The Opening Ceremony

Jackie came over for chile on Saturday night and we had our usual lovely evening. She is such good company.   I managed to drive myself to the Hall on Sunday, to a wonderful meeting, but am paying for it knee and ankle wise today. Have to totter off for a hospital appointment - the Lung lady - this afternoon.

I must be costing the poor old NHS a fortune, and when the government decides on a patient cull, I fear I will be top of the list.

The Olympics have started. And we watched the Opening Ceremony on Friday.  What to think about it?    I had expected to be bored, and carry on reading my book.  I am re-reading Agatha Christie at the moment - even when I can remember who did it, I can't remember how or why, or see how their alibi can be broken.   But the Ceremony did grab me.  An amazing spectacle.  And brilliantly organised.  It could all have gone horribly, spectacularly wrong.   However, I find myself agreeing with Melanie Phillips in the on-line mail today.  She says: In the attempt to convey just this, Boyle succeeded brilliantly. Beijing this most definitely was not. 
This was the very antithesis of that regimented display of synchronised  subservience. This was patriotism at its most quirky, shot through with surrealist humour and manic energy. 
But it was "dripping with Political Correctness" (Melanie's description), and "sentimentality" (Melanie, again).  Much as I loved the lindyhopping nurses and the child patients dancing in their beds, it was hard not to think of two recent cases in which patients died of thirst while in hospital - one young, one old.  That is a failure of nursing at such a basic level, it suggests something terminally wrong with the whole system.  And I suppose I, a now elderly child of the post war baby boom years, must acknowledge being part of the problem.

And did the Ceremony make us forget that all round us were armed soldiers, rocket launchers on rooftops, unthinkable levels of security?  

I did enjoy the Queen parachuting in, and Mr.Bean. Although I thought there should have been two tiny parachutes for the corgis.

I enjoyed it, but to me it well pictured where we are in the stream of time - very near the end of this current system of things on the earth.  It is the darkest hour before the dawn.

“‘I, Jesus, sent my angel to bear witness to you people of these things for the congregations. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright morning star.’”

When the bright morning star rises up, he will put an end to the time when "man has dominated man to his injury", and restore the earth to Paradise.  Then our dead loved ones will wake up from the sleep of death, into a world more lovely than they knew it could be.