I visited the London Eye in the evening not long after it opened – not by design, we just left it a bit late to book our advance tickets! The first surprise is that the Eye doesn’t actually pause to let people get into the pods – it’s moving so slowly that there’s time for you to get on whilst it rotates.

The second was how completely different my hometown looks at night. There were the obvious viewpoints – the Canary Wharf tower twinkling in the east, the beautifully lit Houses of Parliament and Big Ben below. We were puzzling over an imposing building further downstream on the opposite bank and decided that it must be a previously unknown museum. It turned out to be Charing Cross station. Oops!