When I posted the most recent Blog praising Team GB yesterday, I had imagined a closing ceremony a little more connected to the actual games. There was no opportunity for the welcome roar for Team GB I anticipated and the unifying parade of informal mingling was probably the better plan. Team GB will have to share that roar which spurred Mo Farah to his victory on Saturday. It was perhaps a sporting achievement which will never be surpassed and it is right that it should be the supreme moment of audience engagement.
As for the musical extravaganza featuring so many celebrities of yesterday (the spice girls!), some will love the closing ceremony, some will not. As a spectacle it was superlative and once again showed a confident nation at last able to declare itself proud to have been as well as proud to be, willing to laugh at itself, yet meaning business and able to deliver on a scale which has caught the the rest of the world short. Most remarkable last night was the tableau of the Union Jack. The rehabilitation of our national flag, for long hijacked by extremist groups and the far right, is one of the most heartening legacies of what can truly be said to be an Olympic triumph.
The United Kingdom may be the title of our country, but its name, Great Britain, is back. All the world knows why.