A memory

Day -687. WorldCup2018

Please allow me (and excuse me) to deviate a little bit for one night from a football related theme. But it's not too far off.

My memories always seem to rotate around 2 year cycles: World Cups and Olympics. The present part of the cycle, a week away from Rio, hasn't filled me with much excitement yet. But this is about a memory from 4 years ago, a strong and significant one.

The London Olympics started 4 years ago today. It was also two days after I returned from Malta, to where I had gone (and I'm not sure how to put this in the best words, so please bear with me) to say a final goodbye to the person with whom I had many phone conversations about who was winning and losing at the Olympics and World Cups. My Mum knew all the goings on about Maradona and Beckham, and Mrs' Maradona and Beckham, and Daley Thompson and Sally Gunnell from all her years of TV watching with me and my siblings and, in later years, often by herself or with my Dad. And it felt like she stored every bit of info she heard just so that she could share it with me on the phone. "Did you hear about Steve Redgrave....?" And there were the many times where she would be happy to talk to me again to have me explain how Yugoslavia had split into different teams and what the difference was between the Bosnian Croats and the Bosnian Serbs. We had that conversation many times. "So who are the good people?" "Well....".

So on that night, as I watched the pretty impressive opening ceremony, and was moved probably more than I would have been normally by the choir's rendition of Jerusalem, Flower of Scotland and Danny Boy, I thought about how I would enjoy the next 2 weeks without the phone calls but with never ending conversations in my head. Mo Farah would have been a great topic.