A long walk through Kensington served as a warm up for a catch up with Matt and Kathy and a continuation of our perambulations in the East End, along the Regent's Canal and Park in no particular order, challenging the East End to show us it's worst, but it was all very pleasant really, wandering past such notable attractions as the site where the first flying bomb exploded and what we thought was a reconstruction of the aftermath of the Blitz but which turned out to be the site of the 2012 London Olympics, now well and truly a work in progress.
We've been fortunate enough to have visited the last three Olympic venues at about the same time in their construction programme. Sydney, looked ambitious and sensible at the same time, Beijing was ambitious and incredible even before completion and after a stroll around London's construction site our first impression is that it looks, well, small really, dwarfed by the area of land surrounding it, a trick of the light perhaps.
It probably isn't as these things go, with a planned capacity of 80,000 people which as luck would have it is exactly two seventy-thirds of the number of people who travel on the Underground each day, which makes me want to ponder a bit on whether all the fears of congestion in the City during the time of the Olympics might be just a tad ill founded. It's capacity makes it the third largest arena in the country, but as if to make some sort of a statement about the British fondness for outdoor entertainment, after the games it will be reduced to a very sensible 25,000, about the length of a queue at a typical Fish and Chip Shop, which come to think of it is exactly how we rounded off our evening.
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