Olympics: Closing Ceremony by Peatree Bojangles

The night of the closing ceremony was very important, well for my mother anyway – she had decided it was going to be a family night in. “We’ll sit around the TV and eat food and drink this strange tasting pop called Bulmers and it’ll be just LOVELY.” Unfortunately she was unaware of the catastrophic bedlam of pain and suffering she was going to have to endure, but at least she was happy for that one moment. Sometimes we look back on when she smiled so happily at the concept of our family night in and we smile mournfully too. We need these moments to forget the pain.

The Olympics so far has been quite exciting for people who watch TV or care about sports. Unfortunately, I do neither, so I didn’t see much. Luckily, my life revolves around the Internet, so I didn’t really need to watch any of it, as I was fed opinions, images and stories on Twitter and blogs. I know Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis are badass, but I also know that it shouldn’t matter where they are from, they’ll still always be badass. Some people became over-patriotic, leading to racial abuse and prejudice under the term ‘being British’. All of this aside, it was an interesting couple of weeks, which eventually led to our closing ceremony. Everyone was already on a high, so when they sat down to watch this ceremony, they were still buzzing off the excitement of the marathon.

I’m not going to lie; I don’t remember anything about the beginning. There was some people flopping about, I remember a Batman and something else…no, it’s gone. There was One Direction on a bus, singing or something – I wasn’t listening, I was busy undressing each one of those beautiful young boys with my lustful eyes. Then the Olympic athletes all came out and walked around FOREVER. I’m pretty sure they’re still there now, walking around, doing backflips, miming incorrectly to music and screaming inaudibly. It started off like ‘YAAAYYYY!!!11!’ and then ended with ‘OMG STOP WALKING STOP IT STOP IT OMG WHY’. EMELI SANDE. I just remembered there was Emeli Sande. TWICE. She’s a boring fucking thing, isn’t she?

The theme of the night was British music; apparently it was meant to be GREAT British music. Which is baffling because it wasn’t great music, it was awful fucking music. It was Viva music’s version of ‘British music’. I remember seeing Ed Sheeran and wondering why my eyes were still open, and the only thing I could think of was that it was like watching a freak show. Morbid fascination. I almost wanted to see them all fall, and I was waiting to point and laugh. Jessie J was on my TV screen, hideously grinning, she had what seemed like an epileptic fit. I still sat there, watching. More interesting was her choice of outfit: when you’re performing live on a great event such as the Olympics closing ceremony, you don’t wear a fucking skin-coloured leotard. Britney Spears looked sexy in a skin coloured leotard – Jessie J ruins my eyes with protruding camel toe.

The Spice Girls come on, and everyone’s either terribly excited, or overcome with mocking hatred. I watch them, and nothing passes through me. I feel no emotion. I was considerably excited about seeing them because, you know, I had an awful childhood basically, which consisted of Ginger Spice posters, but I felt nothing seeing them. They all looked great, and were okay on stage, but I wasn’t sure it wasn’t a joke about how stupid I was when I was a kid. Nonetheless, there was a highlight of Boris Johnson shaking his booty to ‘Spice up Your Life’ and I suddenly felt patriotic. Or was I physically sick? I can’t tell anymore.

The one great moment happened (other than the Bowie tease – instead we were confronted with Kate Moss drooling in a vogue pose) we were given Eric Idle. He sang ‘The Bright Side Of Life’ with an Indian intervention, which was nothing far from hilarious. An interesting take on it is when people considered it ‘racist’, which I found interesting. If you’re confronted with clashing cultures, instead of going ‘ooh, interesting’, everyone suddenly screams ‘OH GOD RACIST’. It’s like a knee jerk reaction, to make sure they don’t get called a racist themselves. What was racist were the people on Twitter saying ‘dont wana c no pakis lol’ to Eric Idle’s obvious take on the white obliviousness to the Indian culture. If anything it was mocking ignorant white people on Indian’s immigrating and bringing their culture with them, finally he joins in – an understanding.

Enough of that, I don’t really care too much about people being racist or not being racist, as long as they don’t kill me, I’ll be fine. What can kill me is what came up next, and that was Muse. A complete fucking mess of a so-called band. I remember when they released Sunburn and Muscle Museum and I LOVED those songs. I considered myself a ‘fan’ and then I kept listening. It got worse and worse. I wondered why I was ‘fan’ at all. Matt puts a keyboard on loop and scratches a guitar until it makes noise; the others stand there, wishing they hadn’t sold their souls. During this performance, I go and clean the kitchen maniacally, scrubbing the floors, finding myself rubbing a metal scourer into my ears. It ended and I limped back into the living room after spending the last five minutes throwing myself against the wall screaming ‘KATE FUCKING HUDSON’.

There were many other bands and performances. Kate Bush was not there, Russell Brand was weird, Beady Eye were boring, Kaiser Chiefs were awful, Elbow were forgettable, Annie Lennox mimed and so on. It was a shame, because if I were to do the closing ceremony, it would have been Monty Python sketches for 2 and half hours, ending with the live execution of Jessie J.

Anyway, Brazil are doing the next Olympics, which is lovely and they put on a psychedelic performance, which was pretty much what anyone expected from them. I couldn’t take it anymore and went to bed. Mother was pissed off, my father left early to go to sleep since his bedtime is usually 6pm and my brother spent the whole time laughing and saying ‘THIS IS SHIT’ which is a normal reaction from him. Basically, it wasn’t as good as the opening ceremony. It was, in fact, a waste of my time. I could have been wanking to Inception. Bastards.

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