But where we part company is when I hear about political schemes that will offset their cost in some undefined ‘long-term’ This is the lepers bell of the approaching government financial disaster.

As ever, we get back to the principle that we jail people who fail to pay their taxes, ergo, any expenditure must be so important that we would send our own mothers off to Holloway, if they wouldn’t pay for it.

So if some kid you don’t know needs a life saving heart operation, okay, mum get our your cheque book. And I like tanks and aircraft as you never know when the French might get all stroppy again. But am I really going to jail my mother because she doesn’t want to pay for some teenager to play badminton because they might one day be good at it?

No. And neither should anyone else be forced to pay for nonsense like this.

Years ago I was what you might call a hanger-on on the political circuit. You have met the type. It was just that I was partnered with someone whose parent was someone and I was morbidly curious about rubber chicken and people who wore mess uniforms that smelt of mothballs.

Apart from enduring dozens of ordinary dinners I got with the best seats at many of the great London Events with the best views and a chauffeur-driven car to get me there and back. My hosts wouldn’t get away with that level of conspicuous consumption-at-public-expense these days. But as for sporting events, I really don’t understand the fuss. I didn’t then and I don’t now. You watch the Marathon; you sit at the finish line on plastic seats and you see sweaty knackered people trundling towards a sponsor-bedecked archway. You follow the boat race, in a police launch and you hope one of the crews might capsize to relieve the boredom.

But one day, I was shocked and surprised.

I was present at one of the most awesome spectacles it is possible to see and not die at the end of it. It was a display by the Kings Troop, The Royal Horse Artillery. Television cannot prepare you for the smell, the fear, the scale and the excitement of “The Drive” as it is called. Very large horses hurtle around and weave what look like suicidal patterns, whilst hooked up to very old and very heavy gun carriages. One of the things you possibly don’t see on a small screen are the marker men/women who somehow have a role in making sure these monstrous entities do not make a mistake of, let’s say, a few feet and a split second, and cause a catastrophic collision.

(Sorry about this bit, but you understand why the British once had an Empire when you see what the Kings Troop can do.)

And now to the point. The point is that TV is useless at conveying scale. It cannot give you a sense of awe of the world and it cannot, even in High Definition, convey the sense of personal triumph, the skill and the grit of those involved in sports and particularly the coordination and mastery of horse, men and limber. At best, all you can do is empathise. When an athlete, full of escaped endorphins, reaches the podium, on TV (at least) their cry of Veni, Vidi, Vici, is a strangled squawk, mediated by diodes and sub-woofers. It’s not real. It never will be and it is no substitute for being there.

Let’s hope we learn some of the lessons before 2012, lest we end up with another millennium white elephant…

Football, Rugby even Show Jumping are crowd pullers but athletics – yawn.

Watching Dragons Den last night, a particular “road crash tv” fave of mine, I noted the young, hopeful “wanna be” racing driver with the pushy Dad begging for sponsorship. To which he was rebuked.

Instead of the “London Olympics” our money should go into sponsoring potential British Sports Stars.

They would under go selection criteria to assess just how good they potentially are. No second rate dreamers as we are not Socialists where everyone is a winner and there is no such thing as failure.

The sposorship would come with the proviso that if they make it big they pay back the sponsorship ten fold. The surplus thus off setting the costs of the failures.

A self funding system to award sporting talent not an expensive white elephant showcase for a sport of little interest.

The publicity given to that guy that put up a Free Tibet banner (in English so you can see who it was aimed at) did not seem to me to be to little.

Both the Seoul & Mexico Olympics were held in countries with human rights records not better than current China’s, but didn’t stir any serious media discussion. Of course they may have been dictatorial regimes but they were our dictatorial regimes.

Reply: I agree there has been coverage on the media of soem of the issues – but I could not contain my rage at the report I described which explicitly said it was a report about the independence of the media in China, was put together by someone not staying for the Olympics, yet white washed China.

I am sure far less could be spent on this kind of thing. I find the ammount of gas they are using on the flame is quite a disgusting symbol of waste.

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