By Helmut Schierer on 2013-11-22

original artwork by Mike Mahle/mikemahle.com (c),
used with kind permission
So here we are, in the end, reaching our destination after a journey of 14 months, countless blunders on my side and a few prematurely published ‘drafts’. The water surface is coming nearer most rapidly. This is now definitely the moment to make an impact. If not now, when?
This final 007th Minute comes to you with original artwork by designer & illustrator Mike Mahle. Further works from Mike can be found at his own site. Grateful acknowledgements for the kind permission to use this marvellous image.
Oh, opinion. Jim’s. Yours can be aired here. Thank you for flying with CommanderBond.net.
This is the end. Beautiful friend.
Hold your breath and…
No, don’t. Asphyxiation might be your jolly – not judging (I am a bit) – but you’d be tucked up in dead before you finished this; it has girthbloat. If bidding for oblivion, bore yourself to death reading it. Still, I don’t want your sticky end on my hands (fnarr). The guilt I’ll cope with, via the medium of indifference; it’s that I’ve always found grinding my heel into an upturned face far more satisfying. Or, as I age, paying someone else to do it. It’s murder on the knees.
Judi Dench snuff movie Skyfall is where we start. A billion-dollar Bond behemoth, so one little prick on the internet (hi there) isn’t going to burst it. Still, all that tremendous, oddly heartwarming success (albeit having had no stake in the film beyond “going to see it”) does lead me to contemplate blockbusters. Or, more precisely, Blockbusters.
For those blessed with ignorance, Blockbusters was a tiffin-time British quiz programme of the 1980s, broadcast via the harlotry of commercial television, aimed at a beteenaged audience. One could tell that because of the prizes, habitually a “programmable” ZX Spectrum (48K “ram”, no less), a box of coloured pencils or a cultural weekend in tropical Cannock (go for the pencils). Doubtless a modern equivalent would have to dole out fake tan, mobile telephones or Tablets. Can’t help feeling tablets in those days were more fun: when one dropped them, it wasn’t the machine that got itself shattered. Halcyon days. If only I could remember them.
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