This time of day, when the sun can be seen in stripes on the dark grass and on the ferns and there’s a breeze and some of the birds can be heard, is my favorite. Maybe O’en’s too. 

He’s lying on the deck looking out, for movement, any movement, Dave, deer, joggers, though he just lay back, flat out, with a sigh. I say, “O’en,” but he doesn’t respond, happy in the moment, which is all he knows, and which is all we should know. Then our minds would really be open. But, alas, they are filled, nay, stuffed with things, a lot of which we’d probably be better off without.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could clean them out like closets every now and then. But the prejudices and fears — as well, yes, as the fond glimpses — remain, so, when it comes to the bad stuff you have no choice but to acknowledge it, and, if you want to be a human being, which I once confessed was my ambition in life, face it down.

How then can anyone say, as the present Supreme Court justice nominee has, that they have an open mind. 

“What are your prejudices, sir, what are your fears, and can you tell us how you’ve successfully dealt with them in rendering objective judicial decisions?”

You will follow the original intent of the founding fathers? But those fine, stirring words were written in slave-holding days, in days when many women and many children too were chattel, when, aside from the elite, rights were out of reach. People had to fight for them, it was messy, not so neat, not so strictly constructionist.

And so we have evolved — yes, the Constitution is a living document, I’m happy to say. And only when it has been treated as such have we become more human. 

We have been inching toward polity, though it’s been a slog. 

Please don’t set us back.

Whether you are a Democrat, Republican, or independent voter, it’s easy to simply assume that Representative Lee Zeldin, our congressman here in the First District, is a reliable, reasonable, traditional member of the mainstream Republican Party. However, given his decision to invite Sebastian Gorka to headline a re-election fund-raiser in Smithtown on June 28, that easy assessment needs to be tossed out the window. Our congressman has become extraordinarily buddy-buddy with radicals and extremists of the ultra-right, bigoted wing of his party.

Mr. Gorka has been in the public spotlight not just for his stridently anti-Muslim opinions, but for his associations with a nationalist group in Hungary that openly expresses nostalgia for the days when their twisted segment of the Hungarian population marched arm in arm with the Nazis. That Mr. Zeldin, who is Jewish, should embrace a bombastic buffoon like Mr. Gorka beggars belief.

Mr. Gorka prefers to be referred to as Dr. Gorka — although there are serious questions about the legitimacy of that honorific, and about his qualifications to claim to be an expert on immigration or anything else. Despite that, he has served for a time at Fox News as a national security analyst, and worked for the Trump campaign in 2015. Along with Steve Bannon of Breitbart News, he held a short-lived post in the Trump White House, but resigned about a year ago, criticizing the administration’s foreign policy for being — get this — inadequately anti-Muslim.

 Mr. Gorka, who was born in Britain to Hungarian-immigrant parents and who immigrated to the United States after marrying an American, continues to argue that Muslims should be summarily banned from immigrating to this country. As does a racist provocateur of a similar ilk, Milo Yiannopoulos, he gets a lift from making offensive remarks. He greeted the election of Donald Trump to the presidency with an inanity: “The alpha males are back.”

 Mr. Gorka likes to peacock around at public events with a medal on his chest that was given to his father as a member of a Hungarian group, Vitezi Rend, that was notorious for enthusiastically collaborating with the Nazis during World War II. His father’s beliefs can be consigned to history but in continuing to wear this emblem of an acknowledged pro-Nazi organization, Mr. Gorka is clearly trying to tell us something. We should hear him. In 2017, he vigorously denied having been a member of Vitezi Rend during his years in Hungary, but his fellow members, when contacted by reporters, said that of course he’d been a member, and that everyone in the western Hungarian branch of the organization knew it.

According to Recoil, which is a “firearms lifestyle publication,” Mr. Gorka, on a daily basis, likes to walk about armed with two pistols, two flashlights, a knife, a tourniquet, and the U.S. Constitution. Given his beliefs, which are completely antithetical to many of the ideas of liberty enshrined in the Constitution, it seems unlikely that he has read very far beyond the Second Amendment. The rest of his Boy Scout kit is laughable, is it not?

Nevertheless, Mr. Zeldin chose Mr. Gorka to be the big attraction at his fund-raiser. That Mr. Gorka is seen as a drawing card in the First District is a sad sign for all of our Republican friends and neighbors, most of whom are, of course, respectable, reasonable, and moderate citizens. I would like to think that, given a chance to reflect on the anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi associations of Mr. Gorka, they would share my disgust that he was put on a pedestal by our own congressman. 

What did the Greatest Generation fight for? Not for this.

Mr. Zeldin is, by all accounts, a perfectly charming and easygoing man who, in person, is easy to like. By his association with a radical nincompoop like Mr. Gorka, however, he has crossed a line. It is time for Republicans in our district to reassert the decency and common sense of their party.

It may be that Mr. Zeldin thinks it is preferable, on the political stage, not to worry about his or anyone else’s Jewishness, not to make too big a deal out of it. But anti-Semitism is on the rise, not just in Hungary, but here, and our congressman just took a giant step onto the wrong side of history.

I’ve been thinking about a topic very much in the news these days, which has not gained as much attention as it should — understandable, considering all the emergencies, especially emergencies involving children in recent weeks — and that is the Supreme Court decision on June 27 that public employees do not have to pay the costs of collective bargaining by unions that represent them if they have not chosen to be members. In general, the court’s decision has been assessed as a further weakening of the strength of unions at a time when they have been in continuous decline. And this reminds me of how vital a union was for my father.

He was born in 1898 on Clinton Street in New York City to Polish immigrants, and he did not go to school beyond eighth grade. He may have been a proverbial newsboy; after working in various places, including a button factory, he was getting old enough for a real job when a relative helped him become a Prudential Insurance agent. Gregarious and energetic, the job suited him to a T.  

Prudential had instituted a major innovation in life insurance by that time, writing policies for workers, not just for the middle class or wealthy. These policies cost only pennies a week, and insurance agents made the payments easy by visiting customers at home to pick up weekly premiums. My father liked the exercise he got by going up and down the stairs of the lower-class brownstones to which he was assigned, chatting with the housewives of men who were at work, and often offering advice.

Later on, he would talk about similarly collecting payments on annuities, an annuity, in the parlance of the day, being a retirement fund someone created for him or herself that would pay out regular sums beginning at some future date.  

In 1951, having been a Prudential agent for a long time, my father was among those members of the American Federation of Labor Unions who voted to strike. It was newsworthy because it was the first formal job action by a white-collar union in the nation. And that is what I remember most, because my father was pictured on the front page of The Daily News reading while on the picket line none other than James Jones’s debut novel, “From Here to Eternity,” which was published that year. It took three months of negotiations for the agents to win working improvements and recognition of the A.F.L. as their bargaining agent.

I am certainly not going to try to summarize the positive effects unions have had on working conditions over the years, although the good they have done is overwhelming. (Well, okay, just a few things: the minimum wage, the right to sick leave, the creation of Social Security, protections for whistleblowers, maternity leave, overtime pay . . . the list goes on and on.) I am proud of my father’s place in the hard-working world and, given how far we have traveled from the idealism of those days — and given how many union-won worker rights have been chipped away by the modern environment of permanent freelancing, job insecurity, and benefit-free part-timer scheduling at places like Walmart — feeling a bit sentimental. 

High tide came late on Friday, late enough that no one was awake or on the beach when my old, red kayak floated away. It was my fault, really. 

The kids had dragged it up a way after paddling around in the bay the previous evening. I had been sleepily watching from a hammock and said that I would take it the rest of the way to the safety of dry sand. Hungry for dinner or addlebrained from a long, hard week, I simply forgot.

Ellis, who is 8, and I were on the beach the following morning messing around with a metal detector when I noticed the kayak was gone. Sentimental and possessive about such things, I made my son walk up and down with me, looking for a clue. Then, we hiked in on a new trail at Promised Land to scour the beach there. Nothing.

High tide had come around 10 p.m. on Friday. The  wind was variable and light then, from the south-southeast. Guessing where the kayak traveled was just that, guesswork, and, frankly, whoever happened upon it over the weekend most likely would have considered it a gift from the gods. At any rate, no one has yet phoned the town police, to whom I reported the loss as soon as I noticed it.

Then, on Sunday morning, an East Hampton police officer got in touch with me to say that his girlfriend’s father, who is a commercial fisherman, had picked up a red kayak floating in the bay and that I could stop by the house. It was in the driveway, he said. Heading over, I was excited, but it wasn’t to be. The thing was red all right, but it was not mine. 

Looking into replacements later that day, I was disappointed. The manufacturer, Hobie, has followed the trend of adding bells and whistles to everything and anything, all knurled surfaces and military action hero fantasies. Even flashlights are sold as “tactical” these days. Gone are the sleek and effective lines of my old boat, blown from a plastic rotomold before my eldest child was born.

Most of Sunday was spent circumnavigating Gardiner’s Island with Geoff Morris, a sharp-eyed friend since childhood. From the boat we scanned the shoreline through binoculars, arriving from Three Mile Harbor first at Cherry Hill Point, near where Captain Kidd buried treasure. Then, we went north around Bostwick Point, east to Whale Hill with a pause to land a couple of keeper porgies, then to Eastern Plains Point, into Tobaccolot Bay, south around Cartwright Shoal, then beating slowly against a hard chop into Cherry Harbor, and out over Crow Shoal and back to Three Mile. No kayak.

Studying the island so closely was a reward in and of itself, however. And, back on land, the sting of my relatively trivial loss dimmed. A man in New Jersey whose kids had all grown up and moved away from home had one to sell of the same model, albeit blue. I might go get it; I might not. I just hope that my red kayak’s new owner loves it as much as I did.

I almost got run over

Did you — too?

Then there’s a pair of us?

Don’t tell! They’d really take aim — you know

How dreary — 

to be — Pedestrian!

How exposed — like a Dog —

To risk one’s life — 

the livelong July —

I think we’ll move to Quogue!

Every year it seems to get worse. Last night, O’en and I were almost clipped by a wide-turning tank dropping people off at the house across the street. With O’en on the leash, I unleashed obscenities. I had been waving my flashlight energetically to ward them off, but to little avail it seemed. 

As we headed home I thought I heard a woman say she was sorry, but I could have been mistaken.

This morning, a guy sped through the walkway between the cleaners and Mary’s Marvelous after others had stopped, a foot or two away from my receding chin. I yelled, as is my wont, and he clapped a hand to his forehead, realizing his mistake, I thought, though I could have been mistaken.

Then lately I have seen a toddler toddling near the end of our driveway in the morning as her mother walks a dog nearby, on a leash. The toddler too should be on a leash. This morning, I told the mother that cars sometimes drive quickly on our street, and then I thought about how, in backing out of our driveway, which we’re used to doing, we wouldn’t be able to see a toddler in our rearview mirrors. So, I turned and headed out frontways over the lawn.

I wasn’t surprised to read a letter this week fleshing out the serious injuries a 63-year-old pedestrian had suffered as the result of being hit by a Jeep in a crosswalk near the post office on June 23. Driver said she didn’t see her, if I’m not mistaken. Not that long ago, and not that far away, a 14-year-old girl was killed as she was riding a bicycle. 

I’d be mistaken if I didn’t include myself as one of the potentially heedless. You never know. 

One thing I do know is that I can’t remain in a gloomy state overlong, and so it was refreshing on Friday to see Isabel in the reeking dump. She too thinks the traffic is the worst ever. It had taken her I don’t know how long to get to East Hampton from Southampton, she said. I told her that when Mary was about to set out from Springs earlier that day to do some shopping in Amagansett I’d said, “You can’t get there from here.”

Happily, I was mistaken.

Chill out, give thanks, I wrote, from Brooklyn, in a typically mawkish letter to The Star eight years ago.

I remember the afternoon too well. The 100-degree heat in the sixth-floor walkup, the sliced-open palm in a window air-conditioner installation gone wrong, and the south side of Williamsburg’s essential soundtrack to summer: incessant car alarms and stereos 24/7/365. And always, the lamenting of summers gone by.

Entertaining as the melee could be, I wrote to urge the warring parties of The Star’s letters pages to step back from the gaping partisan divide and remember how very fortunate they were, enjoying another summer on the South Fork. 

Twenty months ago, I wrote, from Amagansett, a typically weepy “Relay” about the last day of summer — in my experience of that summer of 2016, if not the calendar’s. A self-pitying account of a day in October, it was all long shadows and falling leaves and an unconscious yearning to hibernate, dolefully played out on a dock and a boat on the harbor in Montauk. 

And on Monday night, I wrote, from East Hampton, this typically soppy “Relay” about the first day of summer, which, like the last day of summer, arrived a month late. 

It had been a long week, what with the usual work I perform as an Enemy of the American People (Sad!), Mother’s five-day visit, and negotiation of a car purchase, and when the East Hampton-to-Lindenhurst-to-Orient Point-to-East Hampton race had been run on Friday, there were just a few hours left until Saturday and early-morning longshoring in Montauk.

It’s dirty work and my clothes are quickly damp if not drenched, but that one-way ticket to somewhere, I keep telling myself, isn’t going to buy itself, so earn and then earn some more.

Damp and dirty but done in the early afternoon, instead of driving back to East Hampton I accepted an invitation to hang out at Ditch Plain Beach with my friend and Y and Y’s friend, Y2. 

Y is renting a room from my friend for the summer, and brought Y2 along when she came out from Brooklyn on the train on Saturday morning. It’s a small world, after all: Y2 used to work at a groovy restaurant-lounge around the corner from my sixth-floor walkup. We knew each other slightly, across the aughts, in Brooklyn, where Y and Y2 are in an all-girl punk band. I am in awe.

But the thing is, Saturday, July 21, was the first time it felt like summer. I’d barely been on a beach before that afternoon, and on Saturday the clouds and windy, unsettled air had dissuaded many from a swim or surf. Mostly alone and close on a couple of beach towels, we all caught up and had a few sips of beer and laughed a lot and looked to the cliffs and the horizon and the heavens, and we felt so fortunate and happy. 

Later, I remembered what I had forgotten: The world is bigger than a wind farm, an airport, an election campaign, and perfluorinated chemicals. People discuss and do other things, like music, and art, and adventure, and that is mostly the province of the cities. That is why Y and Y2 came from far away to live there, and my own thoughts of returning gather anew — once the temperature has dropped below 80, that is — as do thoughts of venturing farther afield, to the field of infinite potentiality.

But on Saturday, it was good just to lie flat and look at the sky and, for a minute, have nothing at all to do. Later still, at the Star Island Yacht Club, we came to know the bliss of a late-afternoon drink by the pool, until it was time for Y2 to take the train back to the city. 

On Flamingo Avenue, windswept and enveloped by David Bowie’s “Soul Love” blaring like a Williamsburg car alarm from the new convertible’s stereo, we hurtled toward the train station, carefree and exhilarant in the moment. “New love, a boy and girl are talking / New words, that only they can share in / New words, a love so strong it tears their hearts / To sleep through the fleeting hours of morning.” 

And then, a deer bolted from the brush and across the two lanes, and I stomped on the brake, and Y and Y2 screamed and threw their arms high, and we all laughed and marveled at the nearness of the unknown. 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star. “Re: Person I Knew” is an album by Bill Evans recorded at the Village Vanguard in 1974.

It was asked last week of some people in the street how they were going to celebrate Independence Day. Most said they’d see the fireworks, which is evocative, but I’m wondering if we shouldn’t before night falls (this was written before night fell) take 10 minutes, at the most, to reread the Declaration of Independence, one of whose “self-evident truths” is, surprise, that “all men are created equal,” an assertion that seems to have been more honored in the breach than in the observance over the years, especially these days. 

The Declaration goes on to say that governments are instituted among Men . . . to secure their unalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. And, further, that when a government “becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it. . . .”

And, of course, following the whys and wherefores, the Declaration severs ties with England, whose tyrannical king has, among other things, “endeavored to prevent the population of these States . . . refusing to encourage migrations hither.”

Written almost 250 years ago, it has a familiar ring now, now that our present president seems as if he would readily wrap himself in a tyrant’s mantle if he could, and, frankly, who will stand in his way — a tergiversating Congress, an apathetic electorate?

We should look to it, as did Mary, who with fidelity and passion knocked on doors for Perry Gershon, winner of the First Congressional District’s Democratic primary, as did legions of other volunteers here and abroad, i.e., Brookhaven.

Though she didn’t use Jefferson’s exact words, she urged one and all to vote as if, in effect, their Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness depended on it. 

And, in keeping with the tenor of Gershon’s and the four other candidates’ campaigns, she urged all with whom she spoke to get behind the winner in the general election, as if — I’ll be so bold as to interpolate here — our lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness depended on it.

The conventional wisdom has been that even a landslide in East Hampton is nugatory when votes come to be tallied in Brookhaven, which was probably why some voters here backed Kate Browning, a county legislator who lives in Shirley. 

Again, Mary, who worked hard for Tim Bishop when he first ran for Congress, backed a winner.

And it’s a truth self-evident to me that she’s a winner herself.

Well at least the president didn’t claim the enemy of the people misquoted him — he had, in fact, misquoted himself, he said, when it came to Russia’s meddling on his electoral behalf.

It was all very well for Whitman to say he could contradict himself because he contained multitudes, but when it comes to presidents you like them to wheedle the multitudes down a bit before spouting off, before giving aid and comfort to people who don’t wish us well. As I said last week, cleaning out the cranial closet every now and then makes it tidier.

Though with this one you don’t know what to believe. Nor does he, apparently, know what to believe. Because he doesn’t know his own mind. Other than the pre-eminent fact that he is pre-eminent. 

But the All-Star game was fun, wasn’t it? All those home runs. Their boom, boom, boom still resounded this morning as I gazed up from the outdoor shower into the outreaching trees, putting aside for the moment all thoughts of gloom, gloom, gloom, and doom, doom, doom. It’s the papers. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em, for you do want to stay up on all the lies and calumny and disasters man or God-made (whose reputation, as a result, has been tarnished too). 

Greed is the big sin, one of my sons-in-law says, and I guess that the urge to aggrandize, especially in the land of the fee [Don’t you change this, editors, or I’ll take my column and go home!], is pretty rampant. There’s no we in me, and our leader is the avatar in that. But doing for oneself is just the half of it. To be balanced, to live up to this nation’s oft-touted ideals, we must also do for others, in whatever ways we can — even to the extent of covering local sports. So, since he’s unbalanced, he must be checked.

This was to have been the City on the Hill, which would inspire, and to which all would aspire . . . the beacon of freedom, go to the light . . . the envy of all. The beacon’s getting dimmer, the cheering more faint. 

The World Cup was fun, wasn’t it? Won by a former ally. Wimbledon too.

Call it an addiction, but I’ve been bereft this week without The New York Times. I have had a copy delivered to my door pretty much every day of my adult life, but suddenly it has ceased to appear. My husband has called every day, even managing to reach a real, live human being, and has consistently been reassured that not only will the next day’s paper arrive, but all the back copies, too. It hasn’t happened, and we are a week into this saga. Crisis!

I am only being half facetious. While it is true that we have other means of accessing The Times — the laptop, on which I receive my “Daily Briefing,” the cellphone, on which my husband relies — these digital versions provide only so much of what is in the print edition, and for a news junkie like me it just isn’t enough. 

Sinking into a newspaper in print is my morning ritual. With my morning Times in hand, I settle on the sun porch. I begin by flipping through the pages and reading headlines. Usually, after finishing the first story that catches my eye, I go back and start on the front page again. I always have a nagging feeling that I might miss something of importance.

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned. Young people, even members of my family and The Star’s staff, don’t seem to need the daily Times. They apparently pick up headlines here and there via email or social media and know everything about everything crucial in the day’s news without sitting down and focusing on it. I have the nagging feeling that maybe they are the ones missing something.

We’re still trying to solve the mystery of the missing Times. Is some early morning dog walker purloining our copy? Is there a new delivery person who doesn’t know how to find Edwards Lane, the street we live on? (We are rather off the map, as a private road.) Should I draw up a sign with a huge arrow pointing up the driveway? 

To be honest, The Times isn’t the only news source I’m addicted to. Come evening, I must have the “PBS NewsHour,” and then I like to go to MSNBC to see what it is focusing on, and then I switch to Fox News for a while to get the other side of the story, and then go back to MSNBC to catch Rachel Maddow. 

My husband doesn’t join me in all this. He is more a digital-screen junkie than a news junkie. Even though he sits in the same room as I flip through my evening television news cycle, he concentrates on his computer the whole time (these days, doing research and writing on one of his great-grandfathers, a noted architect of the Gilded Age). And therein lies the difference between us: He is younger than me, turning 78 in August. Does that make him young enough to be a member of the digital generation?

Welcome, once again, to the world. Thirty-two countries, 64 games, and 35 joyous days of football. It’s not called soccer anywhere else but America, and since Team U.S.A. did not qualify, there’s no reason to call it anything but football. The beautiful game is a simple one, as Gary Lineker, the English former professional footballer and current sports broadcaster, once put it, in which 22 tattooed men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end the Germans win.

Yes, but this World Cup is already proving to be different. We’re in murky Russia, after all, with Vladimir Putin — whose over-Botoxed face itself evokes the taut smoothness of a football — who appears to be able to bend every rule as skillfully as Beckham. Somehow, the host nation ended up in unquestionably the weakest group in the World Cup, alongside Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Uruguay, and viewers believe it can’t just be a coincidence. 

Nor could anyone fathom Russia’s 5-0 win over higher-ranked Saudi Arabia, prompting one clever football fan to tweet: “Revised opinion. Russia to win every game 6-0 and take the World Cup. Putin to lift the trophy in full kit.”

Putin, in response, has only smiled that contorted smile for the cameras and denied that any corruption has taken place. Well, he can be forgiven his smirk, because for him the tournament is not really about sport, it is about telling the world that Russia is back. Whichever nation lifts the trophy on July 15, one man’s victory looks secure.

In the first four days alone there were some opening-game stunners. Cristiano Ronaldo refused to allow Spain’s comeback story to overshadow his own. With a spectacular hat trick, the gimlet-eyed Portugal captain almost single-handedly denied Spain the victory it craved at the end of a torrid week that saw the dismissal of its manager. The action was nonstop and it kept coming back to Ronaldo, who produced one of the greatest performances of his international career. He is astonishing.

While flashy Brazil was held to a draw by Switzerland, the great Lionel Messi’s Argentina was stunned by an unlovely 1-1 draw against Iceland. Yes, Iceland, the country with a population the size of Tampa, Fla., and with absolutely no history of tournament football. No matter what happens next, Iceland has already established itself as the greatest story of the tournament. It was a true feather in the Viking helmet to be able to face Argentina in their World Cup debut and not blink. What heroes they were: brave, organized, superb.

The biggest hero was Hannes Thor Halldorsson, the 34-year-old goalkeeper, who, like every member of this Iceland squad, is only a part-time footballer. Halldorsson is a distinguished filmmaker. The team’s manager is a dentist.

Argentina certainly had the personnel to save itself, and Messi will regret his lackluster penalty as painfully as anybody. The stadium had just heard its first coordinated “Viking clap‚“ Iceland’s gift to football acoustics, when Argentina’s fans responded with song. They had the bigger numbers, the louder voice, and the arena had its first real taste of how a World Cup should sound. It was certainly an unforgettable day for Icelanders. All 300,000 of them.

Germany, always expected to be nothing less than super-efficient, faced utter humiliation losing to Mexico on Sunday. It was a horror show for the defending World Cup champions, who suffered a nightmare start after being defeated by a goal by Mexico’s Hirving Lozano, nicknamed Chucky after the character in the slasher movie “Child’s Play.” 

Even so, Mexico is no one’s favorite, as its fans directed a homophobic slur at Germany’s goalkeeper during the game. The International Federation of Football Association has repeatedly fined the Mexican football federation over this particular chant, and it was clearly audible at the stadium when the goalie prepared to take a kick.

And, ah yes, England. My home team. It hasn’t won an opening game since 2006, and on Monday, football’s most quietly tortured nation entered a World Cup arena with the burden of expectation close to zero. But through a plague of mosquitoes, a series of missed scoring opportunities, and a huge turnout by Tunisia’s supporters, the youthful England XI, with only 248 international wins and 25 goals in international competition among them, beat an obstinate, organized Tunisia. 

It was brilliant at times, it was brutal at times, but when England needed a matchwinner, up stepped Captain Kane. Two goals for Harry, three points for England. 

So, in less than a week, we have bowed at the feet of Cristiano Ronaldo, groaned with Lionel Messi, cheered Iceland’s pluck, witnessed the humbling of mighty Germany, and bubbled with optimism over England. The World Cup ruling bodies might be compromised by greed and corruption, but the beautiful game proves that it can still provide something unexpected — a connection to some enduringly distant corners of the world. And, so far in Russia, more kick than a shot of Stolichnaya.

Judy D’Mello is The Star’s education reporter.