WASHED AND READY TO EAT

If you were holding your breath, it's at last possible to release you from your suspense. The £27m opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics will be a recreation of the English countryside. Complete with farmyard animals clucking and oinking their way around the stadium and 10,000 volunteers turning in cameo performances, presumably as milk maids and scythe sharpeners. Danny Boyle, the man responsible, says that he plans to involve NHS nurses in the show and will give them their own special role. Distributing anti-nausea medication to the British public, perhaps. This mind-boggling spectacle of rustic kitsch - polished with some kind of post-industrial, quasi-environmental veneer - demonstrates a real poverty of ambition. Instead of embracing the Olympic Games as a platform for promoting the UK's future, we use them as a way of projecting an imaginary and idealised past. Let's not pretend this is the Britain that anyone recognises today or believes is going to emerge ...

Hell, no one likes a party pooper. To question the way the Olympics are being organised in the UK is still a little bit of a taboo subject. But the closer we move towards the world's greatest sporting event, the more Londoners are beginning to worry about the competence of the people in charge. The decision to station multiple Rapier missile batteries around the capital, for instance, has raised a couple of million eyebrows. The fact that the weapons may not work in bad weather shouldn't worry us unduly, as we all know that it will be sunshine all the way in London during August. The weather was great, after all, during last year's riots. Rather more unfortunate is the recognition that we haven't had this kind of anti-aircraft protection since the Luftwaffe bombardment of Britain at the start of the 1940s. It does get people scratching their heads. I think your average Londoner is beginning to realise that the carry-on surrounding the Games is out of all proportion to...

The news this week that the town of St Asaph has been granted city status in celebration of Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee celebrations left many Brits bemused. Err.. St Where? The consensus seems to be that there had to be a Welsh place on the list. Maybe they were the only ones bidding? In which case, you have to hand it to the burghers of the sleepy hamlet (population 3,600) for having the chutzpah to claim the crown. As a lifelong Londoner, I tend to believe that the capital is the only place worthy of city status in the UK. Alright, maybe Birmingham at a pinch. But I think it's time we had a clearer set of criteria for deciding on these things. Here's my suggested checklist. If you can meet all the requirements, you're in. 1. Do you have a population of five million or more? 2. Are you always within a two-minute walk of Starbucks or Pret? 3. Have you ever had a riot which spiralled out of control? 4. Are your buses red double-deckers? 5. Are you hosting the ...