Originally posted @ 10:38 pm, Fri 8th Aug 2008
By drawing on many thousands of years of history of inventions and creations, the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics by the Chinese sets us a bit of a challenge for 2012.
Denied of any kind of claim on inventing paper or the printing press, will we be brave enough to still claim the invention of the telephone and to celebrate the creation of chicken tikka masala?
Will we have morris dancing? Transpires even this was taken from the Moors.
It's not that we'd be wrong to celebrate taking other people's ideas and developing them.
That after all is how the modern olympics came about - and I know this cos I originally come from Shropshire - when a Physician from Much Wenlock who advocated physical fitness developed a new set of games based on the olympics tradition.
There is something wonderful about the notion of the classical olympics being so valued that all wars stopped for the duration of the games.
A bit of a shame then that Russia has reversed the tradition by starting a military conflict on the opening day.
War can't be the answer and whilst there are grievances on both sides and legitimate problems to solve (2/3rds of the population of South Ossetia identify with Russia), it's salutary that the population of South Ossetia is similar to a typical British parliamentary constituency.
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