Boris v Jingjing

The search for a mascot begins

Remember ‘Goliath the Lion’? No, me neither. Apparently he was our mascot for Euro ’96, but even Google struggled to find him, an image search eventually revealing an overweight pound-shop cuddly toy of quite astonishing charmlessness – a perfect match for our excruciating medieval-themed opening ceremony, and indeed for a couple of the players on that England team.

For London 2012’s mascot, we have one option that would match Beijing’s Jingjing the Panda for cuteness, but it might reduce our Capital’s gravitas to admit that 3 million of us voted Boris the Floppy-Haired Spaniel into City Hall. Instead, the Olympic committee have launched a nationwide search for a new mascot, challenging design agencies to come up with a ‘new concept’.

We’re not helped, of course, by the fact that the only animals people really associate with London are pigeons and rats. An urban fox is a possibility, I suppose: a scrawny animal with a half-eaten kebab dangling out of its mouth would certainly be an honest animal to associate with Londoners, but it might not sell a huge number of soft toys.

There have been some poor mascots in the past – notably the appropriately named ‘Whatizit’ from Atlanta 1996, described by NBC sports anchor Bob Costas as ‘a genetic experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong’. If the farce of London 2012’s spiky pink logo is anything to go by, we could be in for a torrid time.

Banksy ‘act of vandalism’ graffiti to be removed

When is graffiti no longer an unwanted eyesore? Answer: when it’s a Banksy original worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Still, that doesn’t stop Westminster City Council from taking a scrubbing brush to the art work daubed on the side of the post office building on Newman Street. The reasoning behind the removal? “If you condone this then you condone graffiti all over London” is the rather lamentable justification.

New networking site for Londoners

Forget MySpace and Facebook, now Londoners can meet up online at the networking site ‘Together for London’ dot org www.togetherforlondon.org to share their thoughts and ideas about the city. Launched by Transport for London the featured campaigns are largely to do with travel – and being considerate towards fellow commuters on the Central Line. But there’s ample message board space to have a rant about common irritants: people who play their music too loudly, shout into their mobile phones and, let’s not forget, the free newspapers left lying about. ‘Together for London’ or ‘Rant About City Living’?

Lots of entries for new Routemaster design

For those who didn’t follow the London mayoral elections closely you could be forgiven for thinking that Boris got voted in on one issue alone: the promised return of the much loved Routemaster bus. In fact, the old open-platform buses aren’t just being brought back, they’re being built to a new design. Ideas put forward for the new design have flooded in with a competition offering £25,000 for the winner. There’s an electronically-powered version, one with SatNav (let’s hope it doesn’t automatically divert to avoid traffic hotspots) and one with a ‘smile’, ah, say ‘cheese’.

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