‘Do you want the trousers, or just the coat?’ asked the man from the navy. He was holding up a heavy-looking set of waterproof clothes. Above us, a gunmetal sky. All around, the Thames, looking like cold and very poorly-made tea.

‘I think I’ll take the trousers,’ I said. ‘It might rain.’

They were the world’s biggest trousers. They had built-in braces that stretched up over your shoulders, and the waistband was higher than your elbows. Trousers of which Simon Cowell could be proud. Trousers on, they fed us into life jackets, and then onto small fast boats moored on the edge of a rocking pontoon.

I’m glad I said yes. Not for the rain, but the cold. Two pairs of trousers, a shirt, a jumper and two coats. Chunky socks and a pair of shoes and I was still cold, and that was before they’d even started the engine.

This must have taken a lot of arranging. On the extras of The World is Not Enough, where they show you how they made the boat chase sequence than opens the film, they say you’re not allowed to go more than 5mph on the Thames. Yet as we pushed off into the middle of the flow we quickly picked up speed, until moments later we were skipping across the wake of the plodding tourist boats cruising under Tower Bridge.

Our flotilla of nine small black boats ate up the water, passing under the bridges, past the London Assembley, and the Eye, and on up to Parliament at 20 knots. It felt fantastically fast, being so low to the water, with nothing around you to stop the spray leaping in, and the wind tearing at your hair and ears. The choppy water threw us up in the air, and we slapped down with a thud every time we passed a bridge or buoy or the side of another boat, and then we did a wide, lazy arc just before reaching MI5, and regrouped to pass back down the river.

Every time we sped under a bridge, people walking by overhead stopped and leant over the side to wave, but most of the time, as we once again picked up speed, we were hanging on too tight to wave back. And besides, by this point my frozen fingers had all stopped working.

Once clear of Parliament, our driver gunned the engine so that we were now going far faster than before. 45 knots, according to the GPS computer, which he said was equivalent to 55mph. We raced along to the Docklands, barely touching the water, and up alongside the immense office towers. Canary Wharf doesn’t slowly grow when you’re going this fast: it rockets up out of nowhere like it’s been launched from a pad on the ground, and in an instant is stretching up way above you, looking far taller than ever before because on the water, of course, you’ve never been so low.

‘Hold on,’ shouted our driver, taking just a moment to check over his shoulder that we were all still there before pulling hard on the wheel and cutting us deep into the water. We were almost on one side as we took a sharp turn, and if boats can be said to skid then that’s precisely what we did, as the whole of London pivoted around us and suddenly, inexplicably, we found ourselves facing back upstream towards the pontoon.

We’d been out on the water an hour. My legs ached. My fingers were ready to fall off, but I’d had a fantastic time.

And yes, it was actually work. We were testing waterproof cameras.

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