The city. New York City. The other half of my week. Reached by four hours (plus a little, usually) of bus and subway train into the ghetto at the end of the 2 line: Flatbush Avenue. A few steps and you’re in the midst of the most absurd academic elegance, on a campus that always wins the prize for most beautiful state university campus in America. Take a few steps back and you’re in the ghetto again – black youth unemployment 100%. Literally 100%. The two Americas. It keeps you sane and grounded. (At Princeton, for instance, where all our faculty yearn to be, you could imagine you’re in a kind of dream of Oxbridge.)

You’re in Brooklyn. Built in the ’30s with the help of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens (little trees now magnificent lindens and oaks), and tiny bricks to ape Harvard Yard, Brooklyn College did once host brilliant immigrant Jews and boasted a better Nobel prize rate than Harvard itself. Time moved on and demographics have changed, although brilliant Jews still abound. Among them, brilliant students from everywhere, China, Korea, Albania, India, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Morocco, the Caribbean and, of course, Russia. Couldn’t be a more delightful student body to teach. But step outside the gates and the real America resumes its reign.

Before watching Germany outlast Argentina’s brave effort, and, in the presence of their own Queen of Europe, Angela Merkel, lift the world’s footballing crown, Joe and Claire & I visited Athens, an antique dilapidated gem of a town on the Hudson, currently hosting a piece art by Claire: her beautiful Rock Paper Scissors II, an assemblage of paper cranes (plus scissors, and the window representing rock). The exhibition’s theme is… roadkill.

Athens was once Hudson’s twin, opposite each other on the river, connected by ferries. The Rip van Winkle bridge was built and gave larger Hudson the edge, making of it the more glamorous (and tawdry) of the old twins. Little Athens is now the lovelier of the two, with once fine, modest main street buildings going to seed, elsewhere a slew of superb Victorian homes and an artistic community that is a true upstate treasure. Around America people wonder what upstate New York might consist of. At its best, it’s this.

A dog and pool day. Dog quiet – ate last night’s food, to my relief (so far, tonight, she’s refused it.) Here she is lying under her favorite wild rose bush. The pool is still giving us fits and costing a hundred each time we go back to the ‘professionals.’ We put in chlorine. It vanishes. Phosphates eat it. We put in anti-phosphates. No effect. Pour in chlorine (Pool Shock). Phosphates eat it. Without chlorine, algae grow. Where do the phosphates arrive from? No one knows. Fertiliser leaching into the water table, most likely, and into our well. What can be done? Only the same. Over and over. At impossible expense. According to other pool owners, the phosphate plague is new, in this magnitude. It’s making pool-owning unfeasible.

Joe, arriving last night at 11 pm after an epic 500-mile ride from Toronto, slept late but rose again as Chef Joe, making us a mango salad for tonight. One great thing today – found a wonderful rehearsal space in the local Christian Science church, on offer to us on magnanimous terms. Hurrah! A big leap forward for our coming Woodstock Players rehearsals. With a cast of 20 (the play is a faux Shakespearean tragi-comedy about the Emperor Nero and his court), one of the plusses of the church is its spacious car park. You shouldn’t find this in the city; but then you wouldn’t be driving to rehearsals in the city….

So, alas – futebol – after the Brazilian reputation succumbed to their own mindless aggression (vs. Colombia, followed by totally losing their way against Germany), the once-glorious Dutch brought pointless passivity, and perished, fittingly, by the arbitrariness of the penalty shoot-out. Those who recall Brazil’s last great team, in 1970, the team that intimidated everyone, will recall the Dutch team of the next two World Cups, never winners, but kings of the game. Who will we crown this time, on Sunday? It has to be the Germans – and yet there will be one intimidating figure on the field, and he’s not German. It may yet be all to play for

A country panic we haven’t experienced for some years: our Siberian, Nua, ran off – her collar with its painful electronic signal that keeps her within our electronic perimeter, grown too loose – and was retrieved by a kindly and effective official. When we heard she was gone we couldn’t imagine how we’d get her back; it’s taken days, in the past, even though she never goes far; fear of returning through the electronic perimeter keeps her leery of us. We got her back, and it seemed miraculous. Luckily she doesn’t seem to have attacked a cat beloning to a neighbor, which was the nightmare of the previous escape. Nua, in a stunned state, sought refuge in a huge box-tree bush guarded by hostas. Its dark interior is her favorite hiding place.

Did I call it or did I call it? Praying that Brazil would be soundly beaten in the next round… for the sake of the game. Dream come true, beyond my hopes. The score was 5-0 to Germany when we arrived at the Catskill Mountain Pizza parlour to meet friends and watch the end of the game – surprisingly few people gathered there, just a handful of diehard aficionados. Clearly, professional soccer isn’t a part of rural American life yet. I know city bars were full of shocked soccer fans, watching the brutal de-throning of the inventors of the modern game. (In truth, Brazil fielded a poor team from the beginning of the tournament – even the vaunted Neymar proved overrated.) No less shocking then their fall from grace was the collapse of the Spanish armada, after winning successive international tourneys. But the Germans… always in the game, decade after decade – ever since 1952, my first World Cup. Now I’m hoping the Dutch will beat Argentina, and then beat Germany in the final… for the sake of the game. They’ve been playing its most beautiful version for generations now. Sunshine again today, o joy. Off to water plants and leap in the pool.

Still trying to adjust to being home – it was only 7 weeks, but so focused and intense the bike tour created habits and a head it’s proving hard to dispel. Ah yes, I’m home: country pains-in-the-ass no. 1 – our backyard pool (also a country joy), a cement pool getting on in years, tiles crumbling by the dozen from the perimeter, used by friends and neighbors in return for help with its upkeep, is a maintenance money pit thanks to costly mistakes – costly to us! – by pool maintenance professionals, so-called, and thanks also to the iron in our well (another country p-i-t-a/joy), both of which have enabled a flora no quantities or combinations of chemicals seem capable of entirely clearing from the water. Claire dreams of cementing the damn thing over, or moving to a pool-less, less troublesome house. Country pain no. 2: the house. No, let’s leave that malfunctioning country item for another day. Country pain 3: rabbits. The dog just watches them. They get into the pool area and eat our (pain/joy) homegrown vegetables. Somewhere I have an over-and-under Spanish .310 – and as a teenager sometimes rode shotgun to keep farmers’ fields rabbit-free – but I just don’t have the heart to kill anything any more. Enough – enough country pains for one day. Now to prepare breakfast from fresh country eggs – country joy! to know the very hens that laid the eggs you eat.