London 2012 - Blip 1 - London Prepares

As 2012 draws to a close, I decided to upload some of may favourite images of my highlight of the year, the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

It's been quite hard choosing the blips as, while I have a fair few photos to choose from, I'm limited to one a day of course - which makes the selection very hard indeed! And while there are a fair few photos, I'd also made the conscious decision to not make the mistake of spending too much time looking through a lens - sometimes, the film stock in our heads makes the best storage medium!

Anyway, back to this image, my first blip of the series, from way back in May. There's nothing very special about the image, though it's interesting to see the stadium before the coloured "shrouding" was installed.

But, for me, this is where it all started, on a cold, wet, Saturday May evening. Having failed completely in the ticket auctions, I'd decided to trust the BBC to "take me there". But then, a colleague personally treated a few of us to one of the London Prepares events - in fact, this one, hosting the British Universities Athletics Championships, was the Olympic Stadium's first public use. Sitting inside a 50% full stadium, even back then there was a special atmosphere and I realised that, somehow or other, I had to get just one ticket to see, well, anything really, to experience something that was unlikely to ever return to the UK during my lifetime.

So, from that May Saturday, there followed more than a few visits to the ticket website - I even, on one occasion, managed to buy tickets using my phone on the train home from work one evening - technology can be useful!