By BILL BRYSON
Here's an interesting fact I read on the long flight to Sydney from the States the other day. According to an article in the science section of the New York Times, every hour the average person "sloughs off" 60,000 skin fragments, 160 million motes of dust, and 20,000 particles of clothing lint, among rather a lot else.
No wonder my seat was a mess when I got off the plane.
On my flight there were 397 passengers, all sloughing away for 14 hours. That means that between us we left behind 111 millions of clothing-lint particles, 889 billions of dust particles, and enough skin to make at least two new humans.
When you consider that on the day in question - Friday - mine was one of 958 flights to come and go at Kingsford Smith Airport and that I was just one of some 28,000 skin-sloughing passengers, that's quite a lot to ask of the cleaners, wouldn't you agree?
In fact, quite a lot is being asked of a great many people in Sydney just now. Yet - and here's my point - you would hardly know it.
Only a week or so ago, I wrote that whatever Sydney might be during the Olympics period, it would not be Sydney. "For two weeks," I forecast with blithe assurance, "the city will experience situations that most of the rest of us have already - stressed servers, packed and chaotic airports, strained public transport systems, security checks everywhere, appalling queues."
Well, let me take that back right now. Sydney has been behaving as if hosting an Olympics is the easiest thing in the world, and actually quite a lot of fun. Of course, the proceedings have barely got under way and there is no telling what might happen in the days to come, but so far, and goodness me, it has been nothing but one happy story after another.
The weather has been mostly glorious. The trains that I have taken so far have run smoothly and promptly and have stayed commendably on the rails. The two Koreas walked together at Stadium Australia, warming the hearts of millions. Australia appears to be on course to win about 800 medals.
Everyone everywhere seems to be having a wonderful time. There have, of course, been some well-publicised problems with the buses. Some commentators have even made comparisons with Atlanta, where many drivers famously took their passengers on long, inadvertent tours of the outer suburbs and north Georgia hills, but the comparison isn't really fair. For one thing, not one driver at Sydney is called Bubba.
Moreover, the Sydney problems have been more in the way of introductory hiccups, whereas at Atlanta many athletes were made hours late by hapless driving and one actually missed his event altogether.
Nothing of that magnitude has happened at Sydney or is likely to. It is salutary (and if not salutary at least entertaining) to recall that at this early stage of the previous Olympics, Atlanta was coming to pieces in quite a comprehensive way.
First, there were the celebrated problems with the computers, which led to many interesting deviations from reality, as when a boxer from Uganda was listed as being more than 19ft tall and a German swimmer found himself transferred to the Ghanaian squad.
Then there were the many security lapses, of which perhaps the most memorable was the fellow who was noticed sitting in the stands at the opening ceremonies with a gun in his lap, patiently awaiting the arrival of President Clinton and several other heads of state.
He and his trusty firearm had somehow managed to pass unchallenged through two metal detectors and a bag check.
My own favourite, however, was the occasion at a men's basketball match when the Georgia Dome arena was plunged into darkness for 12 minutes after a technician pulled the wrong switch. Now I know almost nothing about electrical systems, but I am nearly certain that if I pulled a switch and a basketball arena was instantly plunged into darkness, it would not take 12 minutes before I wondered what would happen if I pushed the switch back again.
In comparison with all this, Sydney has been a clear triumph, and nothing has better captured the spirit and quality of the proceedings than the opening ceremonies. They were, as you know already, a vast and classy wonder, free of cliched images and full of lissome acrobatics and the most dazzling effects.
Speaking personally, I thought it was splendid that Ric Birch filled the show with Australian references that no foreigner could possibly understand.
All over the world there must now be billions of people who believe that, according to Dreamtime tradition, the spiritual cleansing of Australia led directly to the development of the Victa lawnmower and a craze for very vigorous tap-dancing among the young.
I can't pretend that I understood the half of it myself (what were those guys doing skimming around on upside down paddling pools?
Why did all the Ned Kelly figures shoot sparks out of their heads?), but I am certain it was all a good thing.
At least it has provided the world with some new Australian images that don't involve kangaroos, Crocodile Dundee, or lugubrious halfwits drinking XXXX at dusty outback pubs, and it did - no one seems to have remarked on the significance of this - bring the indigenous peoples into the very heart of the best and biggest show Australia will ever see. It's been a sensational start.
I can't wait to see what happens next.
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