‘Make hay while the sun shines’ is advice to be taken literally as well as metaphorically, and so, as I walked up from the station after a particularly Olympics-cursed visit to London, I was soothed by the sound and smell of mowing coming from our little fields. Haymaking should have taken place almost two months ago, but the wet made it truly impossible until this week. Should the sudden kindness of the weather and the excitement of the approaching opening ceremony make one get all nice about the Olympics? Well, yes, as far as the hopes of the athletes and the pleasure of the spectators go, it should. It is only when I read that it is ‘easy to carp’ that I get cross. Actually, it is not all that easy. There is considerable moral pressure to talk up the Olympics. One feels like a republican during the Jubilee. Yet ‘Olympism’, unlike monarchy, is a bogus, semi-fascist doctrine, not felt in the hearts of the people.
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Anyway, I shan’t carp. I shan’t carp about the dress instructions issued by a school some of whose pupils will help form the Olympic Guard of Honour. Shoes, they say, must be ‘unbranded or Adidas’. Nor shall I carp about the fact that one group of people not allowed to use the hateful, Soviet, un-British, anti-democratic, Olympic Zil lanes are the soldiers who have been brought in at the last minute to provide security. Many of them face a four-hour daily commute from and to their camp in Hainault. Others are being billeted in Tobacco Dock. ‘It’s like when we arrived in Northern Ireland in 1969, or in Bosnia — pretty primitive,’ says an army friend cheerfully.
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And I certainly shan’t carp about the curious announcements by the Mayor of London which are tannoyed in the London stations.
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