Second to the right, and straight on till morning

Much has already been written of the breathtaking, brilliant and slightly bonkers Olympics opening ceremony, but there is one more thing to say on a literary note.

Just after we were treated to hundreds of dancing doctors and nurses, once the children were all settled down for the night, tucked in under their snazzy illuminated duvets, the camera snuck under one of the duvets to show a little girl, reading a book by torchlight.

Reading under the covers was a wonderful part of my childhood, as I’m sure it was for many other book-lovers and the quotation from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, read aloud by J.K. Rowling, was an apt choice for this moment. For a start, Barrie left all the royalties for Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital, which helped to link up those otherwise disparate bits of the performance – doctors and children’s literature. Moreover, Barrie’s idea of ‘the Neverland’, a place which exists in the imagination of every child – each one varying according to the quirks of that child – ties in perfectly with that magical feeling of reading under the covers.