Hamburg to Kiev.

We arrived at the hotel early and so, with time to spare, I packed Thom off to the balcony with his dictionaries while I lay down and tried to remember my night on the Reeperbahn. There had been brandy, I knew that. Lager, whisky. One show, two, three.  The third show, yes, that's interesting. Was that actually a show? .

Thom ordered a taxi to the stadium. Since he now considers himself European, it was easy for us to fall in with some Spanish fans and pretend we weren't English. Frankly, football bores me. For Thom, it was the most beautiful game he had ever seen. While he claims to discern algebraic forms in the Spanish passing, all I see is a snowstorm of galumphing spermatozoa. But I was happy enough to sit with him, even though he did keep saying, somewhat loudly, maravilloso!

Halftime, I rang Helen. Last summer she met a man, Ross, at a therapy workshop. After a couple of months of tentative dating she decided, quite reasonably, that I should stop my afternoon- and sometimes very early morning- visits to her room. I minded, a bit. Rather than missing her body I found, unaccountably, that I missed talking to her, which we'd never really done. Initially, Gareth was euphoric. Ross had come between me and Helen and so for a few weeks Gareth came into work beaming. He even looked younger. It was as if he'd grown a couple of inches. However, even his enthusiasm fell when it became clear that Ross was an insufferable prick.

It's not uncommon in therapy circles. Sometimes you meet them, therapists who have no other interest in life other than therapy. They care for nothing but optimizing their emotional and physical wellbeing. They have no sense of humour, no hinterland. They will never admit to their previous, unsuccessful career. And then they seduce vulnerable women, like Helen. She should have known better.

Ross invited her to a therapy retreat on a Greek island. With his beard and pony tail, Ross runs the course as an eclectic mix of meditation, group work and optional naturism. Within days of her arrival Helen suspected that half of the women on the retreat were previous or future lovers of Ross and so, furious with him and herself, she fled back to England. She retuns to work next week.

And so it was, with images from last night on the Reeperbahn eliding into familiar, but equally sexy, images of Helen, I was relieved from it all by the roar of the crowd. We were hauled into a  mass hug by the fans next to us. Spain had won. We had won.