Friday 10 February 2012

I went on a school trip last week. Well, it wasn't exactly a school trip as I am way too old for that - but it felt like one. I managed to secure a place on an official trip to the Olympic Park and it was brilliant. Once I arrived at Pudding Mill Lane station we all walked in a kind of crocodile to the reception centre, and awaited our security check like good boys and girls.

Once the bus set off into the park, though, the silliness was soon lost. The stadium, the velodrome, the copper box handball arena and Anish Kapoor's strangely beautiful sculpture 'the orbit' simply took my breath away. Everywhere you look amazing buildings are soaring up into the sky from this once industrial site. And its not just the buildings but the figures. 1.4 million cubic metres of soil on the site had to be washed before a brick was even laid. The venues themselves accommodate thousands here and thousands there, and even the media centre has space for 20,000 journalists. Once the park is up and running there will be over 200,000 people visiting it every day for the Olympic Games. Hotel rooms in the area are all booked out - with one where every room was booked seven years ago.

To my amateur eye, though - it still looked an awful mess. Everywhere there was an army of flashing lights and yellow diggers, with builders in hard hats teeming over the site like ants. Here and there are patches of grass, but lots more has yet to be laid. oads need to go down, pavements need to be laid, flowers need to be planted, and that's just the obvious things. To an expert, though, it's a different story. A builder or an architect looks at the site and sees straight away how it will look rather than how it is.

One of my favourite paintings ever shows a painter looking at an egg and painting a bird in full flight. He can see the potential. I wonder if that's how God looks at me?