I was up in Stratford yesterday. I go up there every two or three weeks or so, as it’s easy for me to get to, and it’s one of those thriving, throbbing places where there’s always something going on. Thus I’ve seen it gradually change over the weeks: there is a lot of building work going on in Queen Elisabeth Olympic Park to prepare it for post-olympic use; yesterday I saw that they’ve started to put the new roof on the stadium. Builders, plant and materiel are everywhere. Yet you can see what it will become: that park strikes me as a beautiful place: very soon, families with children will be going there for picnics; people will be riding bikes along the paths; events will be taking place. It will be green and verdant.

Yet it occurred to me, as I rolled along the banks of the river, that not long ago that place was very, very different. Before 2005 that area of Stratford was apparently a wasteland, it’s river a polluted ooze; a dumping ground for cars and fridges. I wasn’t here back then, but I’ve seen pictures,and it was not pretty. What a difference! What a staggering, staggering difference! The Westfield shopping centre over the road, built alongside the olympic park, is now one of the trendiest places to go in London, and yesterday was, as usual, thronging with people. How different it could have been. That area might still be a wasteland, were it not for a single moment in time, a single decision back in 2005 which changed everything for Stratford. A downtrodden area at the end of the Jubilee Line was turned into a place unrecognisable from the way it was.

There is something incredible in that, something wonderful. One moment can change the course of time, the unravelling of events. Had the IOC chosen Paris that night as everyone expected, I would never have had my outing yesterday; there would be no shops, no crowds, no park, no stadium. There would also have been no ceremonies: no meeting of bond and the queen, no Paraorchestra performance, no monty python bit (which may well have been one of the factors which lead to their reunion last year). In short, none of the mind-bogglingly cool things now associated with that place would ever have happened. It’s fascinating to think how different it could have been, and that it all extends back to the opening of a single envelope and a man reading a name. Somehow I find that thrilling: who would have thought something so small could trigger something so enormous.