Whinging, moaning, complaining, whining Victor Meldrew-types have done nothing but bleat about how badly things are going ever since the government announced that the bill for the Olympics has gone up from, roughly, £3 billion to about £10 billion.
Now, personally, if I had £10 billion to spare, I would probably fritter it away on inconsequentials such as buying Alzheimer's drugs for pensioners denied them by the government, paying for NHS dentists or purchasing body army for our troops in Iraq. But that's just me. I'm always squandering money like a spendthrift with a hole in their pocket.
However, the moaners are singularly failing to notice how much good is going to flow from our winning the Olympic bid.
Now I must admit that I'm not particularly thinking of all the infrastructure improvements planned for East London, or the much needed housing that the Olympic village will provide, or all the fabulous stadia required, as we all know, at heart, that they will all be complete white elephants when the Olympics are over, or that attempts to build them on time and to budget will be a complete and utter disaster.
But, in the short term, much good has already flooded our way from the bid. Did you know, for example, that the government has already started looting lottery cash that would otherwise have gone to other 'good causes'?
How many films promoting the IRA, programmes to fatten up guinea pigs for Peruvian peasants, or schemes to stop illegal immigrants from being deported will not now happen I do not know; what I do know is that about £10 million (£100 million? £1 billion?) has been pickpocketed from the arts budget, which is just about the best thing that has happened to the arts since Damien Hirst's shark began to rot. Hopefully, now, rather than just leeching off public subsidies, artists will have to actually produce something that someone, somewhere, wants to buy.
Can you imagine any other profession or industry being subsidised in such a way, such as your local evening newspaper, for example? Get the government to pay the people who produce it to write whatever the hell they want regardless of what people actually want to read and it would probably end up full of people writing diatribes about, for example, our fantastic Olympic bid. Who'd want to read that?