the cermony of watching

Columnist

Saturday 28 July 2012

SO, how is it in your house?

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Roger Tagholm

One doesn't like to aboast, but we're pretty pleased. We've built our own stadium out of Olympic wall charts and supplements which fan out from the back of the sofa like an industrial-size origami butterfly, row on row, tier upon tier, climbing up until they mingle with the family photos on the wall up in the gods – sorry Gran, we'll cut a hole so that you can see the TV.

It looks impressive, even with the toilet roll stanchions. We've broken a family rule and commandeered the Christmas lights to give it a bit more atmosphere and we've topped off the whole construction by suspending five overlapping pizzas from the ceiling, in honour of the true spirit of the games: faster, higher, cheesier.The time delay footage we've taken of us building it all, complete with numerous speeded-up clips of the dog on the sofa barking at the "workmen" (me), is fabulous. Or fatuous, one of the two. There have been no major hiccups so far, although it's a slight problem if the front door and back door are open at the same time. The gust makes the back of the stand begin to sway alarmingly and causes two carefully-folded flaps to kiss and part, kiss and part, much to the annoyance of my 14 year-old daughter – one flap has Tom Daley on it, the other has Jessica Ennis, and she is not happy about this. Still, we're hoping this blow-through will somehow transfer itself to the track and give our athletes an invisible helping hand.We've used excess material for a Velodrome out in the garden and it's been fun to hear the neighbours saying "Look, they've got theirs up already!" Kind of them to ignore the fact that ours is basically a pond. There was a bit of a velodrama this week when some of the washing fell in it. Mind you, since that included a yellow T-shirt it was fine: our little tribute to the Wigster.So, we're ready. We've got the Olympic lane on the carpet for speedier snacking in between events – the paint will come out if we use the right stuff on it – and we've got the flags in the window. We've asked Mr Lin, our milkman, for extra juice and energy bars. He's from South Korea and –oh God! Can someone check that flag please?

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Families

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