Cauldron

So the London Games are now well under way, with Team GB picking up their first couple of medals. There is a long way to go. I've been trying to watch what I can, which is somehow not made any easier by the BBC offering so many simultaneous broadcasts on the red button thing. So I've spent most of today hopping between channels, being strangely drawn to handball (if only to try and work out what the rules are) and beach volleyball; which, being located in the prim and proper setting of Horse Guard's Parade, looked even more surreal than anything Danny Boyle threw at us in the opening ceremony.

Perhaps the highlight of Friday evening's entertainment was the imaginative transformation of 204 copper petals into the mighty Olympic Cauldron, symbolising the coming together of the myriad competing nations into a beacon of hope shining through the darkness. Or something along those lines. If nothing else, it looked pretty spectacular. And hot. And in an unexpected echoing of this event, I found myself in charge of a barbecue on Saturday afternoon. Admittedly, it was not on the same scale as the Olympic Cauldron, and not even particularly hot (hence the sausages took longer than I would have wished), but in its own modest way, it symbolised the coming together of a handful of work colleagues in Ian's back garden. And in a typically British twist of fate, the heavens opened, with peals of thunder and bolts of lightning threatening to sweep away the flimsy gazebo where I was heroically trying to cook. Somehow I pulled through, with nothing worse than a couple of singed eyebrows.