What is the gleaming light!

Hallelujah!  Praise Be!  A Gold At Last!  And two medals in one day!  

It is as if a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders and I can now relax because we are not going to be like the Canadians who put on the games and didn’t manage to get a single gold medal for anything.

I was getting to the stage where the medal could have been for Mixed Pair Mongolian Nose Flute Tossing as long as that precious metal was glittering somewhere among the other Welsh medallions we managed to wrest from the hands of the Chinese and Americans.

I shall now turn the force of my misery towards the appalling showing of the yellow stuff accumulated by the French. 

God knows I hold no affection for the present Prime Minister, but by god I do not like to see my representative being sarkily put down by some jumped up non-entity from the land of perpetual rain.  [This last statement being based on painful recent personal experience in the sodden fields of Normandy and the rain lashed city of Paris.]

I have to admit that I did enjoy what Hollande said and his elegantly mischievous and evilly witty comments contrast so entirely with the moronic pronouncements of that sad example of American intellectual mediocrity traipsing his gaff-prone way though friendly (!) countries before he returns home and loses the race for the Presidency.  Now say that Americans have no sense of “abroad”!

Talking of American intellectuals, the man who I would most liked to have interviewed, is dead.  Gore Vidal through his books and essays but especially through his magisterial media pronouncements was the very soul of East Coast Old Family viciousness.  I loved hearing him speak because his range of reference was effortlessly panoramic while his in-depth knowledge of American culture was unparalleled. 

He is a real loss.  But at least we have his writing.  Safe in my library!