yelps and cries of poor old Guido Fawkes, renditioned to the Tower to have his joints twisted on the rack are now substituted by the whooping of children waving glowing rods like witch’s wands, in a country out of tune with its own history.

Approaching Heathrow from the east, an airliner lowers its landing gear over the ‘burbs of Barnes, its self-loading freight looking out through the peepholes to see flares and sparkling fireworks below. The airline boarding card says it’s the 3rd but is it not the 5th of November when our largely Protestant nation celebrates the failure of the 1605 papist plot to ignite parliament?

Indeed it was - but Londoners, whose city hosted this act don’t wait for the calendar before opening their box of Standard favourites. In the years after the 13 Catholic terrorists were either killed resisting arrest, or succumbing to Guantanamo-style torture, Londoners lit bone fires to rejoice in the Pope’s continued spiritual and geographical distance from England.

Somehow, 200 years after that piece of Breaking News did Guido Fawkes – rather than the more influential Robert Catesby or Thomas Wintour become the symbol of such wicked treason.

My co-conspirators would make a guy from old sacking and clothes then parade our extra-terresrial through the streets in a home-made go-kart asking for Pennies with which to buy our gunpowder. On the night of the 5th it would be unceremoniously dumped on the summit of our community ‘bonfire’: a sacrificial effigy. Up went Guy and possibly dozens of hedgehogs over the years, in a religious fireball reminiscent of Catholics put to the torch in Cate Blanchett’s time.

We neither shout slanderous insults to Fawkes nor even a ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ to good King James when touching the fuses and retreating 20 feet. And yet our children go begging for sweets on dark Halloween nights, a recently-imported pagan nonsense sponsored by Sainsburys.

This week, you may not see schoolboys in shorts, caps and blazers pushing home-built contraptions while yelling: “Penny for the Guy!” to strangers on street corners. But for the weeks beforehand and afterwards, the city cracks and snaps with the sound of exploding sulphur, charcoal and potassium nitrate above the city, the incendiary devices discovered 402 years ago lashed in barrels to the pillars beneath parliament.

Postcript dated 5th November: I see spook Director Jonathan Evans chose the Fifth to speak about 2,000 modern day islamists, some as young as 15, who threaten national security in the spirit of atrocity and mayhem.

“Remember, remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot.”

When we planted time capsules at school in the sixties, I supposed they’d be found by archaeologists working from a moon base, my Tupperware container of newspapers and playing cards still around when some post-Armageddon ape-planet society was in its ascendancy or Batman super-heroes kerpowing their dastardly foes. The romantic idea of hiding possessions to have them re-discovered in the after-life seemed the ultimate boy’s adventure.

So unexpected was the news that while at Faslane visiting a Vanguard Class nuclear submarine and the neighbouring peace camp across the road last week, I heard from home that the builders jack-hammering our kitchen apart had found a faded letter within the false panelled ceiling (now itself mercifully consigned to history).

Dated 5/4/80, a young girl wrote:

“As my father has this strange desire to put a new ceiling in our kitchen in this year AD 1980, he felt the need to ask me to write a little note for the mice to eat in there. However, if the mice have not totally eaten this, you may yet be reading it - if the projected disaster of 1982 and even those for 1999 (from Nostradamus) have not destroyed the world ..”

On the other side, her mother added:

“When I was 18, we were all up in arms about Ban the Bomb and were convinced that there was no point in life because we would all be dead before we were 25. It is important that people think like this because then they can see and fight the dangers .. just hope, watch and fight apathy!”

Easter 1980 and I was probably working the busy day shift at Southend airport having just booked a holiday myself to the Moscow Olympics that coming summer. The USSR had the previous December invaded Afghanistan; the SAS still hadn’t stormed the Iranian Embassy – let alone the beaches of Goose Green; the Millennium was another 2 decades into the future; the Berlin Wall 10 years away from it’s own freelance Kanga crew. In London, a nanny called Lady Diana Spencer zipped through the Hyde Park underpass in her Mini Metro.

Time froze when the letter was entombed in their ceiling to resurface like an A4 stowaway in that submarine almost exactly 10,000 days later. ’80 was still an age of innocence when we thought our way of life was under threat from four fur-hatted Ruskies manning a missile launcher near Minsk, let alone a death-ray called Y2K.

As my own daughter goes about leaving her own artwork and message memento on a soon-to-be covered up wall, we are perhaps leaving our own cavity calling-card, a time capsule for a future family who may have very different worries about survival and health and who will view ’07 as far removed from their lives as a Tudor dynasty.

Travelling through Wales yesterday I kept catching traces of the 1950s darting from behind hedgerows, as if Patrick McGoohan was The Prisoner all over again in that black roll-neck jumper.

If you’ve ever taken the scenic route through the Isles of Wight or Ireland, village petrol pumps and garage doors stand rotting in the drizzle, slowly collapsing under the weight of time and progress.

In dreariest Pembrokeshire, hidden relics from the age of rust proved elusive as I raced towards my destinations. But at one road junction near Cardigan, another old fuel dispenser caught my eye. Two disintegrating pumps stood like the sentries to the age of two-stroke like a Robert Frank picture and I photographed them dreaming of my early years of happy motoring.

In the undergrowth I saw the Fordson Power Major (1958-1961), a unit that my father nurtured along the tractor assembly lines at Dagenham then helped promote its successors in the rural agricultural shows of the 60s. In one year, his designer had built for him a giant hand with a Fordson balancing on the vertically pointing index finger. Much like rodeo riders as they travelled along frontier towns, farmers’ tool reps followed the show circuit during the summer months and I remember the pictures he proudly showed of his creations during family slide evenings. If it wasn’t me as a baby at the wheel of our Ford Anglia, it was his latest crop of dahlias - or the rotating tractor.

Seeing the forgotten relics of machinery brings out the sentimentalist in me. As workhorses, the Fordson Major, their rival Massey Ferguson or a Shire helped feed us all by bringing in the harvests. I imagine the thousands of loyal miles they ploughed for affectionate farmers and their sons and of the crops that a grateful nation consumed in the years after great wars.

Seeing a once-great implement like this diminutive but honest beast seemed unjust to the point of cruelty.

Steve Ryder was fluffing about rookie seasons for the ninth successive race: ‘Lewis Hamilton hasn’t made a mistake yet in Formula One, in fact (pause) .. he hasn’t in his whole career!’ Poor old golden wheels was doomed from that moment. Initially, he tore brilliantly towards Copse dodging Italian and Spanish armadas but later succumbed to TV’s kiss of death previously reserved for Murray Walker whose reveries for Nigel Mansell usually preceded the plonker policeman’s demise on the very next bend. Hamilton’s first pit proved that Ryder is indeed the new Walker as he stuttered beneath the lollipop. Just as he let out his clutch, it sank back down on his bonnet with a donk and without hesitation I hit 28 on my remote.

Unbelievably, I had turned over to another ITV channel where greater feats were being revealed: The Forty two teeth of ruffian Tour de France cyclist Robbie McEwen’s crank wheel were being churned around by sinew and tendon. At the 11 km mark from Canterbury, just when the peloton had their heads down for the final minutes of English routier, McEwen was rammed from behind by another rider. He skidded along the Kentish tarmac on his knee, recovered, hopped on to a spare frame then roared off, buried with the fierce support of his Predictor team mates (’Kings of menstrual cycling’ says the Guardian). Between then and my coffee refill, the infinitely more capable Phil Liggett was predicting a near-impossible but characteristic return to the main group (and my return from the pot). But McEwan had vanished into the chaos of the peloton to then burst out of the seething mass of maillots in the last 100 metres and shoot past the sprinters who were already rocking their bikes from side to side like double-speed pendulums!

It was one of those sporting moments that leaves you inexplicably exhausted. Wound up like springs we were, gasping for understanding of how anyone can crumple their bike at the back of the pack and end up crossing the line first - all within 10 km. It was like Frankie Dettori dropping at Beecher’s Brook, finding another nag grazing somewhere in a meadow then head-butting his way to win the Derby. Myths like that only used to happen at Olympia but ITV News could barely find the breath to announce the winner’s name. The difference is that Dettori doesn’t brutalize his fellow-jockeys down the final furlong so we can assume that McEwen tried it once again today.

Earlier, my son and I had joined the wobblies on Tower Bridge. We watched the impeccable pale blue mounted Gendarmes scoot past on motorbikes and we caught the useless merchandising from T-Mobile and Champion. Bradley Wiggins stopped close-by to adjust a head-set and from behind me, I heard an American voice say to another, ‘So what did you say this river is called?’ It felt like another Steve Ryder moment on the sofa.

A call from my daughter to say she’s at a nearby friend’s and will soon make her way back home .. and by the way, she’ll have to take a small detour because there’s been a crash and a car’s on its side ..

Up till then I had wasted yet another day attempting to make Capture One and iView talk to each other, synchronising and updating files as I progress through editing and colour correcting, abandoning the text book and podcast method in favour of my own less than satisfactory recipe. But the ghoulish prospect of mayhem in a quiet residential street was too much to resist and I walked briskly to the avenue where, sure enough, a Honda Civic had knocked a Renault 10 feet backwards out of its disabled parking bay, rolling off its front bonnet and landing on its side facing the way it had come, its wiper landing smartly on the wrecked Renault’s front seat.

The police tell me they had been in hot pursuit with the Civic which had bombed down past our house, bolted across a blind junction and become airborne as it hit a particularly rampish speed hump. I know exactly where the flatter part of the hump is since my skinny Ridgeback bike tyres need every little help to negotiate the otherwise aggressive mound, so I drift towards the cushioned centre of the road.

This road-user however, the owner of an apparently brand new Honda, doesn’t know about the Highway Code, nor breaking distances; Stop or Give Way signs or in fact, controlling a car at any speed. He has no license, nor insurance. This road-user has decided it’s pretty much acceptable to floor his Japanese pedal and leg it from the Met in a quiet South London street at 3.15 - school’s out time. He doesn’t know how to get from his front door to Tescos without mowing down a working single mum hurrying home to pick up her child from nursery, a decorated war veteran pensioner who saw action in Anzio or a young Cellist who will one day be compared to Jacqueline du Pré. I’m basking in fiction here because none of these characters in my nightmare happened to be near the momentum of his somersaulting ton of steel. A close call nonetheless for those who approached to crunch on the shattered glass and smell the seeping oil. No-one was hurt except for the 20-something driver who was carted off to Kings for presumably an A+E nurse’s precious 30 minutes of attention. It might have been my daughter had she come straight home, it might even have been me had I not taken my own earlier detour to the bank (I often pass that way at exactly that time: 3.15) and it might have been anyone else making the best of their unsuspecting short life.

One in ten Irish drivers have not taken a test but can legally drive on provisionals for up to five years; Spanish test centres have been caught texting the theory test answers to candidates mobiles and last week, the Beeb reported that tens of thousands of British drivers may have paid scammers up to £500 a pop to take their tests for them - some having done so up to 200 times. As it was, all the damage was material: crumpled roofs, splintered windscreens and perhaps some weeks spent seeking redress in the small claims court. One of those flukes of physics and ballistics, like a shell fragment that passes through one soldier and not his friend close-by.

A few laws of nature hurtling in our direction, and we’re gone.

It doesn’t bode well. A clearly disturbed young man is carrying old orange Sainburys bags and deliberately barges into an elderly gent as he crosses the road outside Stratford station. The first edition of The Standard yaps: “Flasher judge shows court his briefs!” and the pensioner wobbles but stays upright. I help him to gather his balance and thoughts.

I am in Olympic pastures, the land of hope and sport, of pomp and circumstance. In five year’s time, thousands of destructive carbon footprints will tramp across the landscaped dreams of Lord Sebastian Coe and the Rt. Hon Tessa Jowell MP - the High Priest and Priestess of the XXX London Olympiad. Today, the IOC have arrived in town for three days of hard hats and canapés.

Just before the roads across the land to the north and West of Stratford are blocked in the name of regeneration and Compulsory Purchase Order, I toured the lush solitude of the Lower Lea Valley towpaths, the sump-oil stained wrecks of Marshgate and Carpenters Road and the Clays Lane Travellers’ site. Vertigo-defying crews were re-routing pylons, council Green Machines (”High-technology Sweeping”) inched their way along dusty gutters and surveyors’ aerosol sprayings marked latitude and longitude positions for new boundaries. Tied to whichever lamp post hadn’t been impacted to 45 degrees by boy-racers (rather than a bulldozer) were the A4 sheets issued by the Olympic Delivery Authority, Lord Coe’s committee’s right-hand bicep. Their remit is to enforce the removal of residents and traders of Newham whose presence no longer fits into the 500-acre concept of New Olympism. More chavs than champs.

These notices speak of “bulk earthworks .. (including demolition), the felling of trees and clearance of vegetation and the remediation of land.” Dodging rattling dump-trucks, I peddled across the area to see the mish-mash archaeology of industrial estates in the weeks or months before it all vanishes for good. In its place will be a topography where (according to the image gallery) healthy avatar people jog everywhere in a Second Life Utopia. The corporate PDF makes it all seem believable but I also want to superimpose onto this acetate layer the kind of humanity I have seen today: One man helping to inject a liquid substance into another’s forearm on Greenway; a furtive south-Asian couple sampling each other’s tongues off the Leyton Road; desolate-looking east-Europeans dangling their legs over a wall at Three-Mills.

When the £3.9bn has been spent, the IOC have their idyll, Newham Council have been handed a legacy of the urban revamp but it is to hope that only übermensch visit the still disadvantaged area. In the perfect Olympic brochure of 2022, there is no graffiti, no petty criminals, no more money and no security. Olympic-land may return to the wasteland it is today.

With Quadrophenia in mind, I have headed South to Brighton this Bank Holiday. But far from marauding Mods and Rockers fighting for parkas v leather and motorbike grease v Lambretta mirrors on Madeira Drive, all I found were the comatose Historic Commercial Vehicle Society enthusing about liveries over the tinny public address system.

All that trivia was too much for me and so I loped (Westward Hove!) towards the shipwreck ruins of the West Pier.

Its designer Eugenius Birch, was growing up in London’s East End when Victorian industrialisation was gathering momentum. Joining the stampede of innovation, he became an architect, a draughtsman (and artist), building bridges, viaducts, harbours, docks and among others, the Calcutta-Delhi railway. But with more of an instinct for marine design he also tucked away 14 seaside piers into his portfolio and around our coasts, all using his screw-pile method - literally twisting the iron piles into the sea bed making them far sturdier than the wooden posts that till then were the norm. So sturdy were the foundations that his first pier at Margate survived 120 years before succumbing to the ravages of storm.

Completed in 1866 the West Pier became for Birch, like Brunel’s GWR, his jewel. The pier to end all piers. Mimicking the Regency Pavilion, there were Oriental octagonal kiosks, grand archways, elaborate Bath stonework, a magnificent theatre and later, a bandstand. ‘Taking the air’ in the Victorian sense culturally translated to ’saucy postcards’ in the Fifties and British cinema was lent its most enduring film locations for Brighton Rock (1947),’Oh What a Lovely War’ (1969), unmentionable Carry-On disasters but more lasting perhaps, are the images of pitch battles between disenfranchised youth emulating Marlon Brando.

The 1920s saw the pier’s heyday but what remains, perhaps morally too, are the frames of mountain bikes pathetically locked to rusty railings and of Birch’s Empire-inspired Gothic structure, a Grade 1 skeletal hulk. To take its place, the people of Brighton and Hove will be blessed with the i360 - a 183 metre-high observation needle being drawn up by architects David Marks and Julia Barfield whose London Eye concept is the most visited paid-for attraction in the country with over 20 million visitors to date. “Our philosophy is to provide an architecture that is humane, accessible and a pleasure to experience,” they say in their practice’s statement.

An appropriate premise too, I would say, for a master pier-builder.

Man walks in to a restaurant. Grabs a kitchen knife then jumps up on a table and unzips himself. What happens next was caught on film .. No, only kidding, no-one with a 5.0 Mega-pixel mobile was on hand to film him hacking off his three card trick though it really did happen. Last Sunday a Polish man executed a self-dismemberment in Zizzis, a bustling Italian restaurant on the Strand. I imagine he awoke the next morning a bit confused especially as he’s been detained under the Mental Health Act.

I’m sure history could reveal many such incidents. The Romans probably told hearty jokes of slave abuse and then there was Farinelli (1705 - 1782) the most notable of Italian Castrato soprano singers. Although it was eventually made illegal to mutilate poor 8 year-old boys for the church choirs, it didn’t stop 4,000 from being put to the knife every year in the name of operatic art. Castrati were as popular then as the Bee Gees were in the 80s with their falsetto wine. Farinelli went on to achieve his own X-Factor fame, even performing at Lincoln’s Inn Fields - a yelp away from where Zizzis currently stands (the pizza is great so the Neapolitan Farinelli would indeed have approved).

There was also Wayne Bobbit who was notoriously separated from his ‘lolly lick’ in 1993 when his Ecuadorian wife Lorena lopped it off with an 8-inch carving knife .. as he slept. Well Lorena, she drove off into the night tossing the said item out the car window and it took a police search party to locate it. Bobbit’s pipework was satisfactorily re-attached - unlike the poor Pole’s whose plumbing is now sadly decommisioned.

Queen Kate, is a Queen no more. However I haven’t yet seen the royal courtier pinning the announcement to the palace gates now that there’s important news us Plebs need to know about.

Having been chased down the street by ‘buzzing insects‘ almost every day since she put a tentative crystal-slippered foot on those Palace steps, the nation held its breath. ‘How long will it take before she sees sense?’ “Will there ever be a monarch who chews gum at Sandhurst?’ If she really did say to QEII (the old bat, not the old boat): “Pleased to meet you.. er, Ma’am,” then she’s my kind of girl. Even better, the mum’s an ex-hostee (”Doors to manual“) and whom I understand from my own sources, chews gum too!

What stood out for me today in central London was the wonderful Evening Standard newspaper headline: “Kate - The strain shows: Picture.” This is commuter rush-hour-speak for ‘Buy our paper and we’ll show you a damned fine study of her looking not-so fine - all for your delectation on the Connex train home.’ At first I wasn’t sure if the lead story was about Kate, or Kate. Either it was Kate the not-posh-enough girlfriend of the King-in-the-wings or it was Kate the catwalking moll of shambolic Pete. It hardly matters and who really cares anyway? Just about every news organisation have been howling like urban foxes with any story about either women, whether stepping up for giddy monarchy or stepping out to dizzy parties. If there was a strain imposed on either lass it was because they had headlines - plus pictures - on every street corner but that’s media hypocrisy I’ll let go for now.

We watched Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ (2004) the other night and endured two hours of a Jesus look-alike humping a cross through dusty Jerusalem. He didn’t half groan a lot (in the screenplay, certainly not in the Bible) and had every right doing so: ‘What did I ever do to the Romans?’ It was as pointless as the carnage that those puppy-faced foxes left of those decapitated chickens on Channel 4 last night. Carnage in the Biblical sense I was thinking, seems a bit tame these days after 9/11.

This window in Camden presented itself to me and I thought of the uber-vixen dispatched by a night-sighted air rifle, Jesus rising North a few days ago and the two very different Kates in their posh frocks - saving for the same pension plan.

Today I have returned to my hometown. Sitting in the early traffic, I wonder how many of my fellow-motorists might have been in my class at school, might be previous girlfriends, or I may have worked with? Things might have been so much different had I stayed: Got a proper job, married a local girl, had - Essex children.

I have been sent to Southend-on-Sea this glorious day; the seaside location of my magazine assignment and where I first started ambling along the sea front, with camera and Tri-X film that I processed in a darkened toilet at home. Up until a few years ago, we used to stride along the mile and a quarter-long pier every freezing New Year’s Day. Quite coincidentally, we learned through a cousin addicted to researching our family tree, that on Boxing Day 1864, our ancestor Daniel scrapped with some squaddies from Shoebury Garrison. He was later found washing around the pier’s iron struts - on New Year’s Day.

Southend was one of the prime casualties of the 60s sombrero switch to the Costas and it’s been in terminal decline ever since. But I see the garish Treasure Island theme park is helping to bring the hoards back to the Thames Estuary mud flats. I was there to photograph a man from an organisation called Coaster Force, a cult of thrill-seekers dedicated to the addiction of Roller Coasting. Southend is once again on the map - because of Rage.

Seeing Rage for the first time made me almost wretch (rather than growl). There is a vertical climb - and I mean vertical, a Saturn 5 effort - followed by a (once more with feeling) vertical drop with a helical twist at the end. I have been fortunate to fly with the Red Arrows on a few occasions but let me tell you the huge relief I felt when I learned it had suffered software failure and the V-Drop was a Z-drop.

I’m really quite pleased that parts of Southend sea front is still the faded, shabby back-water that I fondly remember. After all, if the Vegas of the Home Counties had been on my doorstep, I may never have picked up a Canon AT-1 for £169.99 and marched off down the esplanade in the summer of ‘78.

I may instead have had ‘Carol’ tattooed on my calf.