The Campbell Academy Blog (110)

Flags

One of the philosophies that I have adopted, perhaps over the last 20 years, is the necessity or the ability or the impulse to put flags in the history of my life.

These are just flags in the sand as I walk down the beach of life to look back to where I've come from.

The best parts of my life are when the flags are reasonably spaced but not too far apart, too many flags in the sand, and they all meld into one; too few flags, and there are big swathes of sand which are unmemorable and unremarkable.

On Saturday, the 22nd of July, I travelled to East London (by car) to speak for 25 to 35 minutes to a group of people that I'll talk about in another blog.

It necessitated me driving around the M25, down the M11, and then past the Olympic Park.

I'd guessed I might see the park because I'd seen the Google Maps route, but I didn't realise that travelling down that dual carriageway, the first thing I would see on the hill diagonally to my left was the Olympic Velodrome.

It's been 11 years since I was at the Olympic Velodrome for the only time.

It was in that two days that I took my family to the Paralympics and experienced everything about the Olympics that we could ever have wanted and more.

It is one of the biggest flags as I look back down the beach.

What's funny though is that one of the things I remember about that was leaving the Olympic Park on our second day after experiencing Richard Whitehead's gold medal in the Olympic Stadium and realising that I could never go back (I would unexpectedly return for the closing ceremony at very short notice).

Leaving the park that day with my four-year-old son and eight- and ten-year-old daughters, I was heartbroken internally.

I wasn't crying; I was upbeat and glad to have experienced such a wonderful thing. Still, I had an extraordinary sense of loss about something that I had looked forward to and planned and experienced and knew that my children would remember for the rest of their lives was gone.

As I passed the Olympic Velodrome on a dual carriageway in the rain on the 22nd of July 2023, my heart broke again (and is still broken as I write this).

One of the greatest things about flags is that they encourage you to put down more flags because you realise how important it is that your life does not descend into a big amorphous trap of getting up in the morning, going to work and then getting up the next day.