So it is nearly upon us, this festival of sport like no other. I love the Olympics and spending hours watching various obscure sports and I always thought that winning a gold medal must be the greatest sporting achievement there is. Opera Holland Park has its own tiny role in the great performance when the torch stops at our theatre on the 26th July to be serenaded by orchestra and chorus and for the torch's accompanying circus to take a toilet break too no doubt. It will be a fun and exciting day for all.
But. There is always a but isn't there?
I don't think I have heard so many dire warnings, instructions, advertising campaigns et al since the seventies when we had nuclear attack public information films on the beeb. We read that hotel bookings are down which is probably something to do with profiteering by the industry, or perhaps it is because all those from abroad who were considering visiting the London games have read the apocalyptic predictions of what utter chaos London will be? Londoners are being told not to travel by tube, by bus, to walk everywhere, to leave additional time for journeys, to avoid certain areas of the capital, to work from home, not to leave their houses and, if we do, it should only be in order to leave the country in which case we will find hours of delays at airports. Employers are asking staff to draw up emergency plans to keep services going, to prioritise Olympic issues over all else etc.
For two years, Londoners have suffered interruption to the tube network as lines are apparently upgraded to cope with the additional demand; "you need to suffer now so that it will be gloriously perfect when the Games start", we were told. Now it seems as if they have given up on that and in fact, the tube system will collapse under the weight of it all anyway and so we shouldn't use it.
One cannot help think we have just shot ourselves squarely in the foot. Thirteen billion has been spent on the games apparently and we still fear the consequences? Those who live in the capital have been told to put up with it and shut up; your stations will be chaos, your road will be shut for days because a bike race is coming down it, lanes will be closed on motorways and main roads and so it goes on and on. Can one of the major cities of the world not cope just a little better than this?
To have the Olympics here should be exciting and profitable for the country, and of course for some it is and will be. But rather than bring an influx of money and business it seems we have ensured that everybody who hoped the Olympics would be a bonanza have found that it has, in fact, had a hugely deleterious effect on them. The arts have suffered particularly from it because the mindset among audiences has very much been to get the hell out of Dodge, that they won't be able to move around the city, that it will be a nightmare on the streets and thus they are going away or staying at home. And it is highly doubtful that visitors who brave the picture of chaos propagated by the authorities no less, will decide to see a show or a play, an opera or an exhibition. And even if they wanted to, many theatres and west end producers are going dark for the period of the Olympics. We may have killed the goose before it even laid the golden egg.
The really depressing thing is that I know virtually no Londoners who are not absolutely dreading the Olympics and wish it had never, ever been bid for. They bemoan the expense at a time when things are so hard in the country but that isn't a really good argument for not having them now since the decision was made so long ago. But should a city of London's size and infrastructure be so fearful and full of dread for the greatest sporting show on earth? Should we really have created such a suffocatingly negative mood around it? Do all Olympic cities have the same problem?
The British love a drama and we certainly make mountains out of molehills but there is a glimmer of hope that we are seeing the well practised art of over-egging the pudding so that the reality can never be as bad. But then again, by the time we realise that, everybody will either be out of the country or hiding under their duvet at home.