Some pictures I took from the London Eye. I mean, I didn't take them "from" the London Eye - they're my pictures, the London Eye can't take pictures. Well, unless you count that stupid touristy automatic camera when you're coming in to "land". That's what they call it, you know. "Coming in to land". It's a hangover from when it was sponsored by British Airways, I think. These days it's EDF Energy so the whole "coming in to land" thing makes no sense, but then EDF is a French company (EDF stands for "Electricité de France" which means Elecricity of France) so they're probably all too drunk or too stupid or too busy surrendering or some other cliché about French people to do anything about it. Anyway, I took these pictures while I was on the London Eye. It was dark, so I had to use a long exposure. I wasn't able to set the shutter speed so I had to rely on the automatic "night scenery" setting on my shitty little camera. It's not actually "shitty", I mean, that would be disgusting. It's just not very good. Well, it's good, compared with compact cameras of even just a few years ago but it's not as good as, say, a DSLR. I used to have a DSLR but it broke. Well, I still have it, but it's broken, so it doesn't count. I miss it.

Anyway, here are some pictures I took from the London Eye:

St. Paul's + The National Theatre Part I

St. Paul's + The National Theatre Part II

The Shard I

The Shard II

St. Paul's Heartbeat (140bpm)

St. Paul's + OXO Tower

The Nuthouse I

The Nuthouse II

Well, that's it. If you like them you can buy prints by, I dunno, taking your computer down Snappy Snaps and asking them to print them out. If you want, you can buy them off me, but I doubt you'd want to do that. But if you want, you can. If you want. All pictures are © me 2012 until I die and for quite a long time after that so if you steal them for commercial gain I will be legally entitled to come round your house and do a smell in your kitchen.

How the BA / Olympics campaign SHOULD look

Surviving Hell

So you're in Centerparcs. Let's not get in to how you got there - it probably involved a drunken conversation with your other half in which you blithely agreed with everything she said in the vain hope that she'd shut the fuck up and let you hear what was going on on "The Walking Dead".

Ironically, how much of the plot you were able to understand - between witterings about curtain fabric and what her mother has done now - will directly affect your chances of survival in the depths of the forested hell in which you now find yourself.  Because surviving a zombie holocaust requires almost exactly the same skills required to survive your own expensive ordeal.

BRAAAAIIINS

I'm going to provide you with some basic rules to improve your chances of getting out alive and with your sanity intact. I have experience here - through various mishaps and misadventures, I have found myself in that betwigged hell a total of three times. And each time, I got out by following some very simple, but very important rules of engagement. Come with me if you want to live...

1. Know your environment. The first thing you need to do, before you have even unpacked, is to work out your exit routes. Get hold of a map, and plot the key strategic locations. Firstly, where have you parked your car? You don't know? Then I am afraid you're dead. The car park is HUGE - you saw the bastard when you arrived. You MUST know precisely where your vehicle is located AT ALL TIMES - escape on foot is not possible. There is nothing - NOTHING - within a day's walk of the gulag worth walking to. There are, however, two prime objectives reachable by car: a supermarket and a pub. Find out where they are. Failure to do so WILL result in failure, soldier. There will be only one exit from the camp, so get to know it.

Learn this. Learn it.

Another key point on the map is your chalet - I'm sorry, but that's what it is, so you can call it a "lodge" as much as you like but we all know the truth. This is your safe haven. Yes, it might have peeling wallpaper and a broken toaster, and there might be a highly suspicious smell coming from the toilet. But it has lockable doors and a fridge in which to keep the all important cache of the one substance that will save your life

2. Booze. You have to have some booze. Not just some, a metric twatload of the stuff. Whatever your preferred tipple, it is vital that you keep your fridge stocked with enough of it to float a medium-sized guided missile cruiser. "Oh, but we have kids", you cry. Fuck 'em, I say. They're having fun, they don't know the horror. They don't know, man. They don't know. Put them in bed and tie one on - trust me, it's the only way.

If, through poor planning or base stupidity, you don't have alcohol in your chalet (shut up, it is), then it is imperative to locate and patronise a bar at the first opportunity. There will be several to choose from in your locale, but there will be only one which is not packed to the rafters with soul-eating zombie shitblasters. Your target will be the one furthest away from what is laughably known as the "pool complex' but which you will come to know as the Watery Portal to Hades Populated By Satan's Least Attractive Demons From The Lowest Pit. Find this bar, make it your own, hope it has a soft play area for the kids. Make full use of this unlikely sanctuary, but do not, no matter how famished you may be, eat there. The food is drugged and you will end up like the rest of the mouth-breathing, tracksuit-clad morons you previously disdained. And most importantly of all:

3. Do not, ever, regardless of the circumstances, make direct contact with any other guest/inmate. Conversation will be required, on occasion, with the guards/staff, but this should be kept to the bare minimum. "Beer, two, now" or "Bike hire, where, now" will suffice. DO NOT speak to or touch the other guests, as they will almost certainly be infected with the F-virus (fuckwittius cocktwatianus). I have personally seen people - seemingly normal, healthy people - make conversation with the evil daft, leading to an invitation to get together for a bike ride the next day and their inevitable disappearance.

4. If you have children, you will have no choice but to go swimming in what I call "the hive" and what "the others" call "the pool". It's like walking into a moist, overheated cavern full of cunts. DO NOT SWALLOW THE WATER. And get out as soon as you can.

5. When walking in the forest, stay alert. The controllers let the victims have bicycles, even though it is abundantly clear that they lack the basic coordination or understanding to control the bloody things. Listen out for the sounds of approaching doom - screeches of "Wayne, I cahn make ver fuckn fing stop!" or "har har didjoo see ver look on vat old bloke's face when I kicked im into the bushes". Protect your loved ones and return to the relative safety of your lodge as soon as possible.

As with global thermonuclear war, the only winning move is not to play. But if you cannot avoid exposure, follow these simple instructions and you should live to fight another day.*

*I accept no liability for injury, death, loss of or damage to possessions, descent into lunacy or discovery of lumps in the danglies resulting from any advice provided in this blog.

Twit Shit

This is disgustingly self-indulgent, so if you're easily sickened or just can't be arsed with babyish whingeing, go away now.

I've had a bit of an epiphany: I take Twitter far too seriously.

This is probably something that occurs to most regular twittererers - am I doing this a bit too much? Is it becoming a little bit too significant in my life? Am I a mouthy gittish twat? Well okay, maybe you don't ALL think like that, but I have an embarrassingly addictive personality and I think a lot of you do too. Go on, admit it - it's the first step to recovery.

Anyway, my Road to Damascus moment came when I was unfollowed by someone I love following - a funny, creative, talented, adored bastard shitblizzard motherfucker who has achieved a great deal in life and whose tweets are things of beauty. When he followed me I felt like my own inane, fatuous, insulting rantings on Twitter had attained a sort of kudos - I felt validated. And when he got fucked off with my pathetically transparent attempts at getting him to recommend me to his thousands of followers and unfollowed me, for at least an hour I felt like I'd had the rug pulled out from under me.

How fucking pathetic is that?

It's even more pathetic than this. I know - hardly seems possible

So, I'm going to take a step back. In retrospect, I've been tweeting far too much for someone who has a full time job and is married with two young kids. I'm going to change the way I "do" Twitter. Rather than follow people in the childish hope they'll follow me, or because they already do follow me and I worry they'll desert me if I don't, I'm going to follow only those who entertain, amuse, inform or enrich me. Oh, and people I know personally and who would be all "hey, why you no follow me no more" if I do what I should and unfollow the boring, middle-aged fucking cunts).

Jog on, you stagey bastard

 All of this is apropos of absolutely fuck all EXCEPT to say I'm not playing the game any more. I have been following people because they've been following me, even though it turns out that these people are so boring they could cause a hermetic monk to beat themselves to death with their own cocks. From now on, there are rules, and I think they should be adopted by anyone who doesn't want Twatbox to take over their lives.

Rule 1: Nah poofters.

No, wait, sorry, that's Monty Python.

Rule 1: Anyone who quotes Monty Python at me gets unfollowed.

Rule 2: Anyone who tweets about football more than 8.65% of the time gets unfollowed. I have a sophisticated algorithm that, when I'm not using it to predict movements in commodity stock prices or the size of the penis growing from Simon Cowell's forehead, is put to work on twitter to identify transgressors.

Rule 3: I will not follow anyone - ever - who asks for a follow back or who in any other way is, or can be suspected of being, a subscriber to the arse-climbing fucknugget collective variously known as Team Follow Back, TeamFB, FollowBackWankbags or Ultimate Cult of the Deep One Cthulhu and his Pisspoor Collective of Bieber-Loving Bastards Who Shall Burn In Eternity For Their Crimes Against Humanity.

Rule 4: I won't follow you if a large majority of your tweets consist of insulting minor celebrities by calling them a cunt, or in some other way demeaning or belittling their careers, when they have achieved more in the last 13.5 seconds than you and your hideous offspring will achieve in ten thousand generations (unless I agree that they are cunts in which case carry on).

Rule 5: I won't follow racists and that.

Rule 6: I won't follow Ken Livingstone.

Rule 7: I won't follow anyone whose entire raison d'etre is to demean, belittle, insult or threaten anyone else who happens to share a different political ideology to themselves. Grow the fuck up and look around you. You tit.

Rule 8: Nah poofters. Oh, shit, sorry, Python again. Bugger, that means I have to unfollow myself. Oh well, no great loss.

Rule 9: if you follow me at all, you're probably an idiot so it's only fair that I reserve the right to unfollow you at any time. As such, why not save yourself the bother and not follow me in the first place. I'm a bit of a cunt, truth be told.

That's it. Let us move forward in a spirit of collaboration and mutual amusement, and if you don't agree with any of the above, you can fuck the fucking fuck off you fuck.

Peace and love xxx

Your Nurk.

Death, Rockets and Linda Lusardi

You'll have to indulge me - I've come over all nostalgic for my childhood. Days of innocence, guileless optimism and good clean fun. Fuck you up the arse if you don't like it (see what I've become?).

Tonight, when I got home from what passes for my career, my four year old son greeted me at the door with the words "Daddy, why did your daddy die?" [Background: my old man died just over two years ago, at the age of 60, from a series of strokes caused by working too hard, drinking too much, smoking like a dirty chimney and foolishly having 4 kids in quick succession with his second wife. The strokes would probably have finished him off by themselves, but they were followed swiftly by a dose of the NHS house cocktail (c. difficile + MRSA, shaken over lack of interest with a splash of poor hygeine) so he never really stood a chance.] Anyway, this is the first time my son has ever talked about him dying, and to be frank it kicked the shit out of me. "I fink he loved you, Daddy, and he loved me too. Why did he die? You're not going to die, are you daddy?" (No, really, he actually said this. If I didn't know he'd been at school I'd think he'd been watching crappy daytime movies on Channel 5 all day.) Well, as you can probably imagine, it ever so slightly fucked me sideways.

This new-found interest my son has suddenly developed in human mortality is entirely my fault - over the weekend I showed him YouTube footage of the last ever launch of the shuttle - STS-135, or Atlantis as it's known to non-geeks (I'm a geek). He was utterly smitten, and I was suddenly very sad that he was going to grow up in a world without the Space Shuttle, so I showed him some more videos of the Shuttle and other space type stuff. Unfortunately, he then spotted an image of the Challenger disaster and asked me what it was. I showed him the video, and when he asked "where did the rocket go?" explained that it had "gone wrong" and that the astronauts flying on it had died. He didn't quite understand at first, but then he seemed to get it, and he asked "why did it go wrong?" I tried to explain that it was partly because silly people had forgotten to check important bits of the rocket, and partly that it was just something that happened when people try to do extraordinary things. He was sad for a minute or so, then asked to see "the gone wrong one" again. And again. And again. Evil-minded little tosspots, these four year olds...

Then it dawned on me that he's going to grow up in a world where people just don't do extraordinary things anymore. I know this sounds drearily whiney, almost Clarksonesque in its petulance, but if you think about it, it's true. I was born in 1973 and, as a result spent my formative years living in a special place called the 1980s. I remember being in awe of the huge number of unfeasibly cool things that human ingenuity and derring-do had wrought - Concorde, the SR-71 Blackbird spyplane, the DeLorean DMC-12 and the Lamborghini Countach, James Bond's submarine Lotus Esprit, Evel Knievel, the X-Wing and the Millennium Falcon, Formula 1 races where the cars actually overtook each other, the Raleigh Chopper... You get the picture.

Here's the picture just in case you didn't get it. Nothing this cool has ever been made since.

These things are all gone. Concorde because it crashed once and was a bit too expensive for the grey-minded beancounters at BA, the Blackbird because the CIA decided satellites were more useful (even though in the time it took to move an orbiting box into position over an area of interest, the Blackbird could've got there and back 10 times), the DeLorean because (okay) it was a bit shit, Formula 1 is a tedious parade of safety devices on wheels, and the Chopper disappeared after a kid fell off one in Droitwich (fact). James Bond's cars no longer fly, shoot missiles or go underwater - instead, they're equipped with defibrillators, first aid kits and a digital connection to Claims Direct. Evel Knievel broke every bone in his body and then inconveniently died, and no one's taken over from him. Lamborghini still makes fast pointy cars but they're now owned by the same company that makes the VW Polo. And the spaceships in the lastest Star Wars films look like they were designed by a committee of vegetarian manic-depressives.

The Challenger disaster was a major catalyst in all this. First launched in 1983, Challenger was by far the busiest and best of NASA's fleet of shuttles, the first to have a payload capacity large enough to attract commercial and military clients and thereby realise NASA's intention of running a profitable orbital delivery program. Its first mission (STS-6) saw the first space walk by any astronaut in over 10 years, and on its 4th mission in 1984, the astronaut Bruce McCandless did this:

Imagine the size of his balls

McCandless is completely on his own out there, strapped to a previously untested jetpack which might have left him stranded in space, floating around until he ran out of air and either plummeted into the atmosphere or got eaten by space sharks. Yes, space sharks. They existed in the 1980s, too. They did. Look them up if you don't believe me.

That image of a human man floating free in space is one of the most enduring images of my childhood memory, along with this:

This was an actual, real thing

This:

We were told we weren't going to need roads where we were going. Tell that to the M25.

And this:

Linda Lusardi - in 1987 the sexiest thing most 14 year olds would see*
*outside of their mum's Littlewoods catalogue

Oh, Linda. Linda, Linda, Linda. The things I would have imagined doing to you if they'd been invented in 1987 and I'd been old enough to know about them.

Moving on.

Two further untethered EVAs (geek speak) took place in 1984 - one more from Challenger, one from Discovery. This was the future - mankind floating around in space unconnected to anything. Then in 1987 Challenger blew up, and when NASA finally grew its balls back and started Shuttle operations again, it was decided that untethered EVAs were just too dangerous. Since then, any spacewalks have been conducted using technology not discernibly different from that used in the 1960s. Sadly, at the same time, the commercial sector and the military decided that they'd rather send their satellites up on rockets (strange, given that rockets were statistically far more likely to blow up) and the dream of a profit-making Space Shuttle died. From that point on, the entire Shuttle program was doomed. Last Friday, it shuffled off its mortal coil and another piece of my childhood died with it.

I suppose I'm just getting old, but it seems there's a lot less amazement out there for kids, even with all the technical advancements made in the last 20+ years. Consider how children today interact with computers - if they notice them at all, they're virtually part of the furniture. My kids treat my stupidly clever and ridiculously poncey MacBook as just another TV which happens to contain pictures, videos and games of every single thing they can imagine (known to us dreary adults as "the internet"). If such a thing had existed when I was a kid, I think my head would have exploded in wonderment. We had a Commodore 64, then a ZX Spectrum, then a BBC Micro and finally an Archimedes. These were awesome machines that did impossible things with cassettes and 8-inch floppy disks. My kids could probably build a Spectrum out of Lego and a deflated balloon, but back then it was like staring into the unfathomable visage of a strange and powerful god. Technology is now a right, not a privilege. Innovation happens every day but it's consumer-focused and mainly passes unnoticed. I remember being amazed when our old rotary telephone was replaced with a wondrous new device with a keypad. I get the impression if I was to come home tomorrow with a fully functioning battle droid, my eldest son would barely look up from his interminable AlphaBlocks DVD, and my youngest would pee on it before wondering off to dismantle the dishwasher. Again.

One day, I hope there will be tourism in space, and hypersonic passenger planes, and flying cars and R2D2s and a new version of the Chopper with laser wheels and holographic handlebars. My kids need more than 3D cartoons and interactive curling on the Wii...