The opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics is only ten minutes away and the cynical British Isles are holding their breath hoping that Danny Boyle’s vision of This Sceptered Isle will do us proud. For those involved in the technical rehersals, it’s supposed to be amazing – we’ll see in 5 minutes. Oh dear, they’re playing Elgar’s Nimrod a piece of music that always brings a tear to my eye, as it is now, though for the life of me I don’t know why, I don’t have any association with this piece of classical music.
I had to put the laptop down to watch the opening sequence to ensure I didn’t miss anything; I’d be interested to see what the average person in the street in other countries would think of the ceremony as it did help to understand some of the socio-economic history of the Britain, and were you able to name all of the snippets in the musical montage? What ever you thought of the ceremony, the spectacle of the 5 rings converging and then raining down as if in a furnace was awesome, as in awe inspiring, not as in the modern vernacular for “oh that’s quite good/average”. I just wish they hadn’t played Nimrod at the start.. got me all emotional.
The olympic athletes are now making their way into the arena, and with 200 or so teams it’s going to take a while. There has been much conjecture as to who will carry the flame into the Stadium to the main cauldron (it’s not going to be Voldemort, he was featured during the literary part of the ceremony) and even though this is going to be at midnight, days (not hours) past my bedtime I’m going to see it through to the end… well, it only happens once every four years and as the UK has hosted the Olympics three times (included this one) it’s a spectacle I won’t see again in my lifetime so what’s a few hours… zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Andrew Skelton: 
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