Precious Memories of the London 2012 Olympics

Remember the Olympics? They were four years ago, which may as well have been a lifetime now: a summer when everyone was proud of Britain, proud to be British, of our athletic prowess and our organisational skills, everyone really liked watching people do hurdling, we all got so carried away we thought Bradley Wiggins was good. Were the Olympics good, though? Like actually? Or were they exceptionally awful and bad? Five writers remember the good/bad times:

Anyone who complains about how they were displaced from their East London homes to make way for the Olympics should have spent a morning, as I did, at the Lee Valley Watersports centre to watch the white water canoeing. They played a segment of "That Golden Rule" by Biffy Clyro, a segment of Elbow's "One Day Like This", a bit of MUSE's "Survival" and a couple of other songs again and again on repeat – never the full songs, only segments – as people went in little boats down the choppy, man-made rapids and a commentator tried to explain things over a PA. Man, what a time to be alive. No level of play on words about residents on the sharp end of Olympic gentrification being left "without a paddle" could convince me that those canoeists weren't having a blast.

I wasn't in the country when the London Olympics rolled around. Instead, I was three beers and two packs of biltong deep in a living room in Zimbabwe. I'd travelled there with my then-girlfriend to meet her family. The trip was great: I saw elephants in the wild, waltzed with an angry hippo across the precipice of death and bought a lot of cigarettes for the grand price of $1 a pack. Unfortunately, this was all marred by the distinct and sickening level of racism that most old white Zimbabweans were still entrenched in. As I watched the globe's Olympians trot out into London's Olympic Stadium, some old dude who was brought up in the palaces of colonialism started to rev-up his shit-talking engine. White people on Team GB? Fine. Black people? Not fine. Why? He had no answers. So while many may remember the Olympics as great, whether for sporting reasons or the Spice Girls, all it reminds me of is that we still have a long way to go until the world is perfect. That, or all old people should die.

My boyfriend and I got visa married in the summer of 2012, right before the Olympics. My visa was going to run out and I couldn't find any work to sponsor me – I was having daily nightmares of getting Yarl's Wood-d out of the UK. I turned up outside his flat crying and asked him to marry me. The day after, we were registering.

The actual ceremony happened about two weeks later and we threw a massive warehouse party afterwards, literally ten minutes away from the newly built Olympic Stadium. It was magical: hundreds of people came, and as my various friends toasted us with lines of coke spelling out me and my new husband's initials, we heard an explosion outside the warehouse – it was a fireworks rehearsal for the opening ceremony. It was in that moment that I knew I truly, truly loved the Olympic Games, London and everything about this stupid country that tried so hard to evict me. Go, Team GB!

Memory #1 of the London Olympics: me and my friend Sacha, drunk out of our minds, deciding that well, seeing as it was happening, I suppose, I suppose we should at least go and watch the opening ceremony, which we did in a crowded bar in Piccadilly, and I woke up the next day and had absolutely zero memory of the ceremony proper (but everyone the next day said it was "very stirring" and "made them proud to be British", and when people directly asked me about it afterwards I pretended it was good and that I enjoyed it, but no, I have no idea what happened and I still haven't seen it in full), but I had a lot of memory of an American man behind us cheering on the US team as they made a slow lap around the Olympic Park and us actively booing him. I mean, it's a wonder we didn't start a legitimate international incident. Fuck the Olympics—

Memory #2 of the London Olympics: me working at the shittiest content farm in all the seven kingdoms, this content farm shit-heap in Canary Wharf, and me living in Muswell Hill, and they insisted none of us could work from home despite having to commute across the Jubilee Line, the most Olympic tube line, and so every day I was crammed for two hours on delayed trains with thousands of tourists from all over the world who all wore matching Olympic-branded shellsuits and caps and didn't know how to get on the tube without making all the doors fuck up at every single stop, Jesus fucking Christ you idiots, fuck the tube, fuck Axonn Media, fuck Andy Mackay, fuck the Olympics—

Memory #3 of the London Olympics: every time I tried to go to a pub that summer they were showing fucking rowing, fuck the Olympics—

Memory #4 of the London Olympics: loads of people I know inexplicably being really into obscure athletic events because they entered a ticket lottery as best I can tell 15 years before the games kicked off and spent the meantime getting Really Into Javelin because that was the only event they had access to, saying things like "unorthodox grip from Pyatnytsya, there" or "of course, nobody has thrown a modern javelin over 100 metres before" and not cool stuff like "what happens if it goes through someone's neck, do they die or what? How often does it go through someone's neck? I want to see blood, motherfucker. Do a neck throw", fuck the Olympics—

Memory #5 of the London Olympics is just desperately trying to sleep or settle without the unblinking peering eerie eyes of Wenlock and Mandeville – two angry branded penises designed to make athletics cuddly to kids – without them staring at me, through the darkness, through the night, staring at me without even being there, just a low distant screeching noise, in the distance, somehow I knew that they were out there, Wenlock and Mandeville, killing, out their using their awesome teeth to tear dogs and small humans apart to feast on their bloods, the monsters are hungry, the monsters are hungry, fuck the Olympics—

I loved London around the Olympics. I'd not long left the city for a new life in Brighton, but I was still pretty enamoured with the place (it'd been my home for ten years, so, yeah, obviously). Four years of Southern fucking Rail soon drills enough holes into that relationship, but back then, in the summer of 2012, I enjoyed walking into the backsides of idiots who mixed their Oyster card up with their RAC membership at the Victoria gates. The novelty hadn't worn off.

I went to see two events: boxing and volleyball. Hands up, I'd never go out of my way to see either IRL, but the Olympics wasn't IRL, at all. Everyone was happy. You showed up at The Pit of Hell Itself, ExCeL, over by City Airport, where dreams go to die, and it was all smiles and optimism and little Union Jacks that weren't immediately an alarm bell for a horde of racists descending on your village square. The extra bodies, the bumbling tourists, the marked-up tat on sale to daytrippers who knew better but what the fuck, it's not like we're ever seeing this again in our lifetimes: it was all worth it for this almost indefinable niceness that permeated every little corner of the city, at least the streets that I walked (at the time, I was working for the BBC, and even that mega-corp of middle-management muddling was bearable when everyone was buzzing about the hammer toss). I cheered on pugilists I didn't know before and can't remember now, and did so with gusto; I felt my heart flutter watching a make-or-break point between national teams that I had no patriotic investment in, slapping a ball about over a net that's surely too high, come on now, that's just silly. It was all just so invigorating.

Course, it wasn't without some shittiness. We were staying in Brockley, and a popular boozer in the area served my vegetarian wife a meaty chilli. She was wolfing it down, saying how nice it was, and offered me a taste. Yes, that's cow. So that's my other big takeaway from London 2012: it was both an event that brought a city of strangers together in a way I'd not felt before, and the reason that my wife broke 20 years of not eating the flesh of dead animals.

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