It`s not a word I like to use.  Among its many and varied definitions one finds things like `irritatingly pleased with oneself;`  the kind of definition that fits certain people, especially politicians like Emily Thornbury who has always presented a smug face to the world, notably in Chatham before the last General Election.   So I`ve no desire to appear smug, rather I feel a warm satisfaction at the way our relatively small nation has acquitted itself in the Olympic Games in Tokyo.

We have been blessed with a team GB that has come a more than creditable fourth in the medal table behind the megaliths of the USA and China and the host nation Japan and being ahead of the counterfeit ROC, aka Russia, which as a nation had been banned from taking part.   I mentioned a few posts ago that I was warming to the Games after a faltering start but I had a feeling that surely things could not go as well as they had in previous years. 

How wrong was that?   Our medalists, those others who took part in the true spirit of the Olympics, the coaching and backroom staff, the administrators  and everyone else who contributed to that remarkable effort and result all deserve the nation`s thanks and admiration.  No doubt in due time honours will be bestowed on the most deserving as yet more smug politicians will bask in the reflected glory - no doubt Carrie, the de facto eminence grise, will replicate the antics of one of her predecessors when Alastair Campbell gave Alex Ferguson a curiously dubious knighthood.

But if I am verging on being tempted into smugness by our Olympic achievements I surely cannot be compared to that demonstrated by one Guy Verhofstadt, the Member of the European Parliament and arch-critic of Brexit, who suggested last week that the European Union was winning the Olympics and that competitors from the EU should wear the EU flag on their outfits.  He wrote this on Twitter, "The common EU has more gold medals than the US or China.  I would like to see the European Union flag next to the national flag on athletes` clothes.  Our identity is stratified - we are all proud Italians, Latvians, Slovenes....and Europeans.  Our sports people should reflect that."

Despite being wildly deluded, he sounds irritatingly pleased with himself.