VIP

We spent yesterday’s Mars Uranus conjunction suitably enough. Four unexpected VIP passes to the first Paralympic World Cup (I’ve just had to add ‘paralympic’ to my Word dictionary; get it together, Microsoft.)

VIP passes = free breakfast buffet and unexpected neighbours. You know that half-glazed staring thing you do when you wonder if you know the woman walking past from the school playground or the chemist. Sometimes it clicks when the woman clocks your half-glazed stare and gives a grin that would keep the chaps at Aardman busy for weeks:

Me: Molster, the Prime Minister’s wife is just over there
Molster: Who’s the Prime Minister
[Wups. The girl’s nine. She needs enlightening.]
Me: Well, he sorta would like to think that he is in charge of running the country. He’s not, but he’d like to think so. That’s his wife. She’s a judge, like you’d like to be when you’re fed up with being a pop star.
Molster: Is she the one who came to see us at Brownies… or was that the Mayoress or somethin’
Me: The Mayoress or somethin’, Mol.

VIP seats are not of gold, but standard blue plastic, neither do they have even the humblest cushion for buttock relief to impede the regulation flip-up seat. They are altogether different in every way from the blue plastic flip-up seats to the left and right, however, as each one has a 3 by 2 VIP sticker on the back rest.

So that’s all right.

Taking piks of paralympic track events with a digital camera with a frustratingly delayed shutter action is… interesting. A click as the athletes run or otherwise propel themselves past gives you this:



Or, if you’re lucky, this:



This learnt, I pressed the shutter while Tanni Grey-Thompson was still a smudge in the distance. And got this:



The lovely woman is 11 Paralympic golds fast, after all.

And there was this marvellous chap from South Africa. 18 years old and, well, bionic. I pressed the shutter for this shot…



…shortly before he was conceived.

(Good pole.)

I feel happy in ways that seem to jiggle outside the shape of the word, that Zig has sat in the sunshine with Professor Gangrene and watched people in chairs and with prostheses and guide runners and, most pertinently, cerebral palsy run and jump and throw in a serious competition. With medals, and cheers and television cameras



and just the right attitude.

He now wants to throw the javelin. Time to hide the pencils and the cats.

A day when even the shadows were technicolour: