Hello again! Because my 41st Birthday Favourites included the first half of September to cover the Paralympics, I had considered combining the rest of the month with October for a joint Favourites post later on. However, there are enough bits and pieces from the latter half of September that I can make a little post and video from, including another tasty free meal, a nice bit of comedy and some great factual entertainment.
So let’s get straight into it, as this won’t take long. As ever, nothing is sponsored to appear here and all opinions are my own, and I hope you enjoy!
Following on from my review of the Olympics earlier this summer, we’ve just had even more spectacular sporting action with the Paralympics in Paris, which I’ve been absolutely obsessed with over the past fortnight.
ParalympicsGB did extremely well as per usual, scooping up 49 golds amongst their 124 medals, and it’s their many achievements I’ll be focusing on in this post of course. But it was great to watch elite athletes from all nations – of which there were 4,400 competitors from 168 delegations in total – as they shared their fascinating stories and showcased their incredible skills in 22 sports, featuring hundreds of events across a myriad of disability categories.
There were huge audiences supporting them with enormous enthusiasm as well, which was wonderful to see. They generated such an electric atmosphere, in stark contrast to the lack of crowds in Tokyo’s Covid-hit Games, so these have really felt like the first proper Paralympics in 8 years.
And it’s also great that the Games were more widely broadcast around the world than ever before, including on Channel 4. Indeed, the fact that there was barely any time difference with the UK made it possible for us Brits to watch everything live on TV and online, and to have full roundups at the end of each day with the highlights programmes and The Last Leg. So it almost felt like a home Games again, the closest we’ve had since London 2012.
All of which meant there was a lot going on all day every day, which was daunting yet exciting to try and keep up with. So in this extensive review post – which isn’t sponsored by anyone and all opinions are my own – I’ll go through all of Britain’s medal winners along with some of my other highlights, and I’ve also made a Youtube playlist to go with it as well. I hope you enjoy!
What a glorious summer of sport this is proving to be. I don’t usually watch or write about a lot of sport, but the Olympics and Paralympics are one of those things I make an exception for, because they’re such massive and special events that I get sucked into very easily.
After the very quiet and stripped back events that had to be held in Tokyo in 2021, the first post-pandemic Olympics in Paris brought back the traditional atmosphere of excitement and drama that everyone loves about the Games, as we watched lots of incredible feats of speed, strength, coordination and agility in a wide variety of sports. It made such an enormous difference having the crowds back again to cheer on the athletes, for whom there was gender parity for the first time, with 5,250 men and 5,250 women competing. It’s not yet equal for the Paralympians though, so there’s still work to do there, and I’ll also be posting a review of those Games next month of course.
Once again Team GB have done very well, with a similar number of total medals to the last few Games. Not as many golds, sure, but some of the silver results have been very close indeed. The competition has certainly been stronger this year, and indeed there have been some notable stars from other nations who caught my attention as well.
So here I’m going to review a lot of my favourite highlights from the last couple of weeks, mainly related to the British team but with a few other people mixed in. I’m not affiliated with anyone involved, it’s just nice to relive the memories, and I hope you enjoy looking through it all too!
In any case, the concerts featured a huge variety of artists, and whilst I felt it was much more of a mixed bag compared to Live Aid, it was still a lot of fun. I had also been far too young to see Live Aid when it took place, which meant I only got to watch it when it was released on DVD many years later, whereas I was able to see Live 8 when it was actually broadcast, as I recalled in my journal at the time.
I also bought the DVD box set of Live 8 that was released in November that year, presenting a wide selection of tracks, and that’s what I’m going to review in this post, along with some online videos that fill in the gaps. I’ve also created Youtube playlists for the UK concerts and the rest of the world, with lots of performances from the official Live 8 Youtube channel (where they’ve uploaded quite a few that were omitted from the DVD set), plus a selection of other clips. I’ve linked to a lot of the videos during this post as well.
So without further ado, and as a sequel to my earlier Live Aid post, I hope you enjoy this run-through of the different concerts and my thoughts on some of the performances!
When I was young my family and I used to visit London a few times a year to spend time with our relatives, during Easter, summer and Christmas. So naturally we would often go out to see the sights. And once I’d bought a camcorder for my America trip, it was only natural to take it with me to London to get some footage of the city, along with a few other locations that we visited on day trips.
So in this post I’m going to share some of those clips from 2000, which are also in my travel playlist. They’re not audio described, but if you are able to see them then I hope you enjoy them!
Well Eye Never 
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