Some Olympic Park thoughts

These are the front gates, as you emerge from the Westfield shopping centre.  

• Most people arriving will come this way. The Stalag 17 / M.A.S.H. feel is not particularly inviting. They've got two weeks to make the experience a bit more cuddly.
  
• The tent city is where you will have any and all symptoms of non-conformism frisked out of you.  Mostly this is to ensure that you haven't brought enough sandwiches to leave the park without raising a second mortgage for a cheeseburger and that you will not be attempting to use a non-Visa credit card in an aggressive manner.
  
• As an Official Sponsor at some appropriately stratospheric level, every advert in Stratford Underground promoting the ultimate joy of celebrating the peaks of sporting endeavour bears a McDonalds logo. You may laugh or cry, it's none of my business to tell you how you should react. Laughing feels somehow stronger though.
  
• When history tells the story of 2012, the number of people who've actually seen the Olympic Park bathed in sunshine may be so short that I'll get a namecheck.
  
• Probably all modern Olympics are like this, they just don't show the shit bits on telly.
  

The bulldozers down below are clearing the ground for the Heineken Beer Tent. This doesn't feel very Olympian, but it does feel pretty British: "If we can't rush the gate, we'll sit in here and get bladdered"

There are no kebab shops in The Westfield Shopping Centre.