Olympics: The lesson for London: bring an umbrella and a sense of humour

The mist, haze, smog or whatever it is crept back in to Beijing yesterday, shrouding the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube. So last Thursday's heavy rain, which cleared the skies in time for the weekend and the closing ceremony, must have been the work of that department of the Chinese government which, with an annual budget of several million pounds, has the task of controlling the weather by firing missiles and shells containing silver iodide pellets into the clouds.

This is just one way in which London 2012 will fall short of the organisational standards of Beijing 2008. We accept our weather. We live with it. Rain may interrupt our Test matches and create a species of Friday night hell on the M60 or London's North Circular but it makes our fields and hedgerows and windowboxes green. Putting a roof on Centre Court is about as far as we go in trying to fight nature.

So London is going to be different. And if they are wise, the organising committee will have learnt to avoid a few more features of the Beijing Games. They will have no time, for example, for the sort of meaningless inspirational guff - exemplified by the slogan "One World One Dream" - more evident in the Chinese capital this month than it has been at any other recent Games. Apart from more general considerations of worldwide mental health, it was depressing to see the land of Confucius and Lao Tzu succumbing to the philosophical values of Madison Avenue and Charlotte Street.

I have a slogan for London, three simple words that use a sense of humour - characteristically British in its hint of wry self-deprecation, you might think, and as such undoubtedly appealing to Boris Johnson - to restore a sense of proportion. Here it is, copyright-free and with no royalty required for its use on flags, banners, commemorative mugs and tea towels: "Only a Games".

No, it'll never catch on. To the ancient Greek motto of the Olympics - Faster, Higher, Stronger - has been added a fourth imperative: Bigger. And whatever we may say about recognising that London's resources can never match those available to the People's Republic of China, the pressure to exceed will be there. And it will only be intensified by that marvellous haul of 47 gold, silver and bronze medals.

In an important sense it is good for the country to have something to live up to, confronting a challenge to show that it can welcome the world and pull off a spectacle. And the enthusiasm engendered by the achievements of our 311 athletes must have diluted some of the pessimism - often wholly justified, particularly in respect of fiscal honesty - that has preyed on the project since the announcement of the winning bid three years ago.

If we can forget about budget disparities, there were cues for the London team in the way China staged the Games. Zhang Yimou's use of film projection on the inner rim of the Bird's Nest suggested that the exterior wall of the low-budget and featureless London stadium could indeed be turned into a giant LED screen, so that the moving images themselves become the visible structure. This would provide a visual signature for the Games while enabling tens of thousands of ticketless people in the Olympic Park outside the stadium to become spectators. The post-Games removal of the walls and the planned reduction of the stadium's capacity to 25,000 would then leave the memory of something unique and spectacular.

Beijing built an Olympic Park of extravagant proportions, but it never felt as though it had been designed for humans. It was vast and it was breathtaking, but there was almost nowhere to sit down, buy a drink and a sandwich, and take it all in in a relaxed kind of way. All people could do was wander around taking pictures of each other in front of the landmark stadiums. I'm afraid it did remind me that Albert Speer Jr, the son of Hitler's architect, had a hand in the layout. At the very least London's Olympic Park should concentrate on a creating a greater intimacy, reflecting the capital's recently acquired taste for alfresco cafe society.

And, given reports of the weather in England over the past couple of weeks, those responsible for planning the facilities for August 2012 should ensure the provision of plenty of cover. Those grey umbrellas featured in the eight-minute London pageant? They weren't a joke.

Are there any dedicated volunteers out there?

It has been said before, but it cannot be repeated too often: the volunteers are the secret of the success of any Olympic Games. Beijing's 70,000 volunteers were up there with those encountered in Barcelona and Sydney, provoking British observers to wonder how London will find a similar number of young people willing to spend a fortnight offering smiling assistance to foreigners, sometimes in their own language. The answer is to create a programme of training and to start recruiting now among the nation's 12- and 13-year-olds.

But where will we find such a man as Yu Dayong, a council worker who volunteered to spend the last couple of weeks as chauffeur to Anne Rogge, wife of the president of the IOC? Yu told the China Daily that he went on the internet to find out about Mrs Rogge, and discovered that she

is a doctor. "That meant she must be very particular about cleanliness," he said, so he arrived at work two hours early every day in order to clean his car thoroughly.

He learned how to park exactly 50cm from the kerb, in order to make it easy for her to alight, and reconnoitred the roads he might need to use, paying particular attention to uneven road surfaces. "There are more than 20 manhole covers between the Second Ring Road and the Fourth Ring Road," he said. He also "developed a polite disposition". Never mind breaking that 20 gold medal barrier. Finding a cabbie to emulate Yu Dayong might be London's biggest problem.

Please, somebody, change the music

One Beijing blemish that London can easily avoid is the ubiquity of appalling music. Not all songs emphasising the virtues of peace and friendship have to be quite as numbingly saccharine as those piped into virtually every venue and public space during the Games. Which doesn't mean that We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions must automatically become the soundtrack to 2012. Somebody - probably the great broadcaster and disc jockey Charlie Gillett, who is a runner as well as having been in at the start of world music - should be given the job of finding an imaginative solution, before the Freddie Mercury blight takes hold.

It's as if we were there...

How thoughtful of the England football team, given that so many of those who usually chronicle their activities were 6,000 miles away when they played the Czech Republic at Wembley last week, to arrange a match in which every detail could be so easily imagined. The concession of the opening goal, the equaliser from a David Beckham set-piece, the visitors' superior passing and second goal, the lumpen England midfield, the booing of Frank Lampard, the look on Wayne Rooney's face when he was withdrawn, the scrambled last-minute equaliser - none of us in Beijing had a glimpse of these things, but we could summon them with perfect clarity from the memory bank.

A thought for South Africa

One of the sadder statistics of these Olympics was the place of South Africa in the final table of honours, represented by a single silver medal. Sixteen years after Elana Meyer's second place in the women's 10,000m marked the end of apartheid, the country's sport seems to be going backwards. But perhaps they have other priorities.