split screen

At first the party’s slow. Full of the birthday girl’s family who want to practice their English or talk politics. The party’s held outdoors. There’s an early autumn warmth. People mill around outdoors as the dusk closes in. Someone switches on the TV inside. On CNN, Bush takes up one side of the screen and Bin Laden takes up another. The bombing has begun in Afghanistan.

A couple of Englishmen turn up. They say the score was two two. So we qualified. By the skin of our teeth. The Greeks put up a fight. The skipper scored in the last minute. Typical. We nearly blew it. More people arrive. They talk about the news. A Frenchman tells me that they’ll turn their enemy into another Che Guevara.

The party gathers pace. English drinking habits are matched by the continentals. I talk in Spanish, French, English. It’s getting to the end of the night. Sedley’s dragged away. There’s been a crisis. The Spanish man thinks the Englishman is coming on to his wife. Sedley calms things down. For five minutes he’s upset with the Englishman. Then it all blows over.

We drive home through the Baresi night. The air’s still warm. The Englishman doesn’t know what he’s done wrong. It will be forgotten soon. He says that he didn’t think the bombing would start so soon. In New York kids had been wearing T-shirts saying ‘Not In Our Name’. This changed everything. Dropping bombs was not the solution. The night was clear and the stars shone bright and the city sang with the scent of pine trees.