The final was the only game I watched in its entirety. My support for Spain was both emotional and irrational.

I love the language, I like the feel of the country, and I have an interest in its evolving relationship with its erstwhile empire in the Americas – where one of my earliest journalistic enthusiasms lies.

It’s one of the possibly irrational reasons why I feel an Iberia/BA fusion makes such sense – a global liaison that appeals to some of the best of two old empires and results in very little duplication of service.

There is much about domestic football that I find alienating, not least its organisation. You can’t vaguely support Brighton & Hove Albion all your life without feeling the frustration of a sport organised for the sole benefit of the footballing elite.

Alienation lies in its maleness too, and its machismo – particularly off the pitch.

And this was where South Africa won. Was it the vuvuzelas wot won it? Did they still the drunken maleness that so has so often brought the game low in the North.

How come fewer  ‘fans’  were arrested throughout the entire competition than are often arrested in a single day of football in the North? Was it the altitude? The Southern winter temperatures?

This has been a watershed for South Africa. A massive moment that Mandela himself did not NEED to attend even if he had been fit enough – the first glimpse of a confident post-Mandela South African age?

A watershed too for a vision of a South Africa that can act in unity to produce so coherent and tangible a result.

Don’t worry, the rose tinted specs are off – for sure the contest allowed a glimpse of the country’s inequalities and challenges.

But the reality that South Africa accounts for 27 per cent of the entire African continent’s GDP speaks of its role to come if this World Cup energy can be sustained.

That’s a big ‘if’. But we can be grateful to football for what has passed. I’m glad I watched the World Cup Final. Despite being an indifferent football follower, I got a lot out of it – I am optimist enough to suspect that in one way and another, the whole world did.

Swirling numbers swarm around the baggage belts. Rows of sleek black VIP limousines still pick up executives. And the journey into Dublin itself, through the equally sleek tunnel that brings you out in the docks, speaks of the infrastructure investment the country so badly needed.

Open the newspaper, and there is the Taoiseach Brian Cowen fresh from yet another parliamentary joust in which he preserved his job to fight yet another day.

He is flanked in photographs by the remarkable Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan, who is combating not only the worst crisis to confront his country since the Great Famine, but is also personally and hugely courageously battling pancreatic cancer at the same time. Indeed he himself had just emerged from a week in hospital fighting off an infection.

The newspapers are also full of Irish magnates fighting off the receivers or bowing to inevitable bankruptcy. There is rage against the banks and against the state’s bad debt bank – NAMA (the National Asset Management Agency) or debt dump.

On the streets and in the overblown four-star hotels you don’t see the ranks of unemployed. Yet every individual you see, you wonder how near the brink they are.

Thousands of homes are being repossessed and nearly half a million people are unemployed. From a population of four and a half million, and a workforce of around two million, that represents between a quarter and a third of the entire work force.

Upon departure, Dublin Airport is a depressing meander through retail outlets – miles of them, it seems, selling stuff that if a bulldozer happened by could easily be confused with landfill.

Is this a message to UK plc? Is this the terrifying spectre that engineered the departure of Sir Alan Budd – the UK’s still new boss of the Office of Budget Responsibility? He forecast 1.3 million unemployed as a result of the budget measures alone. Now he’s going. There is, according to several sources in Whitehall, much more to his desired return to retirement in Devon than has yet met the public eye.

In short, whither Ireland goes, does UK plc follow? Heaven preserve us all if it is!

As is my wont, I awakened to the tones of the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4. The day’s controversy centred on the news that Dr Jeffrey John – the gay Anglican Dean of St Albans, who lives in a civil partnership, was being considered to become the Bishop of Southwark.

The raised voices came in a debate between two Anglican priests, in which one, Canon Chris Sugden – Executive Secretary of something called Anglican Mainstream – raised his voice in protest against the proposed appointment.

He was enraged that a priest who had indulged in an “active gay relationship” with the man whom he now enjoyed a civil partnership, was now being considered to become a Bishop. The Canon dismissed the suggestion that Dr John was now celibate. I already sensed that the discussion had veered into the priestly private life further than felt comfortable at 7.10 in the morning. But the Canon ploughed on.

He described an active homosexual, who had now become celibate, as akin to “someone entering the Cabinet having once fiddled his expenses”. The climax to the Canon’s wrath was that his fellow Canon had “never apologised” for his journey from active homosexuality to celibacy.

Last night I found myself sitting in the sanctuary of the liberal Synagogue in London’s St John’s Wood. It was a rare debate staged by the group Independent Jewish Voices, in which two liberal Rabbi’s and a Palestinian human rights lawyer debated whether human rights in Israel are in crisis.

As they spoke, one man shouted “rubbish”, another, “crap”, and yet another, “go home!” The Rabbis were shouted at with the same ferocity that greeted the contribution from the quietly spoken Palestinian woman.

As she spoke toward the end of the debate, yet another member of the almost entirely Jewish audience shouted “terrorist” and “fascist”. I interpreted this as an attack on the Palestinian. But I was reliably later informed that the shout came from a more orthodox Jewish believer and was reserved for a member of the liberal wing of the Jewish faith, sitting eight seats away from him.

Is violent verbal dispute a necessary concomitant to religious belief, whatever the faith? In what other walk of life can you expected to be bombarded by such anger?

There was hardly another  boat in sight. I wondered why, and suddenly remembered the Men’s Final at Wimbledon was on. Must remember in future – that is a very good moment to put to sea.

As we neared our mooring in the Beaulieu river the skies clouded, the temperature dropped and a day of fabulous detachment from the world beyond came to a rather grey conclusion.

Driving back up the A3 into London, somewhere around Twickenham, the car was overtaken at speed by two blaring police squad cars, blue lights flashing. At a road junction a mile or two later, another squad car was speeding in from the left, and yet two more from the opposite direction.

A police van and another squad car were on the corner, a number of officers were on the pavement and several young men and women were standing against a fence. In the time I was stopped at the traffic lights, I counted at least six squad cars, two vans, and some 15 to 20 police officers on the ground. I saw no sign of weapons. It had all the hallmarks of a drug incident.

I wondered how it would look once the cuts have kicked in. I wondered too whether one consequence of the cuts might prove to be a fundamental review of the criminalisation of drugs.

Snowblog has addressed the question of legalising all classified drugs before. Indeed the Economist magazine continues to argue the case for it. The costs of enforcement, the vast underworld of pain and wretchedness spawned by the ‘drugs war’ are a blight across the world. The illegal drugs industry is worth many hundreds of billions of pounds across the world. They dominate prisons, politics, business, policing, social work and so much more in every major society on earth.

One is left wondering, as I did not whilst under sail in the Solent, in whose interests the current drug policy prevails.

John McAslan is an inspiring force who couples Kings Cross with a project to rebuild the Iron Market in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (devastated by the earthquake six months ago). He was looking at the New Horizon Youth centre, a day centre where I used to work before I became a hack. I have been either on, or chairing its management committee ever since.

Mr McAslan was concerned about the increasing numbers of homeless and vulnerable teenagers who were being attracted to the emerging Kings Cross project. We were talking about the possibility of moving our project even nearer to the station.

We provide security, accommodation, mental health support, football, art, performance, music, showers, laundry, and much else for vulnerable and uprooted young people. Wrestling with the human consequences of sex working, drugs, alcohol, petty criminality, is our stock in trade.

In the end we didn’t move our project. Instead McAslan funded a competition organised by the Royal Institute of Architects. 70 architects entered amazingly creative plans. We chose one, and designs were drawn for the complete refurbishment and expansion of our work space.

We were more than fortunate to secure funding from the then government’s My Place funding stream – the best part of £2m.

Three months ago, Sarah Brown reopened our state-of-the-art building. Last month it won a prestigious RIBA award. Our work with young people has been transformed. So have the lives of those who both work in and make use of New Horizon.

So why do I blog about this today?  Because this week sees the climax of London Architecture Week, and this morning I’m speaking at one of the events about how architecture has transformed the work of one small charity.

I’ll throw in something about our need for urban trees, plugging the fantastic Southwark “urban forest project” – oh, and I’ll be talking bikes and cities too.

Tonight I’ll be chairing a debate at Grimshaw Architects in Clerkenwell, taking urban themes still further. Got to get on my bike right now if I’m to make that Smithfield breakfast in time to give my talk.

I was awoken in the country three weekends ago by a banging on the bedroom window – a sharp thwack-thwack on the glass. I peered behind the drawn blind and there was the telltale evidence: blood and smeared mud on the glass. Heavens! What was it?

I went back to bed. Thwack! Thwack! I peered again. This time there he was, actually sitting on the old brick ledge with his back against the glas, a mottled brown feathered back up against the glass. Small head, hooked bill. But what was he doing?

Back to bed. 6.00am. Bloody bird (literally)! Thwack! Bang! Thwack! This time I caught him at it, smashing the body of a field mouse against the glass, literally pulverising it.

Was there a nest nearby? Young to be fed broken bits of fieldmouse? Later, when he’d gone, I found a dead fieldmouse lying feet in the air, dead on the sill.

I was born in the country, am a part-time country bumpkin, happier in a week that ends there than when it doesn’t. But that doesn’t blunt the sharp encounter with brutal mother nature.

I am seeing more dead badgers than ever in the country roadside gutters. Humans are going to gas them in Wales. We don’t have any cows in our valley, just sheep, so I haven’t heard they will gas any.

Last weekened, thwacks again – but on downstairs window. I’m going to capture it on my camera. I open the blind, scaring a jackdaw, flapping away across the garden.

Dammit, I know the original miscreant was a mottle brown, and smaller. Have I been dreaming? Or have I witnessed a kestrel doing something kestrels don’t do?  They normally don’t like proximity to human housing.

Or was it a sparrowhawk anyway? Or was I deluded, and there was a kestrel on my sill and the jackdaw was doing the thwacking elsewhere. I have the dead mouse for evidence. But…

Cast our minds back to 9/11 and many thought it reasonable to “go after” Bin Laden and his Taliban harbourers and training camps. Hard to remember that the “invasion” was not unsuccessful – in that the woman-oppressing, music and dance disliking, terror exporting Taliban were displaced as the government.

But sudden diversion to fight a war of choice in Iraq; together with the installation of the user-friendly Karzai sapped both success, support, and potentially any viable way of extricating from Afghanistan. On Washington’s Capitol Hill the chair of the House Appropriations Foreign Operations Sub-committee – congresswoman Nita Lowey is trying to halt all non-humanitarian aid to Afghanistan amid reports that the Kabul government is blocking corruption investigations which appear to reveal that $3bn has been flown out of the main airport in the past three years.

Does that mean that for every $30bn of military expenditure that Congress votes through for the Afghan war, they have to build in an extra sum of $3bn? So does this explain why the sum Congress is currently considering amounts to a staggering $33bn? (30+3=33)

The vote on the money comes as General Stanley McChrystal announces he’s leaving the US army altogether. What a chaotic situation! The man leading the spending of tens of billions of the US and UK taxpayers’ money one moment, enjoying civi-street after a bout of insubordination the next. Does the McChrystal affair reveal a deeper malaise – that the people who think they know what they are doing, don’t?

Perhaps even that the people who don’t know what they are doing (us?) do? We still have no idea why he said what he did to an unknown reporter on Rolling Stone.

One of the reasons why it sustains is because it is well run, small, and boasts an effective Secretariat. The Toronto meetings of both the G8 and 20 failed to resolve the issue. There is still not the structure that rendered the G8 a success in place to provide the same service for the G20.

But there are other strange dynamics that flow from the gathering strength of the G20 as a global leadership forum. The UK, France, and the US, for example provide aid programmes in a number of the other member nations of the G20.

Amid the all-party domestic consensus surrounding the UK aid programme there is so far little discussion of the reality that one of the biggest elements of the programme flows to one of the world’s top emerging economies – India.

By far the biggest recipient of British aid anywhere in the world, India is currently experiencing economic growth of a hugely enviable 8 per cent a year. Britain is staggering along at around 1 per cent.

There can be little moral argument against a post-imperial order in which what is still one of the world’s richest economies (the UK is still the 4th biggest economy in the world, and the 6th biggest manufacturing power) giving aid to a country with 600 million of whose people rank amongst the very poorest on the planet.

The moral argument may be simple, but for how much longer will a country with growing unemployment, looming social and economic deprivation, and continuing high levels of immigration from the Indian subcontinent, accept the “ring fencing” of a budget that is devoted to assisting a country that in the long term threatens to overhaul their own?

It’s a crude point but no less real for that. In the short and medium term, Minister may have an “education job” on its own populace to maintain the highly effective UK aid programmes in Indian states like Bihar.

We all know that there are days when very little happens and, as journalists, we have to work overtime to distinguish one day’s events from another. But last night a cascade of happenings toppled into one another.

Even at the sporting level, there was the backdrop of England scrabbling through to the next round of the World Cup. Then the world’s longest grand slam tennis match in history – currently 59 all in the 5th set at Wimbledon.

But the big stuff centred on President Obama carpeting the top allied general in Afghanistan – General Stanley McChrystal. He sacked him as we know – He came out to say so at 17 minutes before we were on air at 7.00pm. Afghan policy in crisis…but exactly why?

But we were already wrestling with the accident on the sea-bed 5,000 feet down in the Gulf of Mexico. Could it get worse? Word was that the cap tapping some of the gushing oil had been taken off following some sort of collision with an unmanned underwater vehicle (the cap has since been reinstalled). And then came word that two workers at the disaster had lost their lives but mysteriously had done so in circumstances unrelated to it.

In three hours our ‘lead’ veered from England’s football victory to BP’s catastrophe, to McChrystal’s sacking.

Yet battling for air was the budget fall-out. The strong hint from Chancellor George Osborne’s statement earlier in the day that further cuts in the benefits bill were in the pipeline (sorry to use that word).

It’s at these moments that news and purveying it become an intoxicating mix of retrieval, analysis, and waiting for yet another shoe to drop.

This very morning it did. I wake up this morning to find that Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (who so recently appeared to be the country’s long term leadership hope) had been distasted after only three years in the job as Australia’s prime minister – to be replaced by the first Aussie woman to hold the office, Welsh-born Julia Gillard. The country’s massive multinational mining companies are in the frame having opposed Rudd’s effort to tax their ‘excess profits’ to fund Australia’s budget.

Yet another news challenge – as we see one multinational corporation tamed in the Gulf of Mexico, and others half a world away seeing their nemesis disposed of by the Australian Labor Party.

Want to know why we love the job? What a challenge! What a privilege!

Coke stands accused of a morass of drug dealing crimes in the US and looks as if he’ll be deported to stand trial there. But in the meantime the strong allegation is that he has compromised the government of Jamaica allegedly funding the ruling party itself.

The prime minister went to amazing lengths to try to block his extradition before having to apologise to his people for deploying state funds to hire an American firm to fight the deportation that side of the water.

Coke’s case highlights yet again the terrible dynamic so many developing countries are caught in. Standing at the cross-roads between production and consumption, the Caribbean mimics West Africa in its rancid dependence upon drug cartels for corrupt advancement.

It’s a gathering disaster that the ‘North’ simply will not face. As I reported more than two decades ago when based in the US, the power in American politics wielded by the illegal drug industry knows few bounds. It is reportedly, according to UN estimates, a multi hundred billion dollar business. So it is in Europe too.

The crime, misery, corruption, social distortion, and the rest, questions the entire approach of the ‘Northern powers’ to illegal drugs. From Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Colombia and Bolivia, and beyond wars continue, centred on drug cultivation.

Is it time to send for Smith Kline Beacham, Roche, and the rest and ask them to take the entire industry over? In other words, IS there another way?

Should Dudus Coke go down as the man who eventually broke the taboo that continues to surround any question of ever readdressing the global menace of illegal drugs?