Games bring more than joy to London

ONE recent morning, in an otherwise empty Olympic park, young games volunteers were practising a dance. They pointed their fingers at an imaginary ticket-holder and sang, tunelessly: “Da-da-da-da-DA — the finest person in the queue!”

A touch of joy is finally arriving in London, along with a star that some astronomers believe to be the so-called “sun”, an astral body usually sighted here once every 76 years. Londoners are starting to sense they will get an Olympic legacy. It won’t be economic stimulus, or a mass post-games take-up of synchronised swimming, but something less tangible: a feeling of togetherness, a new London identity.

Grumbling in the host city is integral to the Olympic build-up even when not held in London. The grumbling phase is now giving way to tempered enthusiasm. In a YouGov survey last week, 51% of Britons expressed interest in the games. Even bankers have been spotted cheering the passing torch.

As a former Londoner “home” for the games, I have been catching up with friends. Typically they start with a moan about disrupted commutes, before telling a rueful story about entering the lottery for tickets and drawing something bizarre — kayaking, say. London grumbling will continue alongside the new enthusiasm. In this oversized, workaholic city of Victorian infrastructure, where simply travelling to the office can drain you of everything you have, people will complain if the Olympics add 45 minutes to their journey home. Living, working and raising children here is a precarious endeavour that barely works in normal times.

Nor are the games an incomparable treat for Londoners. Huge events happen here every day. Next week, an Alfred Hitchcock season starts at the British Film Institute.

Recent hosts such as Beijing, Athens and Sydney were less spoiled. London won’t swoon under the spotlights as did Kharkiv, the Ukrainian town where I watched last month’s European football championship. Archers and pole-vaulters will hardly confer glamour on London. More likely, London will confer it on them.

Friday’s opening ceremony was inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the play, Prospero prefigures London’s closing ceremony on August 12. “Our revels now are ended / ... Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.”

What the games will leave behind is a renewed London identity. Until about the 1950s, the city’s communal identity was mostly white working-class “Cockney”. Then London gradually became cosmopolitan. The shared debates, moans and moments of enthusiasm about the Olympics these past seven years — and now the actual games — will strengthen London’s identity further. Part of that identity is humour, brilliantly expressed by mayor Boris Johnson. London intends to stage the first funny Olympics. Increasingly, Londoners are seeing themselves as Londoners.

In the current We Love This Book magazine, novelist Will Self is asked if his writing is British. “Absolutely not,” he replies. “I don’t think of myself as British. I think of myself as Londonish.” The Olympic Games will make Londoners more Londonish. © 2012 The Financial Times Limited