Last night … er, correction … Early this morning just before I went to bed, I posted the following to Facebook from my phone, just before I tumbled into bed:
Believe it or not. I ended up watching the whole Olympic opening ceremony on TV. First time in my life. And staying up until 2am! Well done London. And good night... :-o
Some of you who read this probably know by now that I consider myself to be born with a ‘sports filter’. The way this works is that most sports news to me remain a distant mumble in the background, or induce me to automatically switch channels, or turn off the TV/radio. And when reading the paper, I automatically flicker through the sports section without even noticing headlines. It really has to be front page news to have the slightest chance of catching my attention.
As for the opening ceremonies of the Olympiad, I’ve never watched more than summaries or glimpses of that before either.
This year, however, since it was after all London (and I had just been reminded through the blog posts of British bloggers Scriptor Senex and Jenny Woolf) I decided to watch a bit until I got tired and felt ready for bed.
I should add that as we’re one hour ahead of London time, it started at 22:00 (10 pm) here; and my usual bedtime this time of year is around an hour later. The only night of the year I’m in the habit of staying up after midnight is New Year’s Eve (when I usually have guests to help keep me awake and alert, and the noise of fireworks all around the neighbourhood goes on until around 1 am anyway.)
I’m telling you this just so you’ll understand I had not expected or intended to remain glued to the opening of the Olympics for four hours in the middle of the night – which is what happened.
Firstly, I was absolutely fascinated with the first theatrical /historical /entertainment part of the show; so impressive! So after that I still felt wide awake, and decided to also watch a bit of the parade. This made me realize how many nations in the world there are that I know next to nothing about. And as Sweden was No 177 out of the … 208 or whatever, I just popped out into the kitchen for a while somewhere well before that to make myself another cup of tea and a midnight snack; and then returned...
And by the time all those people had passed by, in their fascinating variety of costumes, of course I could not miss the climax of it all - especially since the commentators kept going on about how they still had no clue to exactly how or where within the arena the olympic fire was to be lit… So I just had to stay and see the finale as well. Once again I was mightily impressed. All in all, I found the whole opening ceremony an absolutely spectacular show. And I just loved all the British humour intertwined in it, soft-pedalling the pretentiousness.
Well done, London. Well done, Queen Elizabeth and actors and children and musicians and technical staff and whoever played their part in getting that huge show to run smoothly.
I probably (?) won’t be watching a lot of the actual sports games (well who knows, since these seem to be the days of miracles and wonders!) but I certainly enjoyed the opening.
Saturday morning here in SW Sweden has started with rain and thunder… I think I’d better turn off the computer for a while after posting this. I hope the weather in London is better – I haven’t checked!
