Water sculpture at the Olympic Park

An old friend who's been involved in the Olympics and Paralympics ceremonies, whose intensive rehearsals have meant he hasn't seen much of the park, phoned yesterday to say he'd bought two tickets to the Olympic Park for today. Did I want to go? You bet!


So today I've been awake for 19½ fantastic hours away from the computer. We got second row seats for wheelchair tennis matches including the number 1 men's seed and the British number 9 seed and watched mesmerised as hands leapt from precision-propelling the chair to precision-whacking returns over the net. We stumbled in on a charged women's wheelchair basketball match between GB and Brazil and just happened to get front row seats. We watched blind Canadians and North Koreans play goalball in front of a silent audience where several stands were packed with hundreds of people waving Canadian flags and one stand contained six people tentatively holding a North Korean flag. Such is the world.

We wandered among the wildflower meadows and along the river to this water sculpture where four sets of downward jets release water droplets in the form of apparently random words. Most fell into the river too fast for me to read and of the many pictures I took this is the clearest. I was sorry that 'IMAGE' had disintegrated by the time I clicked the shutter, but I decided that 'MORE' pretty accurately summed up my day.

An exquisite evening emerged from the day's clouds and the basketball stadium glowing in the dark drew us back there for one more match.

All this before I go there next week with the tickets I'd already bought for me, my son and another friend...


Black and white in colour 5