Thursday 30th August 2012

Yes, greatly moved. Although initially afflicted: ‘Heavens, they haven’t even got to B!’ But when Handel was sung and Paralympians were flying on wires through the air.. so calm, dignified, thoughtful and affirming. I loved the Non-Para Opening, but this was in another league, radiant with quality and intelligence. It was all wonderfully suggestive, multi-dimensional, open-ended, inconclusive. No trite yuck about disabled people being just the same as everyone else and not really disabled at all. The huge eye in the early part of the ceremony was an ambiguous symbol. What exactly might it see?  There was even, when Ian Dury’s Spasticus Autisticus was sung and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights paraded, an angry, rebellious element which somehow did not jar with the otherwise calm celebration of  objective inquiry, the inner life of the mind, the limitless possibilities of human thought,  which, as science and invention, continue to produce more and more astonishing possibilities for disabled people, while, as a cast of mind or way of living, quite free us from any idea of disability at all, in others and in ourselves.

But even this is to make it too straightforward.  The flame was brought into the stadium by an ex-marine on a high wire from 350 feet above.  He had no legs and the fabric of his shorts flapped without shame where they had been or might have been. It was a moment of terror and beauty.  We must look and not flinch and not lie, yet look beyond. This was the ceremony’s stern and difficult requirement.