If you’re living in London you’ll have seen them. If you’ve living in any of the London 2012 co-host cities you’ll have seen them too. They’re living in Cardiff, Nottingham, Manchester… they’re everywhere. Purple and red flashes in grey raining landscapes. Tired and enthusiastic volunteers walking to and from venues in the Games Maker garb. Every four years a new Olympics comes along with a new uniform for it’s workforce.

And I am one of them. One of the poor souls trapped in polyester.

I picked up my uniform just a few short weeks before I started work at Millenium Stadium and I honestly wasn’t too sure how to react. Whilst the purple and red was utterly garish I couldn’t help but enjoy the epaulettes. When do I ever get chance to wear epaulettes? To be quite honest though I could happily live without the beige slacks however. No-one has ever looked good in beige slacks especially when designed by people who don’t seem to realise that women have bottoms. Sometimes quite large ones.

But the design isn’t the issue that I, along with many of my fellow Gamesmakers, have with the uniform. Everyday I walk around the pitch at Millennium Stadium, whether out in the open or down in the bowels of the stadium. Most tasks given to us involve walking for running from one part of the stadium to the other. During the first week we have baking heat and glorious sunshine. And when security doesn’t let you bring deoderant into the stadium there’s an obvious problem.

We’re cooking in our polyester prisons. They make look like sportwear but they’re not that well made. Didn’t LOCOG think ahead? Didn’t they realise we’d be running back and forth doing various tasks? At first the inclusion of an umbrella was comical but did they really believe the weather would be that bad? Even in cold weather, running around a stadium with 70,000 plus people in it is going to be a little bit warm.

We’re hot, we’re bothered and we’re cooking in a polyester prison.