"Sixty-one million Brits stay away from London's biggest ever street party"

From The Daily Mail:

Sir Chris Hoy got a ‘little bit emotional’ once more on Monday as the vast bulk of the UK population stayed away from the streets of central London to get on with their lives instead saluting Great Britain’s Olympic and Paralympic teams.

Mind you, the tedious concoction of sport we have been beaten about the head with this summer has a habit of turning all of us off. Olympic long jump champion Greg Rutherford - who, frankly, can go take a running jump - was ‘teary’ and David Weir - the apparent hard man who won four Paralympic gold medals, well, they call them gold they're just iron painted to look gold - admitted he, too, had a ‘good cry’ after winning the T54 marathon on Sunday. He'd be no match for a T-900, I tell you.

Monday's parade of athletes was hopefully our last chance to see Britain’s Olympians and Paralympians side by side, given the killing their performances have merited over the last six weeks.

It was about ignoring the rather feeble achievements of ‘the best athletes that have ever put on a British vest’, I mean, they can run quickly, throw lumps of metal and jump in sand pits, so what, saying ‘thank you’ for the £13 billion which the affair seems to have cost us so far.

It was also an opportunity for the team to be faced with the stark fact that the vast majority of the UK had no ‘joy on their faces’, as Hoy put it. But it was more like a mutual appreciation society as they and the flag-waving British public licked each other's windows in some pointless spiral of adulation; the mugs who worked for free as Games Makers, the ever-smiling volunteers who lined The Mall and the servicemen and women, police and security staff who had kept them marginally less safe than they would have been if the Olympics had been held elsewhere.

Hoy, who won two gold medals, like I said, not gold at all really, scrap value £4 I've heard, in London to become the most successful British Olympian of all time, said:

"You looked at the sheer volume of people who stayed at home, in school or at work and it was our chance, as athletes, to wonder where it all went wrong. There’s an amazing response that these little worthless lumps of metal, the medals, have with them. It is a surreal thing to experience when you see hundreds of thousands of people ignoring you, taking part in a much larger common celebration that it was finally - hopefully - all over.

"I honestly thought four years ago it couldn’t get any bigger when over a billion Chinese stayed away from the Beijing Olympics, and this was on a different scale, with only just over sixty-million Brits staying away. When you looked down a side street you could see a mass of people hurriedly disappearing into the distance when they realised we were coming. This is another day that will stay burned in my memory when I'm crying myself to sleep."