So, now that they are over, what are we to make of the Olympics? Or, more accurately, what are we to make of the country the UK seemed to become during the Olympics? Because something seemed to happen to the UK during the last three weeks and, like a lot of people, I'm wondering whether it might have been a permanent change.
I have to make two confessions: firstly, I wasn't in the UK for a lot of the Olympics, so I followed it on Hong Kong TV which is not, I guarantee you, the best. Plus, time differences meant that a lot of the actual events took place later in the day and into the night in HK. But I saw some and I followed it in the online news. The second confession is that everything I wanted to say has already been said - better and far more eloquently than I could have managed - by Jonathan Freedland and I would strongly recommend that you take five minutes to read his article, which you can find here.
So why bother with this post? Because, without wanting to get swept up in the hype, it does feel like something has changed in the UK. One of the reasons I left was because I felt the country was turning into a place that I really didn't like anymore. It was becoming cold and unfeeling; a nasty and cynical place, a place where cheap fame and easy money were glorified. A place that seemed to know the price of everything and the value of nothing. This will sound weak but it just didn't feel like a very nice place to be anymore.
It was knackered old Britain, no longer the head of an Empire, trying to punch above its weight, lost for a role in the world, clinging to a vision of what used to be. For a long time, it seemed to me that the UK had a strong, clear narrative: it was the world's greatest trading nation; then the world's foremost technological and industrial innovator; then the leading Empire; then the bulwark against fascism; then the land fit for heroes; then... what? We always seemed to be looking back to a golden age and I was tired of it - I wanted to go somewhere with a future.
Of course, I'm perfectly aware that all this is just my perspective, which means it says at least as much about me as it says about the country. But now, I wonder whether things have changed. I wonder whether, as Freedland puts it, 2012 might have given us "a glimpse of another kind of Britain. A place which succeeds brilliantly... a place where money and profit are not the only values... a place that reveres not achievement-free celebrity but astonishing skill, granite determination and good grace..."
Before the Olympics I was, I confess, very cynical about the whole thing. I thought it would be a shambles, a national embarrassment. I thought it would be twee and country pubs and warm beer and thatched roofs and the Royal Family. But it wasn't; it was far from all that. Instead, it was forward looking, incorporating the best of the past but in an irreverent way that was somehow still respectful. Aware of the past but not bound to it.
And, watching the Opening Ceremony - belatedly, three weeks after it was broadcast (thanks to the BBC, another institution we can be proud of) - I felt something that I hadn't felt for a long time: pride in my country. Not in a jingoistic, "my country is better than yours" kind of way but just a recognition that we, as a nation, have got it right in the past, we have achieved great things and (whisper it do) we could achieve great things in the future.
So, as I set off back to HK, maybe I'll hold my head a little higher; perhaps we're no longer the "plucky little Brits" who always seem to lose. And perhaps, if this has been a permanent change, the chances of me coming back one day have improved, just a little bit. And I know you were all hoping for that, right?
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