After a party the night before, those who had stayed the night were staggering around among the debris in a state of shock and disbelief trying to piece together what had happened. The headline news was that someone had driven his Land-Rover through a fence and abandoned it teetering on the edge of a cliff. The herd of bullocks being contained by the fence had all hoofed it and the farmer was displeased, apparently. The other news was that the beautiful young mother of the two beautiful little girls was still semi-paralysed and throwing up in the garden, and the Low life correspondent of The Spectator had been sick in a permeable wickerwork wastepaper basket. Then someone remembered that the Olympic flame was passing through a nearby village in half an hour’s time, and some of the walking wounded got together and organised a car and a driver and went down to see it.
The village high street, a picture postcard of thatched cob cottages and ancient walls, was decked out with Union Jack flags and Union Jack bunting. A sparse line of bleary villagers were waiting, eyes left, for the flame to arrive. I wished I hadn’t lost my glasses at the party and could see better.
The arrival in the village of the torch cavalcade was heralded by a policeman on a motorcycle flashing blue lights. As he passed us, he pulled out of his breast pocket a duck caller with a Union Jack design, raised it to his lips and blew a clarion quack. One of our hungover contingent had brought with her a Union Jack on a stick which hadn’t seen the light of day since the Silver Jubilee, and before that the Coronation. Its creased and etiolated condition was somehow highly appropriate for our banner, and she flopped it lugubriously after him. He was followed by a phalanx of other policemen riding motorbikes, and then came a huge disco bus, music blaring, the youths aboard it dancing with unseemly, almost obscene vigour for that early on a Sunday morning.
One of the chaps frantically throwing shapes on one of the disco buses, whose enthusiasm seemed to border on the insane, yelled out to me as he went by: ‘How are you?’
‘Terrible,’ we shouted back. Perhaps he was used by now to seeing crapulent, ashen-faced villagers lining his route, because he not only divined instantly, even at 15 miles an hour, what we had meant, but he also managed to convey with a rueful gesture that he himself was in a similar state, and that we oughtn’t be fooled by his cheerful manner.
Then came another massive bus promoting the idea of gaiety by means of loud and distorted pop music and young people waving — I think it was the media centre — and after that a small comfortable coach full of torch carriers sitting quietly and solemnly in orderly rows. Then came an ambulance and some sponsors’ cars, then a police truck, then more police outriders, and then nothing for a bit. What was going to appear next, we wondered? A herd of bullocks was one suggestion. Henry VIII another.
As we waited, I thought about the memorial service that had preceded the party. I remembered how the red-faced organist had lifted his head and bellowed out the words of ‘How Great Thou Art’ as though he’d meant them with every fibre of his being. And I remembered the single swallow that swooped about our heads throughout the service, and how nervous I had been as I climbed the stairs to the pulpit to say a few words about Pete. And I remembered how everybody had laughed at the end when the elderly vicar dismissed us by saying that he believed there was to be a ‘rave’ immediately after the service, to which everyone was cordially invited. I think most of us had laughed because the word was more apposite to what we intended than he perhaps knew.
After the noisy disco buses and the dazzling police bikes, the sight of a lonely jogger in the road, bearing aloft a golden torch with the Olympic flame flaring out of the top, came as a surprise. She looked knackered, poor woman, and indeed was knackered because she stopped running and, panting heavily, walked instead. ‘Hooray!’ we said and flapped our antique flag at her.
And then she was gone and there was a police car and more police bikes and then a slow-moving queue of normal traffic. Approximately the tenth car of this queue stopped alongside us, and the driver leaned out of the window and asked us with apparent sincerity if we knew what was holding the traffic up. ‘A mobile 70-day taxpayer-funded party and shagfest,’ we said, waggling our faded flag in his face.
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