I Gain the Olympic Park «

I Gain the Olympic Park

Thursday 2nd August 2012

Yesterday I was there. With Merle Barr, formerly Head of Something Big in a Local Authority. Last week at her dinner party, she explained how an utterly nondescript man tried to lure her into a threesome with his wife. That was in Brighton. She was having none of it.

How are Poor Little Rich Gays bearing up in the Olympic Park? Are they there at all? Lord Arrowby took the beach volleyball, but that seems to be right outside his office, where he throbs at our Nation’s heart, running the country from behind the scenes. Of course, Zaha Hadid, architect of the Aquatic Centre, is fearfully intimate with Virgil Grayson and was once seen by me presiding in blancmange-green Issey Mikaye (great accordion pleated structure projecting from her back: she was wearing one of her own buildings) at a small party in his home. Bruce McBain, my private architect, also knows her and a friend of the Multis is her Personal Assistant.

Merle and I entered the park at the Victoria Gate, on the Hackney side. Nobody there at all – to begin with. Quite a lot of junk lying about – containers and cables and gawky fencing. We reached a huge open space, vast avenues stretching in every direction. But suddenly there were gardens and the peculiar charm of the waterways that were there before. You’ll love the landscaping, Poor Little Rich Gays – acres and acres of meadow planting and the kind of trees that would grow there anyway, in a bit of industrial wasteland. Clever to retain the original rather bleak atmosphere.

We wandered for hours and miles. You can’t see the Aquatic Centre properly, because temporary extra seating has been stuck on the sides, but you’ll be thrilled by the wonderful scoop of the Velodrome and the satisfyingly plastic Basketball Court with its alternating convex and concave surfaces.

By the afternoon the Park was quite full. Great vistas of crowds but always comfortable to move about it. Not a frock or heel or glass of champagne to be seen. It surely wasn’t Glyndebourne or the Ivy. An absolute joining-in, a great swathe of democracy – yes, the dear, precious ordinary members of the public! We might have gone Communist. An English day out, a Bank Holiday crowd at Brighton or Blackpool yet it wasn’t – it was the Olympics, the Indian National Anthem to be heard from within the Hockey Stadium at the start of the match.

Our event was swimming. Never having taken a sporting fixture before in my life, I thought £40 quite enough to pay. We were in Row 52 of the extra seating, somewhere near the moon. Reasonable view of the pool, but you couldn’t see the other side – roof in the way, so excluded. Very little idea of what was going on, but we saw some names. Every time there was a British competitor, however crap, the crowds in our packed-out £40 seats just roared and roared and I was in floods for reasons not known. Feeling revolutionary too, that the ones who really cared were crammed in the attic, while poolside bored officials and volunteers papering out lolled.