Notebook: Fun & Games

Molly-rose Jackson from Tutbury carries the Olympic Torch through Cathedral Close, Lichfield.

I’ve had an Olympic few weeks. I refer not just to the Torch, which I did see go through the Cathedral Close on June 30th, but to the almost demented pace that I seem to be keeping up at the moment. Almost as soon as the Torch had left Lichfield, we went to pick up two bicycles – ordered the previous week from the excellent Freedom Cycles of Lichfield – and did a six-mile ride to Chorley and back. And before you ask, the bike purchase was not inspired by sporting achievements but by the hacked-off feeling of not owning a car and being faced with carrying shopping back from Tesco.

But before the bike ride there was a 1940s photo shoot at the Chasewater Railway to attend, which came hot on the heels of Chasewater’s vintage event the week before (“We had enough of you lot last weekend,” said one of the volunteers charmingly, on spotting my Celia Johnson get-up from Decades Vintage). I’m just glad that I did this before the bike ride and not after, when my legs were black and blue.

And this week, the excitement ramped up again with the discovery of a particle that may be the Higgs boson (I work on an educational website, not at CERN, but it was still pretty exciting) and news of a suspected counter-terrorist operation on the M6 Toll near Weeford.

And I haven’t even mentioned our trip to see 1,000 origami boats with battery-operated tea-lights on Minster Pool as part of the Olympic Torch visit (see slideshow below). Those tea lights were not left over from Lichfield’s Titanic memorial event in April, in case you were wondering. We did ask because the act of laying tea lights on Captain Smith’s statue to represent each person who died in the disaster, then chucking them into the icy waters of Minster Pool two months later, would have been pretty disrespectful (though if anyone wants to do an FOI request about the Council spend on tea lights it might prove… illuminating).

And as for the Olympic Torch – apparently it feels like holding a giant cheese grater. You heard it here first.