Friday

It's a really nice day today - far too nice to be in the office, of course. I'm not feeling too bad but have an awful cough when I wake up. I suppose I only have myself to blame for this one, however. There's still plenty to do on this sales kit and very little time left to do it - London Book Fair is only a week or so away now and there's a lot we have to get out of the way before it starts.

After work I make my way to Waterloo to meet K - she has a 2 for 1 voucher for the London Eye and so we're going to take a 'flight' as a nice Friday evening treat. The last time I went on the Eye was on 13th April 2004. The only reason I know this date is that it was the day the newly-decommission Concorde was taken up the Thames on a barge on its way to be installed in a museum in Scotland. I was with the family and we had no idea this was happening - it was only looking down from our Pod that we noticed a giant airliner travelling beneath us. I often like to point out to people that not many other people can say they've seen Concorde travelling below them.

We buy our tickets and are then funnelled into a large theatre-like room for what is called the London Eye 4D Experience. This seems to be a new thing and involves a five minute 3D film featuring adoring shots of London and celebrating Londoners, made '4D' by spraying water and fake snow in your face as the same things happen on the screen. I had seen it done before at Universal Studios in Florida a few years ago and while it's a fun effect it seems to be a fairly pointless add-on to the Eye. The most hilariously pointless bit is when they take a picture of you in front of a blue screen, then superimpose a picture that gives the appearance that your party are standing in a Pod on the London Eye. Given that you'll be doing exactly that in real life minutes later I can't understand why anyone would buy a photo pretending to do it.

We get on the Eye around half an hour later, just as the sun has gone down and as we rise and fall the sky gets darker and the lights of the city start coming on. Compared to the last time I was on the wheel six years ago, I can pick out a lot more things - obviously having now lived in London for two years it's to be expected, but I'm pleased to be able to identify Alexandra Palace in the North and to pick out the massive arch of Wembley as probably the most distant visible building.

The ride comes to an end and, now feeling in a touristy mood, walk across the bridge to Trafalgar Square and up the steps past the fountains to get the tube home from Leicester Square. Both now also starving hungry, we head to Jashan, the delightful little Indian restaurant on Turnpike Lane and get a takeaway. We eat Lamb Rogan Jhosh and Chicken Jalfrezi in front of the first couple of episodes of Mad Men season two and eventually retire to bed, stuffed.