May The Odds Be Always In Your Favour

Note to self: the School Games aren't like the Hunger Games. For a start, the food this year is astonishingly good: tasty, plentiful and hot. Previous years' catering made me yearn for the surly presentation of cold greasy school dinners, it was that bad.

However, the Games' opening presentation was enough to put anyone off there dinner. After a long day's hard work, does anyone deserve to be confronted with a parade of Tory gargoyles. First up, we had Jonathan Edwards: excellent athlete, thoroughly nice man now he's stopped being a god-botherer. Then Tanni Grey-Thompson, fine paralympic athlete.

Two Northern Ireland fencers

Jonathan Edwards on the big screen. Had to make it monochrome, epileptics wouldn't respond well to the jacket. 

Tanni Grey-Thompson

Sebastian Coe: 'and at Thursday's election, your parents all moved to the left'. 

Then… oh dear. Sebastian Coe (wonder whether his LOCOG fees are being put through a tax-evading service company?), the CEO of Sainsbury's, another thieving tax-evader trying to buy the public's affection, followed by perhaps the only man who could make him look less selfish,  Jeremy Hunt, in what I hope and pray is his last official appearance as a public servant (ho ho ho) before his Leveson appearance next week and resignation in disgrace. He made one jokey aside referring to his recent troubles - tumbleweed.

The only amusing bit was the grovelling commentator who followed Hunt. After toe-curling praise for his support (despite this government's slashing of £162 million from school sport, resulting in less activity and a shrunken School Games), he moved seamlessly on to remind us of the most important bits of the Athletes' Charter - emphasising honesty and fair play. It's almost as if it was aimed at Mr Hunt. But it couldn't be. Oh no.

English hordes call for Jeremy Hunt's public evisceration

I can't post lots of pictures on Flickr until I get home - this internet connection is so slow I could personally visit your houses with printouts before they'd upload, but I'll post a few on Vole each day if I get the chance. As for me… well, I'm kitted out in bright blue 'event management' sports gear. I spent the day haring around doing, well, 'stuff', and learned quite a lot about armoury and weapons control. Tomorrow starts at 5.45 a.m. I shouldn't have any problem getting up: my room is at the end of City Airport's runway and flights start at 5 a.m.… If there are any quiet periods, I'm aiming to mark a dissertation per day. Today's seemed to have been mailed in from 1999: it discussed music downloading as though Napster and Kazaa were still relevant.

In other news: wonderful win for Hollande and France, and good news for the hard left in Greece. Shame that New Dawn (Greek Nazis) did well too though.