Danny Boyle's Opening Ceremony as Iconoclasm

Danny Boyle explained his Olympics vision to the BBC's Huw Edwards, saying the ceremony 'has to represent us and feel truthful.' As Martin Luther found to his surprise, there is no single 'truth', rather, as many interpretations thereof as there are people.

So what particular 'truth' was Boyle trying to convey? At a first glance, it's English history (the rural idyll was particularly English, the industrial scenes more common to all our nations). At second glance, there's a troubling undercurrent to Boyle's ideas.

It looked like the Lord of the Rings films. That is not a cheap point. The rural idyll looked like the Hobbits' shire, the industrial hell much like the hell of Mordor. Boyle has borrowed from Tolkein's vision of urban industrialisation.

But how are we to respond to it at the Olympics? In so far as this shire, this 'merry olde England' was ever true (which it wasn't - peasant life was bondage, hardship and toil, not simple pleasures and honest living) it is gone now. All of that's hard for me, as an English patriot, to admit. And I'll admit something else to you, that the evocation of a lost England to the sound of Jerusalem made me want to cry. And to the extent that any of it yet remains, only a small fraction of us live that way: we are a city nation now. Enter: The Dark Satanic Mills.

The people literally tore up the land, revealing urban sprawl, heaving and dense conurbations with industrial blights rising all around them, the lights going down, the land turning dark, the brutalised peasants now brutalised workers, toiling at the furnaces. This hurt to watch. This really hurt. Despite anachronisms, this was a truth indeed.

But then, the twist. Toiling under the yoke of capitalism, what exactly did the workers forge? The Olympic rings.

There's a narrative for you. The land destroyed, the people enslaved, all to build the Olympic dream. What a way to start the games, what a comment on our times. It's asking us to ask the question: is this worth the heavy price we pay?

Moses wasn't happy with this

Is this a Golden Calf? An idolatrous reification of something ineffable, the workers' fruit no use to them - nothing to build a home or feed a family - but put to the furnace for someone else's false god, to be looked on in awe and wonder; they, to be forgotten.

Boyle wanted 'truth'. This is more subversive critique, far more profound than the whingeing about the price tag one hears daily rehearsed in the media. It was quiet enough that we could still gape at our Golden Calf, loud enough to trouble us. Some have criticised it for being 'lefty'. It isn't, it's iconoclastic.

East Sussex and 1066

To Hastings

Recently I went to Hastings for a job interview.

It is difficult to get there. The circuitous journey is two and a half hours. The crow flies only sixty miles from London.

I was not sorry for this. From Hayward's Heath, on the London to Brighton Mainline, the train heads east, for Eastbourne. The journey is one of aching beauty. To the south is the escarpment overlooking a valley full of meadows. This is the South Downs. Lewes is the major town on the route. It is in a gap in the Downs - quite literally, where the land has fallen away. In its place is 'an amphitheatre of chalk hills' and exposed chalk fronts.

I remember this land. I grew up here, I spent my boyhood here. I remember the thrill of going into the long tunnel, bored through the chalk. I remember how the trees in the escarpment closed together above your head. I remember the old slam-door trains racing across the flat meadows, across the Ouse and besides the meanders of the Winterbourne stream. But I had forgotten how it all disappears into the east, leaving only barren marsh.

That is where one finds Hastings, just after 'Bo-Peep' junction. My first impressions were poor. I had already nosed the alcoholic on my train. Experience in Cornwall has taught me to mark this sign. Just beyond the station were two more alcoholics trying to keep their dangerous dogs from mauling each other. The noise was terrible. I walked down Havelock road, past boarded up shops and several more grizzled men either with dogs or cider cans. There one finds the 'Town Centre'. It is no such thing. It amounts to a confluence of minor streets with a Costa on one side, a Subway on the other. Cross the road and one is leaving the 'Town Centre'.

After the interview I inspected the sea front. Though nothing on Brighton, it may once have had its charms. It was sad to see the gutted pier hanging off the land. From there, I ventured into the 'Old Town' which was charming. The timber framed and other period buildings gives the place great character. The pace of life was slow and the place had few people. It is a place for one's retirement.

To Battle

I chose a different route to go home, for scenic variety. I am glad, for I had not realised that the village of Battle, the site of the Conquest, had a train station. As the train pulled in, I leapt off and went to see the place.

The sign to the village centre was in French. I had seen French school children in Hastings and I suppose the land of the Conquest must be of interest to them, perhaps in the erroneous belief that it represents a French victory over the English (the Normans were Norse, not French). But I welcome their euros.

Alas, English Heritage charge an entrance fee for the abbey and battlefield and I am broke. But the village is pleasant and the parish church, St Mary the Virgin, is very fine. The windows are of perpendicular style which denotes they post-date the black death, but I learn that the period of construction and later additions was quite prolonged.

When I stepped in, the place was deserted. There is something chilling about being completely alone in a church. Even to a non-believer, the sense of trespassing upon a sacred place weighs heavily on the conscience. I hurried about with my camera in fear of being 'caught' and made a swift exit thereafter. I wanted to stay, to feel the place as well as to see it. I wonder what feeling of guilt it was which chased me out.

To London

I fell asleep on the train back.