Oh, for the wings.

Aerophobics have got it all wrong. God *does* want us to fly and he *has* given us wings. And rotors and jet engines and rockets and propellers and helium and... everything that our fellow aviators, the birds, would seem to lack.

Flying with feathered-wings, like a bird, seems an incredible waste of energy. The amount of effort those poor little things put into each flap must be tortuous. And what's with that slapping sound that comes from pigeons at take-off? That's got to hurt, right? Poor birds. No wonder they're always squawking.

It's worth noting that early man-made flapping machines singularly failed to get off the ground. Aviation would-be pioneers who tried to fashion feathery wings out of wood and wire never got off the ground and very often plummeted into the sea - we've all seen the funny film clips. It was only when mankind steered sensibly away from this route, electing to pursue a more mechanical means of getting airborne, that things really started to take off.

Watching the International Space Station streak overhead this week at a height of some 200 miles has been a fantastic experience. I urge everybody to have a look at it when conditions permit. It's the 21st Century pinnacle of our achievement in getting (and staying) off the ground - the latest stage of a journey that started with Montgolfier and his chums in their hot air balloons.

Balloon flight is a fine thing, I'm happy to be able to confirm, having had the pleasure of one myself. My first and only balloon take-off was intense, as this joy-flight (alongside my late photographer chum Colin Wallace) was from a busy agricultural show ground. We were tethered to the ground by a bloody great big strap while the vast bubble over our heads was inflated and heated. The basket buffeted and rocked about until the strap was released and - rather like an empty shampoo bottle blobbing to the surface of a hot bath - the ground shot away from under us and we were sucked at runaway speed into the skies of East Exeter.

Once up there, the silence and windlessness was astounding. We were lighter than air, so every little puff of wind carried us sideways without restriction - the net feeling was of being in a weird vacuum. I quickly identified my house and neighbouring fields and roads from above and, as we gained height and started to drift towards the coast, I could not only see but hear clearly what was going on down on the ground.

Kids waved, people in traffic jams pointed through their windscreens. Horses ran away from us while cows stood their ground and stared, mooing faintly into the sky from their meadows hundreds or thousands of feet below our fragile-seeming basket. We crept closer to the treetops at sunset and our eventual landing, in a farmer's field close to Sidmouth, was relatively gentle - although we did end up being tipped onto one side. It was a good feeling, to finally clamber back out onto the green grass of terra firma with that special new experience tucked away.

I've always enjoyed flying, before and since that fantastic balloon run. My first time aloft came courtesy of my dad, who'd paid for me to have a pleasure flight around Exeter Airport during an air day. He had been a corporal in the RAF, so he knew all about it already - and left me to enjoy this short and fascinating prop-driven flight by myself.

The school's RAF cadet corps opened up yet new flying opportunities - including one-on-one flying lessons in a battered and paint-chipped RAF Chipmunk training aircraft. This noisy beast gave me and my early-teenage school pals an opportunity to strap into a parachute suit, grab a joystick and throttle and take these beasts into the air ourselves (under the watchful and unshockable care of a qualified flying instructor, of course). We would spin the Chipmunk around the skies a bit, maybe do some aerobatics, then bring them back towards a runway approach. Much, much better than lessons and kind of like an Atari video game - only not rubbish.

Summer camps overseas gave us even wilder opportunities which I remain massively grateful for. Thanks to the cadet force, I enjoyed three separate helicopter flights - including a tree-clipping adventure in a Gazelle and a classic feet-over-edge dangling adventure tethered to the open sides of a Sea King air-sea rescue chopper. Priceless.

But perhaps the most outrageously spectacular flying experience I have yet had (apart from maybe a stunning aurora borealis display seen through the windows of a 747 bound for Heathrow from Seattle) was in the humble Hele's School cadets glider.

This was a peculiar beast in several parts that would need to be assembled, by hand, using the combined strength and skill of several boys over much of an afternoon. The open cockpit would be bolted to the fuselage and each of the enormous wings fixed with butterfly bolts. 'Flight' (and our teachers-cum-cadet officers insisted on calling it that) would be achieved by stretching a very long elastic band in two directions away from the front of the craft, and then twanging the glider forward. The unfortunate lad in the cockpit would be catapulted forward at high speed across the school field towards a busy-looking dual carriageway, getting airborne for about ten seconds and up to an altitude of maybe four feet.

It was scary, uncomfortable and not really worth doing, to be honest. I imagine health and safety execs soon put an end to it anyway.

Pop go the weasels.

Remember real pop stars? I do. Back in my day we had *proper* stars. They were unapproachable because we considered them somehow better than us. They were artists who had something to say and an interesting way of voicing whatever that was. They lived better and more beautiful lives on our behalf - we wanted them to be dynamic and risky and entertaining, and to live full lives that we could enjoy and learn from, entirely vicariously, while still holding down a job at Woolworths. It was a valuable relationship, the one between a pop star and his or her audience, and a lot could be earned and learned from it - on both sides.

Then, of course, something quite revolutionary happened. Punk brought a new way of thinking, and a new way of approaching music. Singers and musicians were no longer pedestal-straddling demagogues - suddenly they were ordinary people, just like you and me. Perhaps even a bit thicker. "Here is a chord," we would famously read. "Here is another. Now go form a band." The relationship between band and audience changed - some would say for the better. I say it just changed. The audience were suddenly onstage and, while I like my mates to be pop stars, I like pop stars to be pop stars too.

You'd think there would be a third course, but there is not. This was proved quite lucidly to me as I stepped out of the tube station at Greenwich North last night.

The short walk along the illuminated path towards the O2 - a massive circular tent owned and named by a mobile telephone company - was like a nocturnal stroll through a haunted Dystopian forest. Three massive video screens to my right showed, on a loop, Eliza Caird (a singer who has chosen to rename herself after a character in 'My Fair Lady' - namely Ms Doolittle) handing over her sports shoes to a young man. The Mastercard slogan underneath the sponsored footage declared: "Giving something back to the fans - priceless." Can you see what's wrong with this picture yet?

Talented pop singer though she may be, why would this young man want this young lady's trainers? Why should it be a big deal for him? For her? Or for Mastercard? Teenagers in the mid 1970s would climb over each other at concerts to try to grab a scrap of Donny Osmond's shirt - is this somehow a throwback to this kind of hysteria? Is texting a mobile 'phone message to a Mastercard competition line the modern equivalent of scurrying backstage to try to grab an autograph from Jimmy Page as he is rushed into a waiting car? Or is this showing us that Eliza is down with the kids? Happy to mix with the rest of us - even hand over her shoes, for God's sake, to appear as human as the rest of us? Nah. That's just as unlikely.

The bleak picture widened as I got closer to the dome. Not only Eliza, but Tinie Tempah (not real name) and Rod Stewart (real name) were offering clothing and other personal items to 'fans' under the same Mastercard banner. A 30ft picture of Rod had been stuck to the floor. Even at that size, and that close up, the Mastercard small print on the side of the ad that accompanied Rod's face was beguilingly small.

The event I was attending was billed as the 'Brits After Party' and on the way out, ordinary people like you and me were given VIP laminates as "a keepsake". Do they get us into a party, then? "No. They're just a keepsake." A laminate, something to wear on the bus home - to pretend that you are someone, because you look like you get up close and personal with pop stars?

Not an after party. Not an after party VIP pass, either.

The gig itself was bleak. A man called Mark Ronson (real name) stood behind a metal desk while failed pop wannabes like Rose Elinor Dougall joined in a karaoke routine of other people's songs. At least Rose's face - which turned to permanent thunder when she found she could not hear her electronic drumpads through the expensive monitors pointed at her ears) was, to quote Mastercard again, quite priceless.

A pass that isn't a pass, a party that isn't a party, a group of people that are not a band? Not good. And when a credit card company jumps into the frame with an advertising concept that seeks to create some kind of mythical star-fan divide and then bridge it, as a magnaminous and fun gesture, I for one call time.

Pop, as predicted so many years ago, has eaten itself. And we all know what happens next.

The death of an octopus.

The fish market on Quai des Belges in Marseille is a heck of a place. It must have been a mess in 1943 when the Nazis smashed it up, but it's since been rebuilt as a fully functioning seafood outlet and (for curious British visitors like myself) a free aquarium.

Fishermen line the harbour with blue plastic trays on legs, filling them with eels, crabs, lobsters, octopi - whatever their nets and pots have dragged out of the sea that morning. A bucket or two of sea water is added to keep them alive for a bit so proper freshness of wares can be demonstrated. And to give tourists like me something to look at.

For the creatures in the trays it has to be a one-way trip. I assume any animals remaining unsold after the morning trade will be thrown to the hungry gulls who squawk their impatience from the walls of the Vieux-Quai. No point chucking them back. The pressure change, warmth and dryness of air above the Mediterranean waters would surely kill these deep-sea creatures, horribly. After a while.

But, for now, they're alive and dancing a final sub-aquatic tango in an alien place. The lobsters and crabs, crammed together into one plastic tray, are clacking and crawling over each other. Some of the bigger crabs have their powerful claws clipped together with bright blue elastic bands so they can inflict no injury on fisherman, customer or fellow crab.

A few trays along, I catch sight of the octopi. Three or four are writhing in a few inches of water at the bottom of a box. Their suckered tentacles are both beautiful and repulsive, in the same way that a big-ass spider might be a compelling spectacle but completely terrifying (to me). An octopus in front of me is pushing his head up out of the shallow pool, and it seems for a moment as if his small, blinking eyes are looking upwards to make contact with mine.

As he (it might be a she - I have not a clue) wriggles on, a Marseille woman in winter coat and scarf leans into the tray and points out two octopi to the man facing her across the stall. A rough hand grips one octopus by its head and a mess of heavy, wet flesh and tentacles is plucked out of the tray and dropped into a pink plastic bag. A second animal follows. In seconds, the handles of the bag are tied in a loose knot and the whole wriggling heap is dropped roughly onto some scales beside the counter.

The pair are weighed and a price per kilo is offered and accepted with a nod from the shopper. The bag is untied again, and while the woman searches her purse for Euros the fisherman's hand pulls one of the animals back out of the bag. I see its almost-human eyes again and see its tentacles flail about in confusion. Then, in a flash, I see another hand drive a knife or screwdriver or similar quietly and without fuss into the octopus's head. It stabs through its fleshy underneath, through its beak and to its brain somewhere between its eyes. The tentacles droop slowly. From animal to dinner in a few short seconds - as easy as chopping up a carrot.

And that was the end of the octopus.

The shock of the new.

Early on a Sunday morning, before the birds or car-booters have woken, is a great time to see London. A few weeks ago, when the volcano did for all the 'planes, the view across Peckham Rye from the heights of Forest Hill was particularly spectacular.

The sky was a rich indigo canvas on this day, being peculiarly void of all vapour trails, smoke and noise. Through the van windscreen, as I crept over the precipice of the hill to begin the slow descent towards the heart of London, I could see the whole city spread out before me. It was quite some picture: St Paul's Cathedral, a handful of churches, a bridge or two, Parliament maybe, Monument certainly. These brick and stone relics from time glowed warmly under the young sun. The breaking day seemed warm and inviting to my tired eyes - but for one detail.

Overshadowing it all was the stamp of modern man. The Gherkin, the towers of banking commerce, the wire and glass around Liverpool Street all glowered over these lesser buildings like bullish older brothers. The littler constructs seemed like an irritant to their larger neighbours: they were getting in the way. Of progress. The low, fat moon added insult to injury. Nature and history - elegant, important history - were being swamped by this newness.

My rose-scented image of fresh London parkland grass was wiped from my mind's nose by a fog of diesel pumps, burning rubber and pollution. London suddenly turned ugly and damaged. But then, just as quickly, the scene flipped and these super-modern buildings took on a beauty of their own. The swollen, sunlit satellite glowing behind their walkways, elevations and mobile phone masts served to illustrate a unique, modern geometric beauty. Not so bad after all, eh?

And so, in different lights, London declares differing interests. I've no doubt that these historic buildings, in their original context, would have been surrounded by the ugliest of squalor, smog and disease-ridden streets. So this modern world must surely be better? Right? No?

That's the dichotomy of it all. As I look and wonder at London in the early morning, with its futuristic buildings towering over the landmarks like an opening scene from a far out 1960s sci-fi film, I have to wonder hard: which do I prefer? The here and now or the there and then?

The devil in the detail.

When Gordon Brown fell on his sword this week, he did so with a great deal of dignity. It's a shame that his odious successors do not share the same quality.

Clegg is this century's first national traitor. He took the king's shilling and sold his centre-left party and electorate out to the right wing. Rubbish. 24 hours after this sickening cow-tow, he was warming his feet in Cameron's cast-off slippers and making perverse u-turns on Trident and immigration policy. More misery will surely follow.

What do you think? If the polls had returned a radically different result, would Labour have sold their souls to the Tories for the chance - any chance - to co-govern? Of course not. In matters of basic political ideology, it's apparent that Brown has his principles and will stick to them. Clegg, to his eternal disgrace, will not. That's basic schoolboy rule number one broken, right there: he should have asked his mate from Eton about that.

Brown delivered his retirement speech with a great deal of humility and perhaps a whiff of relief that his shift was through. For perhaps the first time since he'd been elected PM he was able to slip back into the role of card-carrying Labour man: and it suited him.

There was no such dignity surrounding Clegg or Cameron. Guilt and shame shrouded the former, a desperate cluelessness the latter. Cameron's opening address showed a man strikingly out of his depth, still spouting party political rhetoric when the time for all that was over. He sees the country, I think, as little more than a bloody big council. He struck me as a winger; a conman who somehow managed to swindle his way into the country's top job. He knows he doesn't really belong at No 10, but he'll pop the champagne anyway and do his best to shuffle through. Our American friends have been here before. Hail to the thief.

Brown made his way to Buck House in a blue Daimler. Cameron was in a silver Jaguar. Am I alone in finding this vehicular choice a little insidious? They're very similar cars, yet the Daimler has always borne a sedate, British, gentlemanly distinction... while the Jag seems representative of either East End gangsters or the 1960s cop cars that chase after them. And the silver paintwork is synonymous of the garish USAF Mustang fighter planes of WW2 - rather more gung-ho than the Spitfires and Hurricanes in their camouflage colours.

Brown retired from the hot seat with great decorum and dignity. Cameron came swaggering in with just a little too much pride in himself. Luckily, perhaps, we all know what pride comes before.

The Annexe

Cartwright, Mackey, 'Chalkie' White, Pearson, 'Bummer' Bob Staddon and other teachers (whose names I stand little chance of remembering) would always do their best to impress the same notion onto all of us Hele's School boys: that the years we spent in their classrooms would be the happiest of our lives.

Of course, as rebellious urchins with snot-stained blazer sleeves, scuffed shoes and heads full of mischief, we would never accept such a fanciful notion. And, a few heart-warming episodes aside, I still don't. I think the best years came later. But I have a certain fondness for these formative times - and I still recall some of the more enjoyable details as well as the moral lessons I learned way back then.

The first two years of 'big school' were spent on a semi-derelict former POW camp on the edge of the city of Exeter. I was in form 22B in 1976, aged 12. It evolved into 32B after a year. Our first home-base was a once-portable temporary wood cabin in a square of grass between the more permanent 1940s brick blocks on the old military barracks. All of these huts surrounded in a typically random arrangement (to confuse would-be Luftwaffe pattern bombers) a large quad, where we would run around, play football or terrorise each other with tales of invading fourth or fifth form bullies.

At lunchtimes and breaks, a few pence could be made through a rudimentary shove ha'penny game, up against the wall of the block where Cartwright took woodwork. And once a week or so, all these pennies could be blown at the Tuck Shop, or Chalkie White's stamp auctions.

We had a school hall which abutted onto a canteen where paper dinner tokens pinched off a roll like bus tickets were exchanged for meals on small plastic plates, laid out on semi-hexagonal, yellow formica-topped tables. We had a metalwork room that smelled of oil and allegedly had a wild mouse in residence, and there were a couple of science blocks where we frequently ran amok with stolen chemicals. Away from the main drag was a music room where inappropriate records with naughty words were brought in to spin on the cumbersome school gramophone whenever Chalkie couldn't be arsed to try to teach us anything.

We behaved horrendously around our science teacher, Mr Urry, who drove a three-wheeler car and had not even the slenderest inkling of how to control us. Poor sod. And we were constantly reminded by one particular teacher - I don't remember his name but can picture him now, plain as day - that there were kids in Papua New Guinea who would 'cut off their right hands' (his words) for a chance of the sort of education which we were permanently so flippant about. Well, whoopee doo...

I remember my first (and last) after-school detention, but I don't remember what it was for. I remember getting into HUGE trouble for stealing exercise books and other bits and pieces, and I remember the alternating piping hot/ice cold showers in the grit-covered games block next to the quad.

Once I'd left, I never expected to ever have cause to return. But for shits and giggles I went back to the annexe a few years ago and took a cautionary look around. The site, under development according to a large wooden sign, was fenced off from the roadside but I was able to crawl through a gap in the hedge, a 40-something intruder with no plausible alibi if I were to be nicked by security. The whole place was protected by guard dogs, according to the warning sign, but once through the hedge I could see or hear none. And I could see or hear nothing particularly worth protecting, either.

All the brick-block buildings had already been torn down to their foundations. Grass and even a few young trees were growing in tufts through wide chasms in the long-abandoned concrete floor of what had been the school hall. With a little effort, I was able to work out my old routes from science block to English class... past the pathway where I was (quite justifiably) given a bloodied nose in front of a gaggle of 20 or so baying boys by Paul Hooper in 1976. I'd called him a 'turd'. Sorry Paul.

I found deep track marks where 22B's home classroom had once stood, and recalled setting off a load of fireworks there (brought back from family hols in Sweden). I walked up and down steps to a maths block that I'd last walked up and down 30 or so years before - with the obvious difference that these now went nowhere. And I identified the path to the gateway towards the main road, which led to Top Field, down Wood Water Lane and to my home - where in the 1970s my dad would have been waiting in his armchair, having finished his super-early shift delivering bread, to hear my adventures or misadventures of the day.

I also found part of the floor of the shower block with broken water pipes still sticking out of the drains like a mini ground zero; a perverse shrine to bad, bad rugby matches on turf which seemed to always be intercut with razor-sharp granules of sand. Not good on the knees. I picked up a piece of floor tiling and twisted it between my fingers, letting boyhood feelings, memories and ghostly voices slip through the decades towards me. I stood in the quad and had a good look around, feeling guilty and a little angry with myself for getting so nostalgic and almost tearful. "They're just the remains of buildings," I sort of reassured myself. "What am I thinking? That this place should be kept as a permanent memorial to my youth, just in case I one day want to have another look around? Ha."

I put the tile fragment on the dashboard of my car and drove away. The annexe has since been completely remodelled into housing blocks and bears zero resemblance to its past life. I caught it just before it completely lost its shape. In time, the souvenir shard of tile that I took back with me to London disappeared somewhere too - as all keepsakes must, eventually. It's time to say goodbye to the old Annexe. Goodbye.

Last Stop: This Town

The Thames. Its clippers, the Victorian bridge lit by street lamps, moonlight and Venus. The voices of drinkers and foreign students drifting upwards towards the modern skyscrapers and wharves. London at night, beside the river, is so beautiful it gives me a huge ache inside.

I find it easy to picture my soul released and flying over this fairytale scene, on its last stop to this town, delighting in the hubbub while mourning each passing second of its final flight a few metres above the lapping waves.

I am invisible. As I rise gently through the air the drinkers keep drinking, the tourists keep tourist-ing. They are unaware that a life snuffed-out is singing its swansong above their heads. What a beautiful way to go!

I so hope that this is the way we all get to leave the party. Dramatically, quietly and in a special and personal way. Like holidaymakers at the end of a season, packing bags and heading for home after an exhilarating trip to sunny climes, richer from the experience. How tantalising it is to dream that a surreal final fly-past could be waiting at the end of it all. And how preferable to the gloomy reality. Box. Earth. Fire.

What a shame, though! To have to say goodbye to all this, for all eternity. How great it would be to pop in, from time to time, to check in on this ever-evolving planet. Perhaps we do. In the meantime, I try to appreciate it for what it is - but in so doing I am forced to also accept that one day my carnival will be over. Sooner or later, it will be time to shuffle off. No lingering goodbyes, no postcards, no 'phone calls. Just goodnight Irene. And thanks for all the shoes.

Living in and for the moment is the best that one can hope for. And what a blessing it must be to be able to fully appreciate that.