We watched the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth games last night, it looked wonderful, the colours and the costumes were amazing and after all the controversy about the Indian authorities not being ready it was good to see them pulling it off without any apparent hitch (although I did spot one unfortunate dancer falling over in the middle of her set)
The strangest thing I found about the whole thing was trying to explain to my 9 year old son what the "point" of these games were and why this eclectic collection of nations gets together at all. A relic of our imperial past certainly but then it's hard to be precise about the rules of this club, firstly not all ex-colonies joined; notable exceptions include USA, Egypt, Iraq and Palestine, secondly, there are even countries that weren't colonies at all but who would like to join, for example Algeria and apparently even France considered it back in the 50s. In the end we concluded that like so many Human endeavours it's conceptually a good idea but in practice a little hazy in its implementation.
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