High, wide and anthem

Parliament reopened this week - did anyone notice that it had been closed? - and one of Stephen Harper's first moves was to propose a change to the wording of the national anthem. For those of you not in the know, O Canada begins with the lines:

O Canada! Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command

According to the government, the anthem should be gender neutral, so the proposition was to replace the second line with 'True patriot love in thou dost us command', a line which comes from the 1908 poem on which the anthem is based.

There has been a huge public outcry against such a change though, and the government has now admitted that its policy was wide of the mark and has backed down, which is a good job as it's taken me almost five years to learn the words as they currently stand; and besides, for an upwardly mobile and forward looking country such as Canada - we own our own podium now, you know - incorporating the words thou and dost into the anthem is so, well, last century.

Speaking of anthems, I've always thought that the UK should ditch God Save The Queen in favour of one that actually refers to the country rather than an individual person. Land Of Hope And Glory would seem to be the obvious choice, but it would have to be the version that gets played at the Last Night of the Proms, which incorporates the whole of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No 1. Just imagine the scenes at the 2012 Olympics if this were to become reality; every time a Brit won a gold the medal ceremony would become a riotous celebration replete with streamers, party poppers, silly hats and a full choir. Unbeatable...



...unless, of course, Canada adopted I'm a Lumberjack and I'm OK as its anthem. Now, that would be a medal ceremony worth watching.

Olympic autopsy (part one)

Well, it's only been over for 24 hours and I miss it already, and I don't mean my pancakes and syrup.

It's been strange switching on the TV and finding no Olympics, but a remarkable final day ensured that the Games went out with a bang. First of all there was Canada's nail-biting overtime win in the hockey - Sidney Crosby's winning goal will now surely enshrine him as Canada's Geoff Hurst - but the real highlight had to be what was undoubtedly the most surreal closing ceremony ever.

It began with the prerequisite formalities: the entrance of the athletes, the speeches, the anthems, the lowering of the flag and the extinguishing of the flame. However, from that point on reality seemed to melt away as we were plunged into a Pythonesque array of stereotypical Canadian iconography.

William Shatner - whose mere presence should have set the surreality alarms going - set the tone by proclaiming that Canadians were the only race who knew how to make love in canoe, a group of camp, dancing mounties (think of the dance troupe at the end of Blazing Saddles, only dressed as RCMPs) upped the ante still further, and then a series of giant, It's A Knockout-style mounties, lumberjacks, beavers, moose, maple leaves and table hockey players paraded around the arena in an ever-growing display of Canadiana that Terry Gilliam would have been hard pushed to better.

Finally, Michael Bublé was wheeled into the stadium atop a giant Mountie hat which then proceeded to rise majestically into the air as he sang the final few bars of The Maple Leaf Forever. Had he then burst into I'm a Lumberjack and I'm OK the evening would have been truly complete, but as it was it was still good enough. The whole event was completely tongue-in-cheek (I think!) and personally I loved it, but the reaction at work the next day was very mixed. Some were amused, some were perplexed, some were embarrassed; how the rest of the world viewed it all remains to be seen.

I can't imagine the Americans indulging in such self-mockery, but I guess that's one of the reasons that I'm glad I live here rather than south of the border. Canada's ability to laugh at itself is one of its most endearing characteristics and one that I hope it never loses - a theme we shall return to in the next post - and the closing ceremony was a fitting end to what turned out to be a pretty good Games.

To be continued...