Olympic Shame….

My shame that is.  Yes, I was wrong, I admit it we DID win something (well, quite a lot of things actually).  I know I said in my last pre-Olympics post that we had about as much chance of winning something as a baboon being President of the USA (no, scratch that, it already happened), but as it turns out we were bloody marvellous!

So, yesterday London became the official host city of the next Olympics and while it may seem we have a lot to live up to in some senses, we have already lived up to a lot in others.  Our 8 minute segment managed to showcase red buses, our love of a queue, our disregard for littering our streets and public transport with free pointless newspapers, our obsession with the weather, our passion for reality TV and ageing rockers and our hero worship of Beckham (though not thankfully his skelator of a missus) and I for one am PROUD!!

So what if they had 2,000 plus drummers, invented fireworks and built all their stadia on time and to budget – we have humour, good grace and a sense of fairplay.  We will not stop people from participating in an event being held in their city (just try and put fences around everything and not let the party spill onto the street and you’ll have a fight on your hands Boris!), we will get some things a bit wrong, but that’s ‘cos we aren’t robots of a one party state.  China’s Olympics were magnificnet let’s not deny it, but it was just a little TOO polished.  If their althetes failed to win yes they showed disappointment, but you couldn’t help thinking that when the cameras had gone they might just find themselves doing a years hard labour on a bowl of rice a day for failing to deliver a gold medal.  There was an undercurrent of the sinister about it.

I joined the celebrations in Trafalgar Square and the party on the Mall (didn’t have a ticket, seemingly it didn’t matter!) and for all the cheese it was fab!  The exhibits on the Mall showcasing the regeneration of the East End and some of the displays; from a rowing challenge to learning a bit of hip-hop dancing to basketball showed people and above all kids getting involved.

So, come on London let’s keep the party going until 2012 and make this something for us all to be proud of.  And as if we needed any further proof of the fun tone of the games then check out this link below.  Boris, I would never vote for you in a million years, but jeez, this was priceless!!  More of the same please you buffoon of a man!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsFRgIb8mAQ

Monkey Genius!

Now I can’t confess to being a huge fan of Damon Albarn (though I do have an extremely soft spot for Jamie Hewlett who’s Tank Girl comics were a favourite of mine), but I have been intrigued by their project Monkey: Journey to the West which I was lucky enough to see at an afternoon performance at the Royal Opera yesterday…

Aside:  I was in the nose-bleed section for 30 quid with my knees under my chin which was bad enough, but the posh elitest bastards at the Royal Opera also sell tickets where you stand up and can’t see what’s going on…as if the plebs (in which I include myself) should be simply grateful for having been let in!!!

Anyway….I’ve loved the idea of bringing Monkey alive ever since I saw iMagine last year on the BBC where Alan Yentob followed Damon, Jamie and Chinese opera director Chen Shi-Zeng as the project came together.  Obviously this also has a huge amount to do with my childhood love of the TV show which was (along with Water Margin – who remembers that?) one of my favourite things on the box.  You can imagine then how delighted I was to see that the BBC had decided to use Monkey and crew (though no Tripitaka I see?) to introduce the Olympics.

However, having logged onto the BBC blog to read people’s comments I was sorry to see that there were those who thought slow-motion athletes, jingoistic flag waving and Dame Kelly Holmes crying at the finish line type montages should be the way forward and that this whole Monkey project was a waste of license payers money!  I say, ye of little imagination!  Let’s face it, we aren’t going to win any sodding medals as sports is supremely under-funded here in the UK, and the Olympics last time I checked were in China!  This leads me to believe that (a) we know we are British and as such should be rooting for the British Team regardless of any animation featuring a monkey or otherwise and (b) should there be no reference to the host nation in our opening credits?

We know we are British because we’ll be glued to British TV sets in British households where we can hear British commentators telling us how our British athletes are “doing their best” and “being plucky against the odds” and “just missing out on bronze” without the opening credits telling us surely!  We managed not to convey any Britishness in the opening credits for the Euro 2008 Championships (‘cos we weren’t in it!) and the BBC still showed that. 

Honestly, some people have no creative foresight or indeed a sense of reality – WE ARE NOT GOING TO WIN ANYTHING unless it’s in some obscure event like 12 bore rifle shooting while wearing a deerstalker, or skipperless canoe paddling uphill.  We are poorly funded and sadly sports has so little place in British culture anymore that it’s impossible for us to make any impact at the Olympics.

Furthermore, are these people seriously saying that animated opening credits or promotion of the games is going to spoil their enjoyment of the sports being shown?  Are these people seriously saying that they can only enjoy athletics or field events or power ligting or gymnastics if the TV coverage features a couple of Union Jacks?  Really, if that’s the case then they really need to get out more.  Call yourself sports fans!

What this does however, is stimulate an interesting debate as to how the UK will present itself in 2012 and some BBC bloggers have been asking what the promotion and opening credits around the London Olympics should feature.  Breakdancing Policemen was a personal favourite of mine, but I’d welcome your ideas and suggestions for other “features”.  Binge drinking hoodies singing Anarchy in the UK anyone?

For those of you who haven’t seen the BBC animation then here you go – make up your own minds.

Graffiti 2

Following on from my musings on graffiti yesterday I recalled having seen an article about a great blog where the blogger had photographed the lavatorial musings of people keen to share their thoughts by inking toilet walls.  Having spent a large part of my day thinking where the hell I’d seen it I eventually resorted to Google to find it was in a recent issue of Time Out.

I encourage you all to read it – fantastic, amusing, thought provoking and downright weird!!  My own personal favourite involves a lesbian and a ball of wool….

www.toiletdoorpoetry.blogspot.com

Graffiti

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I actually love graffiti – well not all of it, some of it is just plain crap, but I like to try and photograph it where I can so here are some random posts from over the last few years from Barcelona and Granada to Brighton and London.

Supermarket madness

And so to the first “musing” – supermarket shopping.

Until like a week ago I was happy to part with my fiver to get a little man in a van (who sometimes came on time and who sometimes didn’t) to deliver my shopping to my door.  I did this in the firm belief that I was being cost conscious i.e. if I don’t wander round the supermarket myself I am less likely to fill my trolley with pointless crap thereby reducing my bill and paying a fiver for the privelege somehow, in my warped mind seemed like a fair trade-off. 

Anyway, now I am a woman on a cost-cutting mission which means dragging our sorry asses to the supermarket, following a prescribed list and wandering like zombies from Night of the Living Dead around Tesco on a Saturday afternoon with the rest of the plebs.  Having not done this for a while I was amazed, perplexed and rather saddened by the sights that greeted me which kind of got me thinking….

Buggies with Cup Holders– the first sorry sight to greet me was a woman in her 30’s pushing one of those high-tech and horrendously expensive buggies that celebs are often seen jogging with on the beach front in Malibu, with a phone glued to her ear, talking in a very unecessary volumous way and paying no mind to where she was actually pushing said pram.  More annoying than this however, was the fact that said high-tech and horrendously expensive buggy had a friggin’ cup holder for her Starbucks frappa-cappa-half-fat-decaff-iced-latte!  They actually make buggies with bloody cup holders!!!  I mean I thought the point of pushing a buggy was to do just that – push your baby somewhere from A to B without the need to carry it, not use if as a beverage receptacle.  Buggies in my day were made out of the kind of fabric you see people carrying their washing to the laundrette in – all badly woven and a bit stringy – and came in blue and white stripes and red and white stripes and were held together with badly welded metal!  Now that’s a buggy.  All children of the 70s know exactly what I mean.  Buggies were not fashion acessories and did not come with endless additional gadgets.  Honestly, I bet you can get them with upgrade options like cars.  I was so amazed that I stared at her for longer than was really necessary till she turned into the dairy aisle.

Frozen Fruit– now, I am a fan of the frozen fruit in the sense that you can buy big tubs of it and stick it in the freezer and use for cakes and pies and smoothies and it won’t go off (unlike those 4 bananas I had to throw away just yesterday after a week), but really, do we need to go to the lengths of utter laziness by selling pre-sliced frozen lemon wedges for those idiots too bloody lazy to actually cut a lemon for their G&T!?  Honestly, people these were not lemons as in mixed with other fruit for pie purpose type lemons, they were actual lemons cut into the kind of shape and size you would need to look pretty in your drink.  I mean even bars and pubs cut their own bloody lemons!  Maybe the Tesco consumer is unable to use sharp implements I don’t know, but this – along with frozen Yorkshire puddings (and yes family and friends reading this who have been brain-washed by Aunt Bessie you know who you are) – really is the last straw in consumerism.  Stop buying these things immediately before you discover your penchant for buying all things pre-cut / prepared leads to a total loss of motor-neurone skills.  You have been warned!!!