Back in the summer of 1996 I was invited on a journalist junket to watch KLF pop star Jimmy Cauty demonstrate sonic weapons at a remote location on Dartmoor (south Devon and close to Cauty’s home at the time). A carriage on a London to Exeter train was blocked booked for stringers attending the event and we were plied with booze on the journey. By the time we boarded a helicopter at Exeter airport (a small provincial facility that shuts down in the early evening), the majority of journalists present were at least mildly drunk. After a twenty minute chopper ride disaster struck.

Forget those boring guides to the best opening lines in books compiled by cruds who either draw solely on canonical literary novels and/or recent bestsellers. This is the real deal and I haven’t restricted myself to book length works either! “I probably never would have become America’s leading fire-eater if Flamo the Great hadn’t happened to explode that night in front of Krinko’s Great Combined Carnival Side Shows.” Daniel P. Mannix Memoirs Of A Sword Swallower. “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto. “When I was nine years old I burned down my school.

Curious about what those stuck in London over the summer but keen to avoid the Olympics might do, I decided to visit a few museums to check out various free tourist attractions. I started with the John Soame Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields on Thursday afternoon (5 July 2012). I used to visit this museum dedicated to the life and work of architect and collector John Soame a lot when I was in my late-teens and early-twenties. Back in the day you could just walk in but now you’re greeted by a door-person and have to hand in any luggage that is much more than handbag size.

For no particularly good reason I decided to head down to The Millennium Bridge in central London to watch tonight’s supposedly spectacular light show to launch The Shard: the just completed tallest building in Europe, and one that allegedly contains apartments for sale at £50 million (although that is probably just hype). On The Millennium Bridge I found myself blinded by the lights not from The Shard’s lasers but the flash photography of the crowd around me. Oddly more people were taking pictures before the lights went on than after the show began…. Both The Millennium Bridge and The Embankment below were packed when I arrived just before the laser ‘spectacular’ kicked off; but once the event got underway the crowd quickly thinned.

The Olympic Games haven’t even started yet but the restrictions on movement around London are already in full effect. Today I was at Kings X railway station and an announcement boomed out saying something like: ‘this is your mayor Boris Johnson and public transport will be more crowded this summer so your journeys may take long…..’ We don’t need the banker loving Boris Johnson to tell us this. If we have to have announcements of this type then the usual anonymous announcer will do fine. One just gets the impression that Johnson wants to bore those that live in London out of the city during the Olympics.