2012™

So, the longed-for arrival of summer runs out of puff just after the starting gun for the Olympics has gone off, and we're back to the piss-poor trudge towards autumn again with little to show of the year besides ever more outrageous banking shitstorms, an alarming bout of jingoism centered on a doddery old woman armoured in pastel (a febrile substitute for another half-hearted bout that failed to gel around the core of the England football team) and the realisation that at the lowest common denominator level of European music, i.e. the Eurovision, we really are utterly alone in striving beyond autoplay house or eardrum-shredding caterwauling. I'm sure something else probably happened too in the last seven months, it's just that the rain has washed my memory slate quite clean.
Still, it's nice of the Americans to perk us up in this glum time by sending an evolutionary throwback to end all evolutionary throwbacks (not that he'd believe in the e-word) to flabbergast and amuse us with bon mots on the organisation of the Olympics, the current US President being a wog and the divine prerogative of the Israelis to lord it over their neighbours. Romney is an idiot of such calibre that even the Tories think he's a twat. Meanwhile, just to reassure us that they didn't send the wrong guy over by mistake, the American media have provided valuable back-up for their meat-brained figurehead - and thus to our sense of superiority - by being virtually the only people on the planet to lambast the opening ceremony for being left-wing and then petulantly censoring any bits of it that they didn't like. This would be the Danny Boyle concoction which was rather marvellous throughout, not least in the jaunty and fun Underworld-DJd Britpop medley, barring a peculiar diversion into trumpeting the national health service as if it was something unique in the world and letting Sir Paul clear out the stadium at the end by making everyone sing 'Hey Jude'.
Oh, there was one other widely publicised critic of the show here too, a Daily Express reader's comment made flesh in the form of a Tory MP. What then happened was that a heap of other Tories actually derided him rather than keeping schtum and united. There's a very strange pattern developing here. Has having the Lib Dems around had a beneficial effect after all in pluralising the right wing? Or, as is more likely, is it just that they don't want anyone pissing on their Rule Britannia parade, even their own kind?