Olympic torch relay 2012 in Bury St Edmunds

Saturday July 7 2012, 4.09pm. The Olympic torch is in Bury St Edmunds

Over-hyped, over-blown and over here.
Well it is now.
The 2012 Olympic torch passed through Bury St Edmunds today with a huge amount of fuss, flag-waving and fanaticism - and it was all over in a matter of minutes.
While there remain millions of Olympic-sceptics in the UK, I for one am all for them and excited about watching the spectacle of the Games take place in this country.
I have tickets for three events which adds to my sense of pride and with my wife Lorraine due to give birth to our first child a couple of months after the games, all things 2012 have an extra resonance.
So what was the torch relay like to watch?
Essentially it's all about the build up, the anticipation and the wonderment. The actual Olympic torch coming through my adopted home town, literally metres from where I live.
My friends Sarah and Tony came over and we had a pre-Olympic torch party and an hour or so before I wandered up to where the route would come past with their three-year-old Daisy and had a look.
Already there were people of all ages waiting for... well the torch. Waiting for someone we didn't really know to carry one of many replica torches for a matter of meters.
It then struck me that we were only really here for the torch and I suppose for the occasion. Trying to tell a three-year-old what was going on presented its own problems.
I told little Daisy what was going to happen, kind of what it was for and that there might be some cheering.
She covered her ears and told me she didn't like noise.
Just before the torch came through as the dodgy Londoners selling all things red, white and blue with one eye on the watching police decided to curtail their enterprises, the atmosphere went up a notch.

Tears for fears: How three-year-old Daisy
reacted to the big torch relay

Coca-Cola staff ran through dishing out frisbee-shaped things to bang, a couple of police on motorbike whizzed through and then all of a sudden the crowds sprung off the pavement and into the roads narrowing the route of the torch bearer.
And then he came past, a rather portly chap in glasses dressed in white surrounded by chunky security guards. The cut of the sporting attire did none of them any favours.
I moved out into the road, crouched down and took some pictures. One of the security guards kept his eye on me until he could see that I wasn't some kind of Lee Harvey Oswald figure, just a sad sports nut.
It was all over in ten seconds with little real commotion. Thousands of people on a street coming to look at a torch and a flame that symbolised something about the Olympics coming to the south east of England in a few weeks.
I turned to see how three-year-old Daisy had celebrated the event. Surely she had stored this momentous moment in her memory bank and would dine out for life on the day she saw the Olympic torch come to town as a wee child.
Not a chance.
She'd burst into tears the minute the torchbearer had come past!