So farewell then, the most wonderful eight weeks this country has enjoyed since … well, probably since the end of the last ice age.Eight short weeks of scintillating Promenade concerts and brilliant Olympic and Paralympic endeavour that have battered down the walls of my cynicism and left me really quite pleased to live here.
It seems so long ago that we all cheered and stamped and shouted ourselves hoarse at the Olympics.
Wow!
What a summer!
The sun even shone after six months of rain.
And now it's all over …
This country has changed over the past eight, glorious weeks of culture, music and sport. It has actually BECOME a country for the first time since the war.
We have witnessed the ordinary people of this overcrowded little island becoming extraordinary. We have witnessed their common spirit, their compassion, their intelligence, their ability to distinguish Patriotism from Nationalism, their exceedingly vocal support for every athlete - not just the British ones, their heartfelt embrace of - indeed their hysterical shrieking adulation of - the world's greatest Paralympians, seeing not the disability but the ability of each and every person taking part.
This wondrous summer has changed the country and it has changed me. Now all we need to change is the government and its financial institutions (in the middle of the Paralympics the Tories blithely announced benefit cuts for the disabled) and we might just be able to glimpse some hope for the future.
Bereft as I feel now that the whole thing is over, I know that - whatever's to come - we will always have this wonderful summer, these eight short weeks of euphoria and hope, of decency and humanity; of eighty-thousand people roundly booing our innumerate Fascist chancellor when some idiot let him into the stadium.
Remember it at the next election. Let's build on it. Let's take back our country from the greedy and corrupt and bring it back into the light.
We managed it for eight incredible weeks. We can manage it again and again.
