
Just before 11pm last night and after a long, damp (and very cold) wait, Team GB's 300 paralympians finally marched (and rolled, in Union Jack wheelchairs) out into the Olympic Stadium to David Bowie's Heroes.
Almost every one of the 62,000-strong audience was on their feet. Boris Johnson was clapping like a maniac. Half the Royal Box was up clapping and beaming and jigging about.
Princess Anne may or may not have been weeping behind a pair of very strange sunglasses. Tickertape was raining down and eyes were brimming and hearts swelling painfully - even in the press seats.


Peter (the 'Quadfather') Norfolk is our flag bearer. Peter, 52, is a wheelchair tennis champion who was left a paraplegic after a motorbike accident aged 19 and, since his right shoulder gave up the ghost too, 20 years later, has been classed as a quadriplegic. He competes with a tennis racket taped to his hand and has world records coming out of his ears.
He can't stop smiling. Neither can any of the rest of Team GB.



A billion people from all around the world had tuned in.
A record 4,200 paralympians from 166 nations were taking part. More than 2.4 million tickets had been already been sold.
A 430-strong deaf choir had sung God Save the Queen.
And it was surely the first time an Olympic audience had been coached not only in the basics of sign language so we could all join in with Beverley Knight's 'I am what I am' finale, but also how to take part in 'the world's biggest ever apple crunch' - 62,000 people biting into 62,000 Royal Gala apples simultaneously to tie in with an extraordinary sequence involving Sir Isaac Newton's law of gravity, dozens of wheelbarrows and a sea of giant inflatable apples that would naughtily defy gravity and float up through the stadium.

The Paralympics Opening Ceremony was never going to be run of the mill.
Last night, the Olympic stadium had been transformed for the third time in just over a month.
Gone was Danny Boyle's green and pleasant land, Glastonbury Tor, the dizzying smokestacks of the industrial revolution, the sheep, geese, Captain Hook, JK Rowling and the luminescent hospital beds.
In their place is a giant umbrella covering a pile of giant books, four smaller umbrellas hanging from the sky, a 'moon' stage with dominated by a huge, glowing ball of light, a web of cables and riggings overhead and row upon row of blue plastic chairs and an awful lot of apples.

But yet again, Shakespeare's The Tempest was woven though the narrative, this time with Sir Ian McKellan popping up as Prospero, a disabled actress called Nicola Miles-Wildin playing Miranda and Professor Stephen Hawking (billed as 'the most famous disabled person alive') encouraging Miranda to 'be curious'.
Once again, the Queen is here, in gold and silver brocade splendour. Sadly she didn't parachute in, skirts fluttering in the breeze, with James Bond at her side.
But she's here nonetheless (albeit with a face like thunder), ready to put Prince Philip's recent illness and Prince Harry's strip billiards nudity behind her to enjoy another late, damp and very chilly night in Stratford.




This time it's all a bit more dignified. She simply walked in, accompanied by the President of the International Paralympic Committee, Sir Philip Craven and a wonderfully gentle Benjamin Britten arrangement of the national anthem sung by the deaf choir.
Festivities kick off with a flyby by Dave Rawling, a disabled pilot taught by Aerobility (a British charity that trains disabled people to become pilots) whose plane is a Health & Safety officer's nightmare of spitting fireworks and bright blue LED lights.

Suddenly everything goes quiet and there's Professor Stephen Hawking, sitting in his wheelchair on the Moon Stage saying something we can't quite hear followed by a 'big bang' as a glowing celestial sphere descends into the huge umbrella and ignites thousands of fireworks and jump-starts 600 umbrella-toting dancers (including some in wheelchairs) and a brilliant aerial dance by dancers suspended from giant umbrellas. Umbrellas are a recurring theme tonight - no bad thing given how damp it is.
But the biggest difference is the theme. While the opening ceremony for the Olympics was all about Britain and what makes us so great - the Industrial Revolution, the NHS, but nothing pre-Victorian - this is quite the opposite.
Last night it was all about the Age of Enlightenment - the extraordinary period of intellectual revolution that took place between 1550 and 1720.



So in comes Newton's apple, a pulsating ball of energy supposed to represent the Higgs particle and a giant revolving book containing The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all seemingly powered by wheelchairs. They are welcomed by an army in black carrying what looks like huge feathery discs over their right shoulders and men waving about on the top of four-metre bendy poles.
As executive producer Stephen Daldrey insisted earlier, this show is 'Not about England. This is not about Britain. This about challenging perceptions. There is no nationalistic brief to this show.' There is though plenty of thumping music. And flashing lights. And an awful lot of bright blue LED headbands bobbing about on dancing volunteers.

The budget for tonight's ceremony is a fraction of the £27 million Danny Boyle had for the Olympic Opening Ceremony.
In yesterday's final pre-show press conference, nobody was keen to say exactly quite how little. Though co-artistic director Jenny Sealey (who is deaf herself) referred to it as a 'very prudent budget - you always want more, but we've don't a good job with what we've got'.
There may be more than 3,000 adult volunteers, 100 child volunteers, and 100 professionals, (including 73 deaf and disabled professional artists and 68 volunteers) who have spent about 85 hours each rehearsing at 106 rehearsals, but it's not a patch on Boyle's epic Isles of Wonder when it comes to epic entertainment. How could it be? It is though fun and jolly (if very cold) and then just as things are revving up, it's time for the Parade of the Athletes.



We salute you: Mr Townsend is lowered through the air carrying the Olympic flame before passing it on to five-a-side footballer David Clarke, who helped teach David Beckham how to play blind football


Not at the end of the celebrations, as is traditional for Olympic opening ceremonies so that TV audiences around the world can nip off to bed and not miss much other than the lighting of the flame, but right near the beginning - so the athletes can pull up a blue plastic chair pew on the running track and watch in awe.
Which on paper sounded frustrating and daft - why on earth carve up the show like this? But as we chunter on about timings and deadlines and how everyone will lose interest during the 90 minutes plus it takes to get all the athletes on stage, it starts.
And everything changes. Because what a parade it is - the wheelchairs, the prosthetic legs, the walking sticks, the grimacing in pain, the missing limbs, the party hats, the dancing, the burning pride, the grinning ear to ear and the amazing dresses worn by each team's very glamorous umbrella carrier.




It's a far jollier and happier parade than at the Olympic ceremony - though funnily enough everyone around me suddenly seems to be in tears.
And no one's remotely bothered that we'll have to wait an hour and a half until Lord Coe can make his millionth triumphant speech of the 2012 Games, and the show proper can (finally) continue with the arrival of the golden wheelchairs, a giant whale whose skin is created by LED lights and the biggest apple crunch in the world.
Mexico wins my prize for most colourful outfit - a vision of staggering bright ponchos and huge floppy sombreros. Germany comes last - with men and women in nasty nylon-looking outfits of baby blue and sicky pink respectively.
On and on (and on) it goes until we're all completely drained.












Followed by a visit to Sir Isaac Newton's garden, which is awash with wheelbarrows, big apples, little apples, giant inflatable apples, and finally, the world's biggest simulataneous apple crunch.
'Ladies and gentlemen, please get your apples ready - three, two, one and ... bite!'
There's a massive crunch and very tasty they are, even at 11.40pm. Royal Galas and British too, we were assured earlier today, though no one on the organising committee could remember quite where they came from, other than Sainsbury's.
Suddenly the apples have gone and we're off to the 21st century to visit the Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs particle.



source: dailymail
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