Feel good factor at Olympics

By The Standard | Aug. 27, 2012

Despite dire, dreary, warnings in the more pessimistic British tabloid Press and on satellite TV that it definitely wasn’t the best time to visit the Disunited Kingdom during London 2012 and the orgy of the Olympics, I went anyway. (But not really for the Games!)

Eating out with Dusty Miller And all that nonsense about massively intolerable, frustrating delays — due to anticipated heavily increased security at British airports and other ports of entry, coupled with threatened industrial action — was just that: crass, arrant, negative bulldust. Entering Britain was a piece of cake to anyone who, reluctantly, has to put up with searing, sweating, blistering hours of bad-natured incompetence, blatant and flagrant corruption at (say) Beit Bridge in the hot season. I don’t think I’ve ever entered Great Britain so seamlessly smoothly: and certainly not in the past five years or so, since I’ve been visiting fairly frequently. (For 23 years, since a long leave in UK marred by the violence and intimidation of the August 1984 Miners’ Strike against Mrs Thatcher’s Tory administration, I never set foot outside a London airport until April 2007, on returning for my son’s marriage at St Andrews, Scotland. Since then I’ve flown in and out at least twice a year!) Possibly because the UK Border Patrol (ex-Immigration) had a brace of stern-faced officers stationed at the air bridge, ready to grab any chancers who’d managed to leave Harare, Lusaka or Addis Ababa without the necessary visas and permission and send them straight back on Ethiopian Airways, things just swung. My daughter, Adele, had asked for a reasonably accurate idea of when I might arrive in the friendly rural medieval market town in Oxfordshire, where she lives — on the cusp of the delightful Cotswold Hills. I had thought very deeply! According to Ethiopian Airways, we were due in at 6:50am, but, being a seasoned traveller, 7:30am was probably nearer the mark, I calculated. Due to negative publicity I allowed three hours — four hour hold-ups were commonplace the week before — to clear immigration and passport formalities. (Say 10:30am) then 30-45 minutes to collect luggage from the carousel and to clear Customs. (Say 11:15?) I felt it was about a 20-minute walk from Heathrow’s Terminal Three to the Central Bus Station, positioned mid-way between there and Terminal One (Say 11:30). Coaches from Heathrow to Oxford’s main Gloucester Green bus station leave every half hour, but sod’s law, I would probably have just missed one. (Say we’d pull out at 12:30.) The journey from LHR to Oxford is very much a moveable feast, subject to the volume of traffic flowing, or otherwise, on the mind-bogglingly busy M40, but normally takes between around 75 minutes and two hours-and-a-quarter hours. (Say we’d arrive at about 14:30.) A Stagecoach bus leaves Oxford for Swindon, via Faringdon, where my family lives,every 30 minutes at 15 minutes to and past the hour and takes 37 minutes. Thus unless everything went pear-shaped, I estimated being there for much-needed afternoon tea with my grand-children by 3:30pm (British Summer Time) having left Ha-ha-ha-rare’s so-called international airport at 13:35pm (local time) the day before.

Truth was we’d have landed at least 30 minutes ahead of schedule had we not been “stacked”, slowly circumnavigating an idyllic patchwork quilt south of England, while pencil-thin members of the Ethiopian Olympic squad oohed and aahed on spotting the White Cliffs of Dover, Beachy Head and the English Channel, thousands of hectares of verdant arable farm land, the Essex marshes and North Sea, beyond, a sparkling meandering River Thames, Tower Bridge, Big Ben, the London Eye, Houses of Parliament… city… suburbs, towns, villages, hamlets, farms: A living mosaic or tapestry as seen from 30 000, 20 000, 10 000, 3 000 cloudless, sunny, feet above sea level. I always ask for a window seat, clear of the wing, when flying, in order to enjoy these vistas. I particularly miss the daylight Air Zim flights to London when you could witness the drama and splendour of the Sahara Desert unfolding for seemingly endless hours. A night arrival at or departure from Dubai is memorable because of the fireworks-like horizon-to-horizon backdrops of electric lights. It’s almost worthy of Las Vegas or Blackpool Illuminations and is an even more jaw-dropping experience if you left a Harare blackened by yet another Zesa outage (or outrage!) The plane’s doors were opened seven minutes after our Expected Time of Arrival. My anticipated three hours to clear immigration and passport control was out by two-hours 57 minutes! It took just three minutes to get a reasonably warm welcome from a British functionary and about the same length of time before the first of many genuinely warm welcomes from myriads of Olympic “volunteers”, later to be dubbed the “Games Makers”. (I was in Faringdon for early lunch!) I am naturally cynical and if you’d said I’d be impressed with any of the 70 000 McDonald’s burger-trained burgundy-and-red track-suited meeters, greeters and helper volunteers before I arrived at Heathrow, I’d have suggested you think again. But you couldn’t help liking them, with their infectious smiles and “Nothing’s Too Much Trouble for Us” attitudes

Although I didn’t go to the UK for the Games, you couldn’t get away from them and the “Feel Good Factor” which hit me at Heathrow was apparent the length-and-breadth of the UK. As always, I was on a working holiday and when my family went to see Women’s Diving (tickets to all events were like hen’s teeth) I had to spend much of a hot sunny London day in the St George’s Tavern in Victoria, where almost every punter was on his or her way to or from some event.

By one of those odd coincidences I seem to experience when on these jaunts, an ex-Zimbo pal and I pulled off a picturesque mountain road in Scotland’s majestic Southern Uplands for a late lunch in the burgh (population 8 200) of peebles, happened to try the Crown Hotel in the historic and attractive main street for our plates of haggis, tatties and neeps. Peebles happens to be the home town of one of Team GB’s Olympic show jumpers Scott Brash. The Crown happens to be Scott’s favourite pub and he happened to be jumping live on the inn’s enormous flat-screened TV.

We had to fight our way out of the place and its Scottish hospitality anyway, and that with the burgh’s favourite son’s horse clattering into several jumps. If he’d had a Clear Round, I reckon we’d be there still!