So - what is a vomitory?

Yes, I had assumed it was something that made you sick, but apparently it's also the name for an entrance or exit in a theatre. I must admit I had never come across it before, and it certainly isn't a word in use in the Rose Theatre where I can sometimes be found ushering.

Yesterday I heard the word used in all seriousness in that second sense. I was attending a training session for team leaders at ExCel, and we were looking at the layouts of the arenas for the Paralympics and the positions where volunteers and staff would be deployed. Vomitories are the passages between the seats where the spectators come and go, but not, hopefully, where they throw up.

Just one more training session tomorrow, when I'll be getting to know the ExCel in more detail, and meeting more of the hundreds of volunteers who will be working there during the Paralympics.

The Games begin next week and I am so looking forward to working my first shifts from Thursday onwards, in spite of the achingly early starts.

I'm also really pleased that the momentum has built up around the Paralympics, with a record number of seats sold. The atmosphere during the Olympics was so special, and I do believe we are going to experience it again during the Paralympics as well.

I've now collected my uniform from the massive warehouse that has been transformed into the Uniform Distribution and Accreditation Centre. Some volunteers have been working there since April, making sure that the enormous task of distributing goods to about 200,000 people goes smoothly. Even though they are never seen by the general public, and are doing pretty unexciting jobs, they still manage to keep cheerful. 

I've been issued with two purple and red polo shirts, two pairs of sand-coloured trousers, two pairs of grey socks, plus a jacket, umbrella, bag, water bottle and watch, and a rather nice pair of trainers (which will certainly get some wear after the event).  The clothes don't quite fit - a unisex design for flat-chested sportspeople doesn't necessarily fit a real person like me - but I can make them work. 

"London 2012: Olympics success down to 70,000 volunteers" : The Independent.

With headlines like that Games Makers are rightly proud of what they have achieved, even though many of us have not even started yet!  I will be collecting my uniform and accreditation tomorrow in readiness for the Paralympics. The figure of 70,000 is the total number of Games Makers involved in the Olympics and the Paralympics.

Comments have appeared in most newspapers about the smiling greetings given to spectators by the volunteers in their distinctive purple and red uniforms. But the fact is that most of the volunteers were never seen by the general public, and some of them (such as the torch relay team and the uniform and accreditation teams) were at work well before the Games started.

Those people who greeted you at the station and guided you (with their pink fingers) to the venue were in the Last Mile team. They also managed the crowds leaving venues, with cheerful encouragement from the loud-hailers.

Once you got to the venue the Events Services teams took over. They checked your ticket, directed you to your seat and dealt with any problems. 

Those two groups were the face of the Olympics to spectators, but they only accounted for about 20% of all the Games Makers. 

Some others you will have seen on the field of play. Each sport had its own specialist volunteers who looked after the athletes or supported the disciplines, such as the ball girls and boys at the tennis. Then there were those teams that appeared at each medal ceremony - they were (I think) the only volunteers who wore a different uniform and the only roles that were gender specific. Two women in purple dresses with colourful sashes escorted the athletes, another woman in a strange little purple hat escorted the presenters and three or more men in collarless suits (why, for goodness sake?) carried the medals and flowers. 

But most Games Makers worked behind the scenes, in hundreds of different roles. Volunteers were working on the website, driving athletes and officials, making costumes for the Opening Ceremony, managing the workforce facilities, issuing provisions to the media, looking after visiting and UK politicians, interpreting, working in the athletes' village, and many more functions.

And it's all going to start again in a couple of weeks time with mainly new teams of Games Makers for the Paralympics.

There had been an air of cynicism over the Olympics in Kingston. We were having to contribute substantially to the costs with no obvious benefits to us.

That all changed as we gradually realised that not only were we hosting four Olympic events but we were also getting the torch twice! And all could be watched for free.

250,000 people watched the torch relay in Kingston. That is not only far greater than the population of the borough but beat the turnout in all the other London Boroughs, even though we are the smallest one.

It started out from the Hook Centre - our great pride and joy down here in Hook - carried by James Cracknell, a former Kingston school pupil.

I didn't get in to Kingston to see the torch when it went down the river on Gloriana. The river side pubs and restaurants were the perfect place to watch it go by, although I caught the whole event online.

You can see the Guildhall top right as the flotilla approaches Kingston Bridge on its way to the Olympic Park.

The next day was the men's road cycle race. We found a spot on Kingston Hill as the cyclists flashed round the corner by the Albert pub.

A thunder storm broke out in Kingston just as the women's race set off on Sunday from the Mall. A tree in Bushey Park, on the route, was hit by lightning and burst into flame. I decided to watch this one out in the dry, and it was wonderful seeing so many places I recognised, across Surrey and through Kingston.

The crowds were amazing again, but they were nothing compared with what awaited us for the time trials on Wednesday. 

I watched the women's race from the pavement opposite the Rose, and managed to capture a Canadian rider with her supporters across the road.

We were all waiting for Chris Froome and Bradley Wiggins in the men's race. A huge roar preceded them as they rode up the High Street and turned into the Ancient Market.  I sneaked into the Upper Circle Bar in the Rose to get this shot of Wiggo storming past the Guildhall.

The roar of the crowd was unbelievable.

The two cyclists said this in an interview:

‎"It was really something special, just enormous, the support," Froome said. "It's something that I don't think I'll ever experience again". Wiggins said the same, "coming back round the roundabout in Kingston, I'm never going to experience anything like that in my entire career. It's topped off."

So which roundabout was he thinking of? It could be the mini-roundabout at the junction of Kingston Hall Road, but many people think he was referring to the wall of sound, bouncing around the narrow roads, that hit him as he turned into the market.

Once he had gone past, there was a rush to see the end of the race on the Big Screen in the Rose. I was ushering and I've never seen a crowd like it in the theatre before. Everyone was screaming at the screen as Team GB took the gold and bronze. We all cheered the medals ceremony and stood up for the National Anthem. What a day!

A friend of mine who lives on the Sussex coast remarked that he was glad he wasn't up this way because it must have been chaos on the roads. From this end it looked very different - it has been one big party for Kingston. The trial event last summer alerted everyone to the restrictions, and whereas there were some mutterings then, when the reality hit us the sense of pride in Kingston was palpable.

So we did get our money's worth in Kingston after all, and no doubt the pubs and restaurants will be very, very happy.

On Wednesday night I travelled back home from the dress rehearsal of the Opening Ceremony in a bit of a daze.

You all now know why! And that was without Bradley Wiggins, Mr Bean, Tim Berners Lee, the cauldron and the wonderful James Bond sequence which they kept secret from us.

The clouds appear

And the animals

Rural life

The industrial revolution

Hospital beds

I went to see the final rehearsal of the Opening Ceremony last night, so I'm sure you want to know what happened. Well, I can tell you this ....

#savethesurprise

What I can say, is that it was the most amazing spectacle I have ever seen. If you were planning to do anything other than watch it on Friday evening, then think again.

Oh, and I do get fed up with all the carping about the organisers. The crowd management before and after was excellent, and carried out cheerfully by everyone. I didn't have to queue anywhere for more than a couple of minutes, including the loo, although the crowd did move fairly slowly towards the station afterwards. There were plenty of food outlets around the stadium, selling fairly basic stuff - fish and chips, noodles, curry, sausages, pizza, waffles, icecream, beer - and not a sign of McDonalds.

I don't think anyone would call me a 'sensitive little violet', especially as one of the aims of the Social Liberal Forum Conference last Saturday was to increase our visibility.

I'm not going to write about how any of the sessions at the conference went, because I didn't actually manage to sit all the way through any one of them. But others have started commenting already.

I spent most of the day trouble-shooting. Fortunately there wasn't too much going on that I would class as trouble. In fact, the main problem we encountered was some bugs with the AV which meant that the webcast was too quiet to hear properly. Luckily, Tracy Connell managed to record Nick Clegg giving the William Beveridge Memorial Lecture.

We were asked why we had invited Nick Clegg and other speakers who are not SLF members. But this was never intended to be an SLF lovefest. We wanted to provide a space where Lib Dems from across the party could explore and debate some of the core social issues, in a political context. The topics under discussion were all issues that are of central importance to social liberals, but we know that they also matter to everyone in the party, and indeed to many people outside.

So Nick Clegg addressed the title we had given him: 'How Liberal Democrats in Government are addressing Beveridge's "five giant evils" (Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness)'.  

We had been planning this conference for eight months. By 'we' I mean the conference team of Geoff Payne (the Hackney one), Prateek Buch, Liz Maffei, Naomi Smith, Kirsten de Keyser and myself, as project manager. We are all volunteers, but we made a great team.  We divided up the tasks between us and met on a monthly basis in some rather pleasant pubs and restaurants.

Geoff is a genius at constructing a programme of topics and speakers. We decided to have a theme of intergenerational justice, which would allow us to explore the impact of coalition policy on the old and young and the interplay between them. So under his guidance we created sessions on economics, housing, education and social mobility, well-being, care, and inequality.

But we also took a look at how new political expressions have sprung up, including the Occupy movement. Sadly, both Naomi Colvin from Occupy and Shiv Malik from The Guardian were both taken ill, so we missed their perspectives. Another session asked whether the Government is tackling the causes of last summer's riots.

Altogether we had 39 speakers or chairs on the programme, eight of whom provided perspectives from outside the party. Seven parliamentarians spoke, including two Cabinet members (Nick Clegg and Ed Davey), two ministers (Lynne Featherstone and Paul Burstow), one peer (Claire Tyler) plus Simon Hughes and Tom Brake.

I was very keen that people would be able to network easily, so we gave a lot of thought to the location of refreshments and the dozen or so exhibition stalls. This seemed to work well at our venue at the Waterloo campus of Kings College London.

If you were there then I hope you enjoyed it, and we will be contacting you soon to ask for feedback. If you weren't then watch out for next year.

Would I like to enter the ballot for a free ticket for the final technical rehearsal for the Olympic Opening Ceremony? You bet - and last week I learnt that I had won! This is one of the perks of being a Games Maker (aka volunteer).

I nearly missed that opportunity because a few weeks ago I came quite close to dropping out.

I received a bit of a shock when I read my shift times at ExCel during the Paralympics. During training we had been warned that some shifts might begin very early, with examples given of 7am starts. So I was resigned to having to leave home at 5.30am and could see the advantage of travelling before the rush hour.

But I was not expecting to be given five shifts that actually start at 5.15am.

I dutifully checked on TfL which confirmed that I would not be able to get to ExCel from home at that hour of the day. Well, to be exact, the only way to travel would be to take three night buses leaving home at 2am, which I did not consider an option!

Now many of the 70,000 Games Makers live outside London and have had to arrange to stay with friends in order to take part. Others have booked into the temporary camp sites that have sprung up across London.  LOCOG do not pay for accommodation, and this has been well-known from the start.

In my case, since I live in Greater London with good transport links into the centre, I had assumed that I would be able to commute from home, so I was left with a dilemma. They clearly needed some of us to start that early (and it may be my fault for offering to be a team leader) so I knew it would be unlikely that my shifts could be changed. I do not have any friends who live near to Docklands where I could sofa-surf. There are hotels nearby but the rates had been racked up for the Games.

It seemed I either had to pay out for accommodation or withdraw. It only took a few minutes for me to decide to book into a hotel for five nights, reckoning that I could afford it and that might make it easier for the managers to alter the shifts for someone who could not afford to do so.

There are several hotels right by ExCel, but even the budget hotels were charging a non-returnable £99 per night. The reviews on the one that still had vacant rooms were, predictably, not brilliant, but that was outweighed by the thought that I could arrive fresh for my early starts.

It's still going to be pretty exhausting, with shifts lasting up to 11 hours. I have eight shifts in all, plus a venue training day. I can't complain that volunteers are being exploited, because we have been warned throughout about most aspects of our expected commitment (apart from the early start, of course).

A couple of days ago I decided to book an extra night at the same hotel, and discovered the rate had dropped to £65 for the last remaining room! I phoned them up and to my amazement they agreed that I could rebook all the nights at the reduced rate, without charging me for cancellation. So there is some good in the world - and I have the glimpse of the Opening Ceremony to look forward to.