BADGES 02

(This opening bit is probably best imagined in a ‘Robert Webb’ voice, the sort he uses when he’s playing his particularly sarcastic and angry character…)

“I can’t wait for the Olympics…”

“…to be OVER!!!!”

I saw it as a couplet of Tweets mere moments apart but I bottled it and didn’t bother, deciding instead that there were other, less public, places I could try them out in…

“Ah yes…” I hear you mutter, “He’s just being a killjoy again…”

Although it’s not really that at all. I’m quite happy for this year’s exhibition of running, jumping and standing still to happen as long I don’t have to have anything to do with it, but I am getting heartily sick of all the advertising that’s somehow managing to tack itself on to the event, and, when I say that I’m looking forward to it all being over, it’s mostly because of that and, of course, the assumption that everyone in the country really, really wanted tickets, because we didn’t, okay…?

You can relax now… Rant over…

Whilst I am struggling to have any enthusiasm whatsoever for this year’s Olympic Games in London, I do have in my vast collection of tat, one piece of memorabilia from the 1980 games which were held in Moscow, a small black and gold enamel lapel badge.

I sometimes think that my school must have been a very odd one because, alongside the normal curriculum in the late 1970s, they also offered tuition in Russian. Now, I didn’t partake in that, of course. I was struggling enough with French and German, but one of the lads who was (in those days) friend of mine did take that course, because he had some sort of Bulgarian connection in the family, I seem to recall, and that is why, in the year leading up towards the Moscow Olympics, he went off on a school trip to Russia.

I know…! A school trip to Russia in the year following the election of the first Thatcher government…! I’m surprised the whole population of that establishment wasn’t rounded up and sent to some sort of Government “re-education centre” or Gulag. Russians, at least the ones that we saw in films and on television at least, were simply not to be trusted in those days at the tail end of the Cold War, and you’ll remember all of the “tit-for-tat” boycotting that went on, I imagine…

Anyway, my friend returned unharmed and presumably unindoctrinated, unless he is actually a “sleeper agent” and I’m currently blowing his cover. I remember that he was bubbling over with tales of trains having to have their axles swapped over in the dead of night and other exciting things like that, most of which I’ve long forgotten. It’s quite peculiar, really, that I do remember that one about the trains, now that I come to think of it. Maybe it was some kind of secret code word for some operation or other that washed my brain…

He had also managed to acquire a vast collection of Moscow Olympic Games badges that became pretty hot currency for a week or two, which is presumably how I came to acquire one. This could have been the point in my life where I lost my treasured 1966 (or was it 1968?) “Beano” Annual. (Whichever it was, it was the one with the great story about a family who lived in a huge hovercraft… Brilliant…!)

Anyway, getting back to that little badge, I’m fairly sure that there’s a distinct possibility that it’s the only one still floating around from that particular collection.

I wonder if it’s still sending regular signals to Moscow Control, and whether the poor bugger assigned to eavesdrop on my sad little life has gone mad with boredom yet…?