AT LAST..

Being something of a curmudgeonly old cynic, I was quite prepared to be disappointed with the opening ceremony for the London Olympics.   I wasn`t sure I wanted to watch it, suspecting there might be something more rewarding on another tv channel somewhere.

But from the moment it started until the very end, I was captivated.   Not just the scale of the thing but the bravery, the invention, the sheer courage to even attempt some of the sequences.   Now, there`s no point in going into detail here - it`s been done to death elsewhere - but I think there are just a couple of things worth saying.

The first is that I enjoyed it for its Britishness - quirky, self-deprecating, with a mixture of pride, humour and self-assurance - and if there are corners of the world that didn`t get it, were a bit baffled by it all, then too bad.   For it was an occasion for us and, my, didn`t we enjoy it?   Of course there have been some quasi-intellectual grumbles about what was included and what wasnt and some daft Tory MP has even gone so far as to complain that it was too `leftie.`   He misses the point - this was not a political extravaganza, but a celebration of what we were, what we are and what we might become.  OK, we might have been spared the sadness of seeing Muhammad Ali and the ritual inclusion of David Beckham but, that apart, It made me feel that, at last, we might just have stopped apologising to the world, for such was the confidence on show last evening.


The lighting of the cauldron was quite simply a work of genius and should have been the final act in a memorable evening, for it just doesn`t get any better than that.  Pity it wasn`t, as Sir Paul seems these days to be perilously close to no longer doing justice to his own towering talent and perhaps no longer matching occasions such as this. 


But I loved it.  So there!