Olympic Gold for postboxes

Every time a British athlete wins a gold medal in the Olympics or Paralympics, Royal Mail will paint a post box gold in their home town. 

 Have you got one of these where you live yet?!  This one is in Sherborne where we went to do our weekend shopping this morning (showery again as you can see!)  Most of the flowering tubs and hanging baskets we see everywhere this year are in shades of red, white and blue as you can see here and this summer's weather seems to suit them as they are all looking good.

This one is in honour of Peter Wilson who won gold for shooting earlier this week and who lives in a village near Sherborne. 

The speed with which Royal Mail is getting out the stamps and painting the mail boxes is amazing - maybe they merit a gold medal too as it's certainly faster than the mail delivery service is sometimes!!

Having said I wasn't interested in sport and how could we possibly justify spending all that money on Games and so on and so forth I now find myself getting drawn in  to Games Fever!  I was only passing through the sitting room where my husband was watching the cycling yesterday and I sat on a footstool for a moment and discovered two hours had passed by and no dinner started!

As  Mick Brown said in today's Telegraph:  Over the last week something quite magical has happened in Britain. People of whom most of us have never heard, doing things about which most of us know absolutely nothing, have put the country – and me – under a spell. Rowing, cycling, slalom canoeing, sports shooting – we are all experts now, gathered round our television screens and computer terminals (Work? That can wait), united in that most precious and exhilarating of things – a Great National Conversation.....The effect of all this on London has been particularly remarkable. People seem to be walking with a lighter step, strangers engage each other in conversation; the familiar landmarks are cast in a new and wondrous light as Olympic settings. Could any city in the world have provided as splendid a backdrop to beach volleyball as Horse Guards Parade, and to an equestrian event as Greenwich?.... As if in some exuberant proletarian uprising, crowds have lined the streets of the city and the leafy suburbs, five deep, reclaiming the spirit of the Games from the autocratic hands of the IOC and corporate sponsorship. They can’t say you can only eat McDonald’s, drink Pepsi or wear Adidas sneakers when you’re standing outside your own house in Dorking.

2012 is certainly proving to be an amazing year here in the UK what with the Silver Jubilee celebrations, the torch carrying all over Britain and now the Olympic Games and the Paralympics to follow.  It's all going to be a bit of an anticlimax once it's all over isn't it?!