This Olympic size cover-up in London seems bananas

IT is less than 100 days before the Olympics begin. Normally they happen a long haul flight away and are of little interest to anyone but the athletes’ mothers, because watching fit people with numbers pinned to their chests running around in circles is nearly as bad as watching golf.

But these Olympics are happening in East London, around where I used to live. I lived there not because it was a great place to live, but because it was the only London address I could afford; it was not the East London of Young British Artists featured in Channel 4 documentaries, but an East London more likely to pop up on Crimewatch. If you live somewhere leafy and lovely, close your eyes and imagine endless miles of concrete studded with towerblocks, pylons, kebab shops, flyovers, cheap supermarkets, dole offices, bus stops, minicab offices, dodgy pubs and dodgy geezers.

Amid this were further empty acres of toxic wasteland, abandoned factories and dead-end roads to nowhere. From the twelfth floor balcony of my friend’s towerblock, you can see the stadium, like a giant wiry meringue, emerging from the urban nothingness. Next to it is the giant Anish Kapoor sculpture which my friend says looks like a broken helter-skelter. It does.