Nine Days Left

"It's fifteen minutes by tram," she said, "maybe twenty." And so we ended up, thirty minutes later, on the beach at Fountain Twelfth Station. The sand was flat and narrow and full of bits of shell. "It's like pistachio ice cream," I said. "Pistachio?". Volleyball to the left, a wire fence to the right, I spread out the towel and felt the rain begin to fall.

A broken TV and a twenty-second power cut couldn't spoil the World Cup Final. The players managed that just fine by themselves. I watched (and tried my best not to sleep through) the game with Ukrainian beer in a Greek-owned cafe. It is the World Cup after all.