OK, I am a grunge re the 2012 London Olympics. For example, I drove past the Olympic Park last night at a peak period when the official websites were predicting fortissimo traffic chaos. The A12 was almost deserted and the Olympic Lane had nothing but empty buses. London is being described as a Ghost City, because so many sensible Londoners have fled to the shires.
So what of Greenwich Park? Unable to get a ticket, I looked first to the BBC, whose website had crashed. So I turned to Youtube and thank keirshepherd for the above video. It is nice to see folk having a great day out in the Park but (1) it looks as though I could have had a ticket without the Park becoming over-crowded (2) the competitors look amazingly relaxed – are they judged on the jumps and not on their speed? (3) where on earth did the kitchy ideas for the jumps come from? They make the aesthetics of Disneyland in the 1960s look restrained and tasteful. To find anything as bad in everyday London, the only place I can suggest is a pet superstore. Do we conceive the animal world as inferior to the youngest kids? Are horses imagined to enjoy trashy sentiment and sickly colours?
Greenwich Park was designed as a place to keep deer and for the young royals to learn horsemanship. One can imagine the Queen Elizabeth I taking the park at full pelt. The spirit of the Tudors could have been caught with a wild racing gallop – more Cecil B DeMille than Micky Mouse.

Image courtesy Peter J Dean