Ask not what your Capital can do for you...

Like most everyone else, we've received a missive or epistle telling us that we want to join in with the London Olympics' volunteer programme.

There's pages and pages of it, most of it so much gabble. It took three readings for it to dawn on me that the "games-makers" we were being exhorted to recruit were, in fact, volunteer workers. This annoys me: back when Manchester did the Commonwealth Games the volunteers did a splendid job and I've every hope and expectation that they'll do the same for the Olympics in London. Why The Committee ("Can we have order please? There's a tray of meat pies just come in as need paying for.") needs to piss on their chips by dubbing them "games-makers" is beyond me. Ask any passer-by if they would want to be a "games-maker" and I'm not sure you'd get many appropriate replies.

Partway through a particularly dense patch of verbiage lie the words "and of course, increased visitor use of your library." I've now read the bloody document five times and am none the wiser as to where the "of course" comes from.

As far as I can tell, we're being asked to act as recruiting agents for volunteers for the London Olympics, using the People's Network to provide access to the online application forms. If they said that I'd be all for it. Dumping a pile of officious bumptious garbage on us all doesn't endear the project.