Notes on a helicopter ride, 3 March 2002

London seems so small and so huge. Biggin Hill to the Isle of Dogs in under ten minutes.

Taking off just about the most exciting part. It feels wrong, un-doable, like a slide or a skid - the type of motion that in most other forms of transport comes just before disaster/crash (a car going forwards and sideways on black ice). But the diagonal is a perfectly legitimate direction for a helicopter.

How responsive to the controls, which the pilot seemed to manage in little calibrated jerks.

A very different relationship to space; more childlike, making your way through an infinite climbing frame.

Then what we came up here for: to look down. So many large houses with tennis courts, and swimming pools - giving way to more regular suburban streets, arterial roads and dusty-looking train tracks; green, woods, and irregular-sized football pitches with the players moving around the ball systole and diastole; a few desireable stand-alone houses; the regularity of it. When you are down there, you fit into this perspective- just as you are a subject of laws and a victim of statistics.

Greenwich Naval College - so recogniseable from the air (along with the Houses of Parliament, the Millennium Wheel and the Tower of London, which are all yet to come). Other landmarks are harder to place - the dome of the British Museum, surrounded by a cradling bulge of roof; Centrepoint, far less dominant - because more spindlly - from the air, and Picadilly Circus, hard to pick out.

One of the most exciting moments: looking down on Canary Wharf and the buildings constructed and being constructed around it. This is our measure of tallness, in London.

The Isle of Dogs looks more like a map of itself than almost anywhere else - because of the cartographic appearance of the water cut into the land.

Hard always to believe that there is nothing beneath the bottom of the helicopter but air - as if, more credibly, we were supported by a tall column of strength all the way up from the ground.

Very few comments from the other flight-takers. 'There's so-and-so's flat - look, you can see the water feature.'

Seeing the white wings of seagulls beneath us, they fly pretty high - not to be sneered at, altitudewise.

The various blebs of the Millennium Dome, the fountain near the Royal Festival Hall, the verdigris roofs of concert halls I can't think fast enough to identify.

(The cabbie on the way back says, 'You can get a map from that view,' meaning 3-D. 'Yes,' I say, 'a map would be useful.' Because it is all seen in such a way as to demand rapid identification, one isn't moving fast, but one can see far more of the place than at any other time. The closest experience is the descent of a plane to Heathrow, but that is a grander, more patrician view of boroughs and thoroughfares. The helicopter view is of higgledy-piggledy buildings whose identification is problematized by the repeated shock of seeing them from above - from the top of a possible drop.)

Over the Houses of Parliament, which are somehow reassuring, yet at the same time they make me think of a terrorist attack upon them - a grabber of the controls - a suicide; over HP, the helicopter dips to one side and we are all able to look directly down: something impossible from a plane.

The weather is slightly fuggy, and I feel that the photos I'm taking are unlikely to be impressive. [Note: they were awful.] I take them with the feeling that I might be better looking as intensely as possible. But in a way they allow a focus without which one might be tempted to relax too much, and just say: 'Wow, look, London.'

We dip, too, over the Wheel - another view of this. The little blister-like pods, with their intermittent flashes.

I don't trust myself identifying the Royal Festival Hall. It has more presence from up here. The architect would be proud. It also looks cleaner than much of the rest of the town.

We turn round and head back towards the Isle of Dogs. Because we are directly above it, we get less of an impression of the Thames - when it begins to bend to left and right, we can see its slimy greenness.

The Tower of London is so boxy and enclosed, with inner lawns, that it's very satisfying to look down into. I don't, at the time, think of doll's houses or architects' models; I am aware that these are real buildings seen at a different scale.

Detail (the white wings of birds aside) is rare, and human detail almost non-existent. I see no stories, from such a height. The nearest thing is the two lanes of traffic jam heading South over Lambeth Bridge and the empty lanes North.

I wonder, now, if anyone has looked up from the ground, and seen us, and been jealous. I wonder next whether someone in the wheel, in a similar perspex pod, saw us an recognised our superiority.

Thinking of War and Peace, which I had been reading on the train to Bromley South - and of Tolstoy's panoramic views of the battlefield at Borodino; panoramic but therefore always earthbound.

Smoke only rising from one site, south near the airfield. (Driving past the entrance, on the way into Biggin Hill in the taxi, and going past the Hurricane and the Spitfire mounted on plinths, the voice in my head says, 'Tally-ho'. The cafe is called Scrambles.)

(Before flying I was worried about a number of coincidences: this was a birthday treat for me, and in today's Mail on Sunday there is (I think, I haven't checked) a photo of me as a boy, probably as a birthday treat, sitting at the controls of a helicopter. I don't think any image of me as child or adult shows me more blissful. It was my ambition to fly in a helicopter ever after. I have almost completed Finding Myself, it could be published as is - I am no longer necessary to it. My girlfriend may be checking the one o'clock TV news, to make sure there hasn't been a helicopter crash.)

Back to Biggin Hill - the swimming pools and tennis courts again. A single smoky fire.

We slide in over the runway, me looking out the front. I have for a long time wanted to be in a airplane as it lands, the long lines of the runway to left and right, preferably at night so that the lines are instead lights.