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ONE News Europe Correspondent Garth Bray at the London 2012 Olympic Park. - Source: ONE News
ONE News Europe Correspondent Garth Bray at the London 2012 Olympic Park. - Source: ONE News
I've just taken a walk in the park. Not just any park.
That park is the London 2012 Olympic Park at Stratford, a vast wasteland seeded with billions of dollars, rolled folded and cajoled through planning meetings and poured and jackhammered into a rather fetching shape.
The turf is bedding in nicely and the world's biggest McDonald's branch doesn't appear to have opened yet, so I'm more than content to find a pristine park bench in the shade of a handsomely leafy lime, among the half a million trees and shrubs newly planted here.
I nibble my Sainsbury's hummus roll. Sainsbury's is a sponsor of the Paralympics, so I sneak a quick look to make sure my lunch isn't snatched by a zealous official in a pink fluro vest, eager to make an early pinch for ambush marketing.
The Paralympics will follow a fortnight after the Stadium behind my bench lights up with the XXXth Olympiad closing ceremony. I've wondered before, whether it would make a more fitting tribute to the pluck of those adaptive athletes and also provide the Games with a useful, lower profile dry run, by staging the Paras first.
Here I find my answer. Humid lawns surround me, ringed with warnings to keep off the brand new grass. Lawns that even officers of the London Met dare not trample, or so one landscaper tells me.
Who would want to share that, or go second The Olympics is foremost about being first. The whole place has that kind of buzz, a hum, the psychic equivalent of that new car smell.
Perhaps that's a poor choice of analogies, given that the new car smell of new cars is a complex cocktail of off-gassing chemicals designed to retard flame, possibly linked to birth defects, and the London Games have already copped flak for Dow Chemical's sponsorship deal.
None of that seems uppermost in the minds of other newcomers. I can spot them. Their accreditation tags flap in a breeze, stiff and newly minted and they are grinning the same dopey grin I catch on my own mug.
Well, the same dopey grin I get the helpful guard to snap me wearing, in front of the Stadium.
This then is the privileged view of the early bird spectator, doubly privileged because I get to see the place as it's almost intended to be seen, from the inside and I get to do that while the whole place is filled with nothing but the thrumming expectations of a nation, and the rehearsals for the ceremony to come, rather than heaving with hundreds of thousands of sweaty visitors.
Let the Games begin, in just a little while, after I've had a chance to luxuriate right here before that tumult.