Emma Cowing: If only moaning was an Olympic sport

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that my small corner of Glasgow was probably the worst place outside of the capital that he could have thought of. Living near Hampden Park stadium, the official location for the Olympic football venues, we too will be playing host to the Games.

I know this because I regularly receive letters from the council informing me that this will result in confusing and convoluted restrictions involving parking my car halfway up a poplar tree in a non-restricted yellow parking zone between 8:57am and 4:36pm except on Tuesdays and every second Sunday (September/October inclusive).

Yes, Britain – and Scotland in particular – has embraced the approaching 2012 London Olympics with all the warmth of a wet weekend in Wester Hailes. It seems like it’s not that we don’t want them, it’s just that we can’t really be bothered.

In a recent article published on the US-based news wire Associated Press, it was noted that, unlike abroad, in the host nation itself, “instead of enthusiasm, euphoria and ebullience, the Olympic countdown is generating a drumbeat of scepticism, scare stories and doom”.

Nowhere was this more evident than on Monday, when the route of the Olympic torch was unveiled to a complete lack of interest and an awful lot of grumbling about how much all this was going to cost.

It didn’t help that the accompanying torchbearer outfits – white, baggy and with gold detailing – resembled a set of outsized pyjamas from George at Asda.

Twitter, predictably, had a field day, comparing them to some of the late Sir Jimmy Savile’s more daring outfits and the sort of thing you might see on a nurses station in a high dependency unit.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Boris Johnson, that trusty bellwether of haute couture fashion, stepped into the ring to describe the outfits as “elegant but not too austere”.

Thanks for that, Bozza. It’s a miracle you haven’t been snapped up by Vogue with that sort of incisive critical approach.

But the outfits, frankly, are the least of the nation’s worries. There is the spiralling cost – now thought to be as much as ten times the original 2005 estimate of £2.9 billion – the security issues that surround an Olympic Games that has been a target since the day after it was announced, the impact on the tourism economy as a result of big foreign tour operators missing out the UK because of the Games (in November the European Tour Operators Association – whose members bring tourists to the country from across the world – reported a 95 per cent downturn in bookings to the UK during the London Olympics period in July and August next year), not to mention the general inconvenience, as typified by my friend’s attitude to getting out of London altogether (a common sentiment, I hear), and my concern at whether I’m going to have to park my car in Paisley for the duration of the thing.

In Scotland, the ambivalence is particularly pointed. It is, after all, called the London Olympics, and London is at least 500 miles away for most Scots. With the exception of the aforementioned football events, this is an English-hosted affair. And I think there is also a certain sense in Scotland of keeping our powder dry for the Commonwealth Games. People feel a sense of connection to Glasgow 2014 that they just don’t get with the Olympics.

But perhaps that’s just the British way – to get curmudgeonly and complain that it will never amount to a thing, before rallying around at the last minute, plonking on a Union Flag hat and cheering our lungs out with the rest of the nation.

Will Scotland end up showing an interest? Perhaps. Because, the truth is, if my friend does come and visit, we’ll probably end up watching the Olympics on TV – just to feel a part of it all. And it doesn’t get much more British than that.