TrulyGreatBritain

It’s time for some flag waving in Great Britain today. The results in the Olympic games that finished yesterday were a triumph for the British team. Not for one hundred years has the British team won so many events, or so many medals. It’s a feel good factor writ large, and we have every right to enjoy our national triumphs.

I have a friend who jokingly refers to the London Olympics in 2012 as a disaster waiting to happen. As we were watching the awesome Chinese organizational efforts she would say, “what’s going to happen when this show comes to London?” She means that we will get it all wrong, and I think she couldn’t be more wrong.

Of course we will get it resoundingly right, as we always do. Yes, there will be mistakes and errors, fear and trepidation along the path to our doing so but if we hold our nerve, and we are famous for doing jus that, then we will do magnificently. We have always punched above our weight whenever the going gets tough.

In Britain, as long as I can remember, the prevailing and accepted pattern of behavior is to self denigrate and play down our national achievements to the extent that we end believing we can’t achieve anything, when in fact we can achieve everything.

Any list you of the ten top countries, always has Great Britain in it. For a country of just over 60 million people it is amazing that it still is the fifth richest economy, and won proportionately more Academy Awards, Nobel Prizes and all the glittering prizes than any other.

This country has invented more things per capita than any other. This includes such wonders as the television, Internet, radar, jet propulsion, the tank, penicillin, telephones and the list goes on, seemingly forever as witness to this nation’s undying creativity and genius.

Our armed forces, much maligned by the politically correct left leaning of our own country are respected as no other by the rest of the world. The financial centre of the City of London is second to no other. Creatively our literature, art, music, films, television and radio are thought of as without equal anywhere. British museums, art galleries and our best universities are all rated as some of the best of the world.

The French sometimes say that the British are arrogant; they are wrongly mistaking this country’s natural reticence. When you measure Britain’s achievements you realize that this small country has an immense deal to be proud of.

Britain will always be idiosyncratic and funky, its people are built that way. The Mayor of London, Boris Johnston, symbolizes a wit and cleverness that promises well for the 2012 Olympics in London. Of course, like Britain, Boris will occasionally bumble his way through, but in the end, we will get it gloriously right.