One privacy rule for the royals, another for the plebs

HERE we go again, then. We’ve hardly got over the thrill/shock of Prince Harry’s boy-bits being splashed around the net than we’re invited to join in a mass display of outrage/titillation at the public unveiling of his sister-in-law’s girl-bumps.

To which my first response was indifference. Boredom, even. Half the population of the world has developed mammary glands. Why on earth should we care about such a trivial revelation?

Well, there are reasons. And they’re not just the most immediately obvious ones.

But before I get on to that, I want to consider a much more shocking story.

One that says just as much about the sick nature of our society – some of it the same things – but which hasn’t had a fraction of the attention. Which is itself also something worth pondering.

It happened in Portsmouth last Tuesday when a 26-year-old man – described by his family as “vulnerable” – climbed onto the roof of a high building.

While police tried gently to coax him down safely, a crowd gathered below. Among whom some started yelling at him to jump.

If that isn’t already stomach-churning enough, when he did jump some onlookers filmed his fall –  and posted the footage on the internet.

As police said, their behaviour was “disgusting” and showed “a complete lack of empathy” for a troubled man.

What it also showed was an alarming distancing from reality.

So many people filter so much of their lives through the medium of a screen – TV, computer, games console or phone – that they are apparently becoming detached from physical truth.

Other people’s lives are thereby reduced to entertainment.

“Reality TV” takes over from genuine reality.

Nothing matters until it’s on YouTube. Where you can laugh at it. The more horrible – or the more salacious – the better.

Which is where we come back to the Duchess of Cambridge and the photographer so aptly dubbed by John Major “a peeping Tom”.

Like the unfortunate man in Portsmouth, the young Windsors have become commodified, dehumanised. Made public property even in those moments they’d like to keep private.

In Harry’s case there was no room for sympathy. He blatantly brought the whole thing on himself.

Kate’s case is different. She was in a place where it should have been reasonable to assume privacy.

The photographer, let’s face it, was either a perv or out to make money out of the perviness of others. Probably both.

But why should we more outraged at this instance of a seedy modern phenomenon than at others?

The surreptitious photographing of, say, Uma Thurman, Emma Watson, Charlotte Church or any of the literally thousands of women whose “wardrobe malfunctions” or not-quite-private beach moments have been sold by paparazzi to newspapers, magazines and websites.

You may say – and you might be right – that many, maybe most, of these women have colluded in their own commodification. If so, they were only taking advantage of prevailing conditions.

The duchess, we may assume, was not doing that. Or at least not deliberately.

Though it’s a fine line between courting fame for the wealth and privilege it can bring – and she’s certainly acquired plenty of that – and complaining about its seamier side.

The Harry and Kate incidents have shown the royal family as mere celebrities in the dismal modern vogue. But only up to a point.

The family – who, be it remembered, are who they are purely by accident of birth – still wield an anachronistic degree of power. Kate-gate has revealed that more clearly than anything caught by telephoto lens.

Others may revel in flashing their flesh about – and there are plenty who are famous for nothing else. But I suspect Thurman, Watson and Church were no more thrilled than the former Miss Middleton at being spied on in that tacky way.

They, however, knew they couldn’t do much about it. They didn’t have the clout that royalty still, bizarrely, seems to carry. Clout that seems to carry weight even in the courts of France, Italy and public opinion.

All those upholders of national morals who have squealed with indignation at the invasion of privacy have a point.

It would have been a lot stronger if they’d squealed just as loudly in defence of the rights of Thurman, Watson, Church and all the rest.

In fact, the most sycophantic defender of royal privileges happens to be the same paper whose website has become a world leader through the liberal use of celebrity “glamour” and “daring necklines”.

Marrying into royalty gets you lots of privileges denied to everyone else. There’s no good reason why it should.

And no reason at all why an enhanced right to privacy should be among them.

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DID the undoubtedly patrician, Rugby-educated Andrew Mitchell swear at the police and call them plebs? I don’t know – I wasn’t there.

But imagine that you or I were accused of blaspheming at an officer outside Liquid or Betty’s, say.

We’d deny it, of course. But whose word do you think the magistrates would take – yours or that of two uniformed defenders of public order?

Government policy killed Hillsborough victims

IN 1989 I was sports editor of the Sunderland Echo newspaper and editor of the town’s Saturday evening Football Echo.

On April 15, Sunderland were away to Oldham in the old Second Division. About halfway through the first half I took the unprecedented decision to take the running match report off the front page of Wearside’s equivalent of the Green ’Un.

Events at that afternoon’s abandoned FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest were simply too grim for a mere football match to seem that important. Even for football fans.

Especially for football fans.

With a few hours’ reflection, I might have chosen not to run the photo that dominated page one instead.

Taken by a Press Association photographer and distributed in what was then the usual way by wire service, it told the story of Hillsborough’s horror more vividly than any number of words.

 Few, if any, national papers used it in the days that followed. An internet search now brings it instantly back to view, copied, tellingly, not from any British papers but from foreign ones.

What it shows – the twisted bodies and distorted faces of ordinary people crushed against a metal grille – was soon deemed here too tasteless to show.

But horrifying as it was, it was also deeply, deeply shaming.

And not just to the police, the ambulance service, the Football Association and Sheffield Wednesday FC, all of whose shortcomings have been brought to light by last week’s publication of the long-delayed independent panel report.

Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was also guilty.

Not just for its participation in the ensuing cover-up of official culpability which has now at last been aired. But for helping to create the appalling conditions which caused the tragedy.

Four years earlier I had written an angry article condemning the then new practice of fencing fans in.

I recalled a match at Newcastle in 1974, when as a 16-year-old I had taken part in what was called “a pitch invasion”. That is to say I, and a number of others – mostly youngsters – in the Leazes End of St James’s Park had scrambled onto the field to escape the sheer weight of people surging behind us.

It was an FA Cup quarter-final – also, coincidentally, against Nottingham Forest – and the ground was simply not adequate for an emotionally charged crowd of 54,500 people.

As I wrote in 1985, had we been fenced in, those of us at the front would have been crushed.

Of course, I was not the only one voicing such fears. But then, we were only football fans, not people to be taken seriously.

The fatal fencing was FA policy because it was government policy. And it stemmed from an attitude right at the top.

David Mellor, who was a junior minister for most of Thatcher’s time as PM, gave it away on Radio 5 last week.

Asked about her part in the Hillsborough cover-up, his first words were: “Of course, she didn’t like football fans.”

Her attitude, that of her government, and – fatally, as it turned out at Hillsborough – that of the police, was that football supporters were hooligans, the enemy within. Policing them was a security issue, one of containment, not of safety and welfare.

The attitude was summed up by the Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Hill-Norton, when he called football “a slum game played by louts in front of hooligans”. You could hardly express class prejudice more clearly.

Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, notoriously detested football and its followers. The day after Hillsborough he spoke of “a tanked-up mob” that allegedly caused the disaster.

If that wasn’t his own lie, he was passing on someone else’s.

But it was a lie the government, the police – and, as we know, The Sun – were all predisposed to believe.

As president of European football’s governing body UEFA, Jacques Georges should have known better. But he was quick to pass on the lie, describing the Liverpool fans as “beasts waiting to charge into the arena”.

Unlike others, he soon apologised for his words, but he had already betrayed the attitude.

Football fans were animals. To be herded. And caged.

Things have changed since Hillsborough. The cages went, all-seater grounds came in, the policing of supporters is – mostly – far less antagonistic than it was in those bad old days.

The whole atmosphere of match days is different. The old Bovril, meat pie and urine smell has been replaced by the fine-cuisine aroma of the corporate dining suite.

Grounds are certainly safer. But it has come at a cost. About £30 per ticket in the average Championship ground, considerably more in the Premier League.

A year after Hillsborough, fans in Manchester United’s Stretford End paid £3.50 to watch a game. Allowing for inflation, that’s around £6.50 in today’s terms. You couldn’t see professional football anywhere in Britain for that today.

If football was ever a slum game, it isn’t now. The slum-dwellers have been priced out.

And the teenager I was in 1974 would have been priced out too.

If football in the 1980s was a battleground in the class war, it was the working-class that lost. Not just the battle, but the game.

How Mutt Romney could swing it for the nice guy

WHAT kind of man sets off for a 12-hour drive with the family dog strapped to the car roof in a box?

The same kind of man, evidently, who as a schoolboy led a gang of bullies in forcibly cutting off the long hair of a pleading and weeping fellow student.
The same kind of man who, while his fellow citizens struggle through an economic recession, splashes out $12million on doing up his California beach-house, while claiming $77,000 in tax relief for one of his wife’s dressage horses.
Whose own tax avoidance means he salts away most of his $250m fortune in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands – not exactly what patriotic Americans expect.
Who likes to portray himself as a "job-creator" despite making that fortune as a master of "leveraged buyouts", which translates into real life in the form of closed factories and lost jobs.
The arcane tax schemes, and the planned "reforms" which would make him even more fabulously rich, may not carry huge weight with the average US voter – though they should.
Neither, perhaps, will the opposition to public health-care, the flip-flopping on the big-in-America issue of abortion, or the promise of a budget to make the poor "more self-reliant" – i.e. poorer.
They may not care all that much that a man apparently opposed to all forms of public spending (except military ones) once spent $1.5billion of taxpayers' money on staging the 2002 Winter Olympics – more than all seven previous Olympics in the US combined.
But it's hard to imagine an electorate that likes to think of its President as "a nice guy" forgiving Mitt Romney for that dog story.
Especially when you add the way the Romney children discovered where their pet was. By spotting the trail of diarrhoea down the car window.
It’s that detail that really brings home the full emotional impact of the best-known anecdote about the best-known living Mormon.
This is not a nice guy. Yet he is the man the Republican party wants to put in the White House.
It ought to be an impossible hope. The awful thing – the truly scary thing – is that it might not be.
Barack Obama has not lived up to the almost unfeasibly high hopes his 2008 election campaign built up.
Four years on, America’s national debt, plunged into record deficit by the war-mongering Bush administration, has not been fixed. In fact, it’s $5trillion worse.
Guantanamo Bay, that other chilling emblem of the Bush years, remains open. American fingers still get dirty in foreign pies – as they have under every president since 1941.
It is, in many ways, a sad record of disappointment. And it’s not all the fault of the most obstructive House of Representatives any president has had to battle against. Not quite.
It may be to Obama’s credit that the US – and the world – hasn’t been plunged yet into another Great Depression like that of the 1930s.
But the economy is still dire, which cannot be good news for a president seeking re-election.
In such circumstances, Mitt Romney’s dog would probably win the vote. Whether Romney himself can is an open question, with the candidates apparently running neck-and-neck in the opinion polls.
In the nice-guy stakes, it’s no contest.
American big business will be lining up its petro-dollars behind Romney. The rest of us should all pray the nice guy wins.

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SARAH Storey, David Weir, Ellie Simmonds, Jonnie Peacock – who provided the most memorable moment of the Paralympics for you?

One contender was not a competitor at all, but the crowd who booed chancellor George Osborne.
It was perhaps a little impolite to the athletes whose medals he was there to present. But it was also a genuine and spontaneous expression of group feeling.
Just the kind of thing, in fact, which the great British public has been praised for all through this Olympic summer.
Just as Storey, Weir, Simmonds and the rest deserved our cheers, Osborne has earned the jeers.
Not just generally for his failed and brutal financial policies, but specifically for the government’s on-going assault on the very group of people the Paralympics celebrated.
The privatising of “fit for work” assessments is only the latest attack on the disability benefits many rely on.
And what of that much-trumpeted legacy of the Games?
The government promises £8million this year through Sport England to develop more grass-roots projects to help get disabled people into sport. Big deal.
Meanwhile, Osborne’s cuts have meant more than a third of councils in the UK have cut back their public sports facilities. In total, 375 leisure centres, gyms, swimming pools, football and tennis sites have either been closed completely or had their opening hours slashed.
If that’s not worth a hearty boo, I don’t know what is.

And Oscar for 'worst loser' goes to...

TO Alan Oliveira, Oscar Pistorius is “a great athlete” and “a really great idol”. To Pistorius, Oliveira’s victory in the Paralympic T44 200 metres was “ridiculous” and only happened because the blades he runs on are too long.

Brazilian Oliveira also said Pistorius was “not a bad loser”. Which was kind of him, since a bad loser is exactly what the South African sounded like.

Perhaps it’s because he hasn’t had much practice.

To be fair to Pistorius, after a night to sleep on it, he apologised the next morning. Significantly, though, he didn’t retract what he said. He said sorry only for the timing of his comments, “in another athlete’s moment of triumph”.

So what it boils down to is this: the most famous Paralympian of them all has “respect” for his opponent, but still thinks his own defeat was “ridiculous” and “unfair”.

Oh dear. It doesn’t seem quite in the true Olympian spirit, does it?

Pistorius, in his dummy-spitting poor sportsmanship, has sent a dagger right to the heart of what the Paralympics is supposed to be all about.

We’ve heard a lot these past weeks about level playing-fields and equality of opportunity.
Pistorius’s first comment after Oliveira’s victory was “we are not running in a fair race here”.
A remark which contains several levels of irony.
Irony No.1: Pistorius himself fought over several years to compete against able-bodied athletes. He was finally allowed to run against Usain Bolt and company only after persuading the authorities that his own blades didn’t give him an unfair advantage.
Irony No.2: Every aspect of the Paralympics is governed by technological advances and judgement calls designed to even out levels of disability.
You would struggle to play a decent game of basketball in a hospital wheelchair. And neither Pistorius nor Oliveira would run much of a race without their carbon-fibre blades, which aren’t much like legs, whatever length they are.
Irony No.3 (the big one): Pistorius has never known a truly level playing-field in his life.
His story is indeed remarkable. Having had his lower legs amputated before he was a year old, he went on to play water-polo, cricket and tennis at school, took part in triathlons, wrestling and boxing.
In one school rugby game, he was heading for the try-line when an opponent tackled him hard – and came away clutching one of Pistorius’s prosthetic legs. While the defender presumably reeled in shock, Pistorius hopped to the line and scored.
That is indeed true grit and exemplifies exactly why so many athletes with disabilities – and those without – regard Pistorius as an inspiration.
But there’s another side to all this.
Pistorius was born in a country then still regulated by apartheid. His white parents were wealthy enough to send him to one of South Africa’s poshest schools.
And while he surely lived up to the school motto, Virtute et Labore – translated, loosely, by the school itself as “Through Courage and Labour” – he equally surely had every possible assistance to do so.
If the playing-fields of Pretoria Boys High School had been truly level, young Pistorius would have had to share its advantages with thousands of township boys.
Or perhaps with some of the estimated 12,000 landmine-victim amputees in neighbouring Mozambique.
The greatest challenge facing the organisers of Paralympic sport is to try to make it as fair as they can.
They do it through the category system, which is immediately and obviously riddled with inconsistencies.
For example, T44 means “single below-knee amputation or moderately reduced function in one or both legs”. Yet Pistorius is surely T43 – “double below-knee amputees and other athletes with impairments comparable to a double below-knee amputation”.
I like Pistorius’s own motto: “You’re not disabled by the disabilities you have, you are able by the abilities you have.”
I also like what his parents apparently told him: “A loser isn’t the person that gets involved and comes last, but the one who doesn’t get involved.”
But life dishes out many more disabilities than the purely physical ones. And not everyone gets the opportunities to get involved.

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SO Archbishop Desmond Tutu believes Tony Blair and George W Bush should be arraigned at the International Criminal Court at The Hague for war crimes over the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Well, it’s only what many people, including me, have been saying for the past nine years.
But when it comes from a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and famously one of the nicest people in the world, maybe it’s time for the world to take note.
However, when he says the Iraq war left the world more divided than “any other conflict in history” he calls into question his own grasp of history.
World War II, anyone? We’re still feeling the aftershocks, 67 years after it supposedly ended. Indeed, Iraq itself could plausibly be described as one of them.

 

The prince and the paper

 

Personally, I'm slightly less interested in nude pics of Prince Harry than I would be in, say, knowing the Swahili word for 'crispbread'. The decision by The Sun to publish them, though, is extremely interesting.

Neil Wallis, the former managing editor of the News of the World, said he would have published the snaps a year ago - but not now. Not since the Leveson Inquiry started querying the ethics of the national press.

The next day there is Harry, in all his naughty glory, decorating the pages of the News of the World's former stablemate. Someone at Wapping took a different view from Wallis.

So is this a matter for Leveson? Has The Sun stepped out of line?

Frankly, I find it hard to see much of an ethical dimension here.

Those papers that chose not to publish the Harry pics may have taken a good decision on taste grounds. Or they may have feared – rightly or wrongly, reasonably or unreasonably – upsetting the royal family.

The Sun’s decision to publish was a commercial one. Ethics, or morals, don’t come into it.

Complaints that The Sun broke a Press Complaints Commission instruction by publishing should be balanced by a question whether the PCC should be wasting its time and risking its authority on such trivia.

There is nothing either moral or immoral about nudity in itself, whether the nude in question is a royal or just some bloke down the pub.

If the right royal Jack-the-Lad sees fit to get his kit off at a party - in effect, a public place - that's his own business. But he can hardly claim invasion of privacy if someone snaps him at it.

And, to be fair, I've seen no suggestion that Harry himself is particularly upset.

If he really is the sort of chap he seems to be, his reaction is probably a combination of mild embarrassment and greater amusement. Which would seem about right.

Louise Mensch, who has been a robust member of Leveson's committee, was more worried about attempts to suppress the pictures than by their publication.

"We cannot have a situation where our press is so scared of the Leveson Inquiry that they refuse to print things that are in the public interest," she said.

Which is exactly right.

Except that it's hard to see how publication of these particular photos was in any way "in the public interest".

Here, yet again, is that old confusion between what's in the public interest and what's of interest to the public.

Mensch, incidentally, is much the most interesting of current Conservative MPs. She will be missed when she goes off to spend more time with her husband, Peter.

He, bizarrely, is the manager of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band who have happily long since outgrown their earliest claim to notoriety. Which was getting their kit off.

The Chilis have gone on to make some excellent music and some less excellent, though still more interesting than anything Prince Harry's done yet or seems likely to do.

Still, there are clearly plenty of people interested - even if only in passing - in seeing the dashing prince's formerly private parts.

And The Sun has never let taste get in the way of giving the people what they want. It makes a change for the unclothed celeb to be (a) a genuine celebrity, even if only by accident of birth, and (b) male.

The justification offered by managing editor David Dinsmore was that "Hundreds of millions of people have seen these pictures over the internet and it seems perverse that they shouldn't be shown in the pages of our newspaper."

Well, hardly. If everyone's already seen them, why show them again?

In fact, it's all a bit of a storm in a teacup. But what an interesting teacup, and what an amusing storm.

 

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IPSWICH Community Radio, otherwise known as ICR (105.7fm), is on the lookout for new premises and a new board.

If that sounds as if the station is in crisis, I’m assured by presenter Doug Coombes that there is “no great scandal to report”.

The station’s directors resigned en masse last week, though, being replaced by an interim board. And Nick Greenland, who was formerly paid to be the station co-ordinator and is carrying on in a voluntary capacity, says they are seeking new faces with marketing skills and local business contacts.

ICR first broadcast in 1989 from a caravan in Christchurch Park. Since launching on its current wavelength in August 2007 with a permanent FM licence, it has been one of the most vibrant community radio stations in the country.

My own involvement has been just one appearance on Coombes’s excellent Wednesday morning arts show, Lifelines, and a few on Graham Blackburn’s anarchic but always entertaining Naked Football Show, a kind of on-air Ipswich Town fanzine.

I can recommend the station, though, for its diversity and for the passion of its presenters, who are all volunteers.

Coombes said: “CSV Ipswich have been fantastic landlords, allowing us to live in the Clubhouse rent-free since 2003, but with financial pressures of their own they have decided they need more house-room for their other community projects and we have agreed to move out.

“The general feeling among members is that the challenge of finding a new home and funding could be a very positive new start.”

If you can help, contact Nick Greenland at nick@icrfm.co.uk

The death of books - a virtual nightmare

VISITING other people in their homes, one of the first unspoken questions in my mind is usually: “What books do they have?” Rapidly followed, all too often, by: “Where are the books?”

In this reasonably affluent, reasonably educated society, a home without books is one of the mysteries of the world. To me, anyway.

Evidently, to most people a home without books – or at any rate with what I would consider pathetically few – is normal.

No wonder the publishing industry is in crisis.

More books are published now than ever before. More individual titles, that is. Total sales have been falling for years, though.

In the first quarter of 2012, fiction sales were down 18 per cent on the same period last year, a near-catastrophic rate of decline that cannot be sustained for long.

Of course, JK Rowling has had nothing new out so far this year – there was nothing from her last year either – and by March the EL James, Fifty Shades phenomenon had not yet launched.

But those monster successes merely underline the main point. There may be more titles than ever for book-buyers to choose from, but a small handful account for nearly all the books that are actually bought.

It’s a depressing thought that those few blockbusters are needed to keep their publishers going. Even more depressing that by stocking a few select titles among the groceries, the big supermarkets threaten the existence of specialist bookshops in the same way they have been putting other small shops out of business for decades.

A good bookshop is an Aladdin’s cave of delights – while a big supermarket is my personal prototype of Hell.

In my experience, one of the few better places one can go than into a bookshop is into a book.
Since I first “got” reading, at the relatively late age of seven, there’s hardly been a moment when I haven’t had at least one book on the go. These days it’s usually one fiction, one history and various volumes of poetry.

I spend more time reading than I do watching television, even including the sport which accounts for most of my viewing.

I realise this makes me rather unusual these days. As does my house, which has more books in every room – including the landing, the kitchen and the loo – than most people seem to have altogether.

For an anti-materialist, I’m an inveterate acquirer of books. But not exactly a hoarder – several rucksacks-full have to go to Oxfam each year to make room for the new acquisitions.
A possible solution to the space problem, which I’ve considered lately, is the e-reader.
There seem suddenly to be nearly as many of those as real books in the hands of other train and tube travellers. And I can certainly see the advantage of taking one thinner-than-paperback device on holiday rather than lugging around a suitcase full of printed novels.
E-book sales apparently rose 366 per cent last year. Amazon, the biggest online bookseller by far, reported this month that e-books now outstrip their sales of the printed variety.
Which might be good news for trees, and the fuel cost of shipping heavy books. And might ultimately give me more house-room.
It’s also easier to self-publish an e-book than a real book, which might lead to a further explosion yet in the number of unread titles available.
But there’s a bad-news side too to this rapid switch to digital – and not just for those of us who love the heft, smell and feel of books and consider them the best furnishing for a home.
It’s not just that the Kindle could be the last nail in the coffin of the bookshop, either – though that is an imminent tragedy.
I was discussing with a friend the other day the way we used to carry our Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd albums around at school in the 1970s.
It wasn’t just for show (though of course it was a way of showing how cool you were). By passing our favourites around, we were able to expand each others’ tastes.
The CD lessened the ‘cool’ factor – they are simply not such attractive, showy artefacts as old-style albums. The cover-less, non-portable download then destroyed it.
Of course, modern technology allows downloads – and tracks ‘ripped’ from CDs – to be “shared”. But the digital files themselves are ephemeral, not things to be owned, kept, passed around. They cannot be browsed on the shelves of shops, or friends’ homes.
The visibility and portability of books, or records, is part of their point.
The book on a shelf is part of your own past, to be delved into again, or simply part of the structure of your life.
The e-book, once read, will be gone, probably never to be revisited. Certainly – since you never “own” the file but merely have it “on licence” – not to be lent to friends.
If printed newspapers become a thing of the past, of course I’ll care. If proper journalism can survive, though, the move to an online existence won’t much matter. News is ephemeral anyway – and is easier to retrieve online than from old papers.
I don’t mourn the Encyclopedia Britannica, killed by the more useful internet.
But if all books go the same way, we’ll all be much poorer for their passing.

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I COULD see a lot of sense in First getting the west coast main line rail franchise, whatever Richard Branson thought about Virgin losing it. The more lines are run by the same company, the easier it will be to re-nationalise them all when at last we get a real Labour government.
I don't think it's what the Tories had in mind. But I was surprised at the enthusiastic response I got from all around when I suggested it on Ipswich station the other day as we waited for a late-running train.

Legacy? It's just back to reality

SO what was all that about then? And what hangover can we now expect after waking up from the biggest wipeout of national consciousness in most of our lifetimes?

The end of the Olympics is a bit like walking out of a cinema blinking in the light. Disorientated to find it’s still daytime in the real world, buses still going past and people going about their ordinary business as if all our existences had never been under threat from space aliens at all.
For two weeks words like “omnium”, “ippon”, “repechage” and “countback” have entered all our dreams.
We have all become instant experts in the intricacies of taekwondo and the rules of handball.
People we had heard of barely if at all – people like Jo Rowsell, Max Whitlock, Jade Jones and Liam Phillips – have had us cheering, praying, crying.
People we can just about con ourselves into believing we have always known and loved – Ben Ainslie, Chris Hoy, Jess Ennis, Mo Farah – have become gods in our hearts.
And now it’s over. Time to go back to work. Back to our normal dull routine of soaps and football.
To find, soberingly, that back here in reality climate change is still a threat, Europe is still in crisis, the Tories are still in power and the bankers and industrialists still have the rest of the world over an oil-barrel.
We’ve all been at a party. A really good party. The kind that leaves you buzzing. For a while.
The kind of party that’s bound to leave you feeling a bit flat once the buzz wears off – which it will start to do disarmingly quickly.
The kind of party you wake from wondering how the world has changed. Only to discover, disappointedly, that it hasn’t.
From even before the moment, seven years ago, when London was awarded the Games, one word has been associated – optimistically or cynically – with these Olympics.
That word is “legacy”.
The athletes themselves have caught the bug.
In the moment of their greatest triumphs, many have spoken of encouraging youngsters to take up their various sports – as if that was what it was all about.
Which – let’s be honest – it isn’t.
The glory of a victory on the cycle track or in the pool is in its own moment, not in some mythical future.
If Vicky Pendleton really believes that her greatest achievement will be if some children get on their bikes next week because of her, she is demeaning herself. If they do – and let’s hope they will – it will be a welcome bonus, not her crowning glory.
The great success of the Charlton brothers, Bobby Moore, Nobby Stiles and co was achieved at Wembley Stadium in June 1966. The fact that it started me (and others of my generation) on a lifetime’s love of football, and to play it eagerly, though badly, was merely a by-product.
Vicky, and Jess, and Jade, and Mo will have inspired some kids, just as Nobby and Bobby did, but each success is more than wiped out by the sale of a school playing-field somewhere.
So let’s not kid ourselves that Britain will gain some great legacy from having staged the Olympics.
We’ve gained some pride, yes. From unexpected successes in the sporting arena – and even more unexpected success in organisation. But all that is temporary.
What will last are a collection of memories, many of them more than slightly surreal.
Did I really spend a lunchtime watching women try to kick each other in the head – and even cheering them on from my sofa?
Did I really get excited for a few moments each by dancing horses, girls twirling coloured ribbons, and grown blokes hurtling down a slope on kids’ BMX bikes?
Is it really humanly possible to hold your breath underwater while your legs go through a whole hip-hop routine above the surface, then fling another person out into the air – and all with perfect grace, timing and a Farrah Fawcett smile?
Was Nicola Adams’ grin after becoming the Olympics’ first female boxing gold medallist really even broader than her Yorkshire accent?
And did Ladbrokes really pay out on Brad Wiggins being named Sports Personality of the Year even before all those events took place, and four months before the vote?
Yes, indeed, it was a fabulous party.
Was it worth £9.2billion – approximately £1,400 for every man, woman and child in Britain?
Set against the cost of bailing out Northern Rock (£3bn, £30bn, £55bn or £100bn depending how you calculate it), or the tens of billions wasted on the Trident missile system, it looks like a bargain.

CRACKING Games though they were, and despite records galore in other arenas, surprisingly few were set in the athletics stadium.

Maybe that’s in part testimony to success in cleaning drugs out of the sport.
But the concentration on home successes allowed one world record to slip largely under the radar. Pity, because in a way it was the most historic moment of the whole Olympics.
When the US quartet of Tianna Madison, Allyson Felix, Bianca Knight and Carmelita Jeter ran the women’s 4x100m relay in 40.82 seconds, they smashed a mark that had stood for 27 years.
And wiped away the last reference in the world record books to the name East Germany.