The Great Walls

Remember that moment in Peter Jackson’s ‘King Kong’ when you thought ‘oh oh, I think this movie might be a bit shit’?  You know, the bit just after the BBFC certificate vanished and just before the theatre lights came up? 
A much better ‘King Kong’ was the one featuring Kurt Russell.  That version made sure that you didn’t even see the monster until half way through, meaning that the suspense was such that you were by that point chewing the fingernails of the person in the seat next to you, having run out of your own.  That movie had some flaws, sure, in particular the giant ape hand that I suppose looked realistic as a giant leather mit, but also reminded one of those huge oversized boxing glove seats.  The best feature was The Wall.  It was clear that it was ancient, but regularly repaired, and anyone driven to engineer on that scale was shit scared of whatever was on the other side.
The best King Kong, of course, is the original (movie, not actual creature).  It scared the shit out of me when I first saw it, so it must have blown the minds of the original audience.
Walls, especially big ones, are iconic. 
When the Chinese decided that a fence just wasn’t going to cut it, they didn’t fuck about.  One can just imagine the tender process, with the Emperor being presented with ‘The Big Wall’, ‘The Huge, Fuck-Off Wall’ and, of course, ‘The Great Wall’.  The Great Wall was the most reasonable priced, and the rest is non-sweary history.
Hadrian, in a move that is probably retrospectively supported more by English people then even the most fervent ‘Yes’ supporter in the forthcoming Scottish independence referendum (have they decided on the question yet?  If it’s ‘Do you agree that Scotland should remain part of the Union’, some people are going to be busy swapping badges) famously walled off Scotland from Roman occupied Europe, in a move that even today means there are few straight walls north of Berwick-upon-Tweed.
A wall is a statement.  Build one round your estate and you are making a very definite statement.  And that statement is ‘poachers will be shot’.
Domestically, walls around property boundary lines tend to be low, ornamental.  It’s more a suggestion of ‘this is mine and…actually, this is mine, fuck off’.  It’s the sort of statement that used to be made by mounting an enemy’s head on a pole, the sort of provocative move that is now only equalled in suburbia by any instruction starting with the words ‘polite notice’, before going on to say something about ethnic minorities not being welcome.
Come the big blow over Christmas, it was all about fences.  Traditionally, these wooden dividers of garden boundaries are to be found marking the edges of property lines.  After Christmas, quite a number of them were no longer strictly aligned with the property line.  Some weren’t even aligned with their original postcode.
Well maintained fence panels and posts held firm, or went over as one.  Well maintained panels acted like spinnakers when attached to weaker posts and sailed into the distance.  My panels were approaching heritage status and so it was a case of storm 1 – fence 0.
Between Christmas and the New Year a common sight in any DIY store parking lot was a stream of people exiting with one or more new fence panels.  Not owning the sort of working class vehicle capable of transporting panels, and worried that any attempt to attach a panel to a roof rack, given the weather, would result in the car turning into a glider, I had mine delivered.
I did, however, treat myself to an electric screwdriver.  Like any bloke issued with kit that looks a little like a gun, I immediately held it at hip height and made ‘bang bang’ noises.  One wonders if when soldiers are issued with their sidearms, they pretend to put up shelves.
Even though non-sonic, it was the bloody business.  Turned a chore into a joy and the new fence is a joy to behold.  Not sure if it’s giant ape proof, but it’s rather more attractive than a head on a stick.

Superhuman

In the build up to these 2008 Olympics, the tele viewer was left in no doubt whatsoever that China was a very naughty country. Worse than battering monks (God alone knows how they managed that when everyone knows you never fuck with a bald guy (have these people not SEEN Westworld?)), worse even than rolling tanks over shoppers, China has stopped journalists accessing the entire internet!

That’s right, journalists can’t download porn where a girl sits on a cake (have you seen that?) so the most sophisticated criticism of China was of the county being the equivalent of a moustache-twirling villain tying a girl to some railway tracks. That’s not the outrage, the outrage is that the oncoming steam train, yea, burns fossil fuel yea? Yea? Will nobody think of the penguins?

The opening ceremony was, to be fair, a terrifying endorsement of all we had feared. Note to all superpowers: if you want to make yourself look non-threatening and cuddly, don’t have thousands of your citizens doing the same thing simultaneously, flawlessly. The last time westerners saw footage like those drummers all beating together in time was of soldiers goose-stepping in B&W newsreels. However, if the message is: ‘even our percussionists are terrifying’, then job done.

The build-up and the opening ceremony were all about making regimes look good. This did not work. Politicians never look good, not standing next to normal people and never, ever, standing next to fit people. Politicians have suits that don’t quite fit them and have shiny arses to their trousers and shiny elbows to their jackets – that’s because they spend all day sat at their desk with their head in their hands thinking ‘what the is going on with the economy?’ or ‘why the fuck did I pay that hooker with my visa?’.

Then the games started.

The Olympics is sport broadcasting for people who hate sport – no, correction, the Olympics is when sports other than football make it onto television and the world is reminded that sport can be thrilling and athletes can defy belief.

Russia’s territorial ambitions are as nothing compared to BBC sport, which has annexed just about every digital channel it owns to provide saturation coverage the way that Bomber Harris arranged for saturation coverage of many German cities at the end of the War. You’re never more than a click away from watching somebody do something incredibly dangerous at high speed. Have you seen the canoeing? The only way they could make that sport more exciting is to let lose sharks and crocodiles into the stream and have the canoeists beat them to death with their paddles.

The athletes are amazing. All those mornings of getting up in the dark to go training. All those evenings of going to bed early when all you want to do is get off your tits and party. It all pays off, because suddenly you’re having the time of your life. Win a medal? Great! Get knocked out in the first round? Great – you can now spend two weeks getting pissed, eating chips and cheering on your team-mates!

What’s really cheering is how all the team GB athletes are such ambassadors for their sport and their country. And the teens – bloody hell. First of all you have to check your perving credentials at the door when you remember that the girls doing synchronised diving are in their teens – and also because their Dad has probably spent the last few years of his life really getting into shape to beat the hell out of perverts.

Most of the teens you see on telly are hoodie rat-children, carrying knives, talking jive and looking like there are well on their way to evolving into morlocks. These people are anti-chavs. Bright and enthusiastic. No wonder we never see them though – they do their training before it gets light and they are in bed by eight.

Best of all are the BBC commentators. Just as you sit at home, thinking ‘how can she do a somersault and land on that beam?’, the commentator screams ‘that’s AMAZING, how does she do that? Magic leotard?’ Possibly, or steroids if it’s a foreigner.