Introduction to the Olympic Programme by the Right Honorable Sir Alan Bladder, MP, Minister of Truth and Other Information.

The Olympic Year of 2012 started with a premonition by my wife, Imelda. It was the early hours of New Years Day and we were in bed together. She awoke with a jerk.

“I’ve had a dream”, she said, in tears. “There was an overturned police horse on Whitehall and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was tearing flesh from it and his eyes were swivelling around and glowing green”.

“I’ve seen that”, I comforted her, “it’s just George’s astigmatism”.

“Not the Chancellor, the horse. The horse’s eyes were glowing green and there was a shaft of bright light shining from his bottom…”

“Well, you see, George’s…”

“Not George’s bottom, the horse’s.”

“I’m not sure I can quite grasp the symbolism”, I offered, weakly. “The Chancellor of the Exchequer and the sun shining from a horse’s arse. Is it something to do with the economy?”

“It’s more serious than that”, she said, her voice trailing off.

A fear gripped me. It had been many years since my wife’s last dream. A brief course of pills and a more or less constant diet of vodka martinis had seen them off in the intervening period, with only the occasional act of Parliament drawn up and passed to allay her fears for the future.

My wife’s dream, it turns out, was a portent of one potential future and, as this collection of diary entries, memorandums and official correspondence seeks to present, at one time in the past that future could have been a very different future indeed.

That the future we now face in the present is distinct from the one that was present in the past is a sobering thought. All of our tomorrows will, one day, be the yesterday that might have been if today had turned out to be what would have been yesterday’s tomorrow.

I think it was Winston Churchill who once said something important and I, for one, would whole-heartedly agree with this. Which is why I believe our Olympic Legacy is a fundamentally British one: a Legacy forged in the White Heat of the Blitz Spirit; a Legacy inspired by the ethos of excellence against insuperable odds; a Legacy galvanized lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

That is what I believe and I’ll stand by it until the day I die. My wife had a dream. I urge you to do the same.

Tags: Apocolympics