football season

it is european football time again.
it is strange how i measure time by football, especially since i would not even describe myself as a major football fan. i played only a little bit as a kid, but i was never especially good. i have little interest in the clubs games, and i support rangers only nominally as my family has supported them for generations and it just seems the inborn logical club to back. but for some reason i do watch the international games. as they happen rarely and always in the summer, over the past 2 decades they have also become my way of counting time. i remember always exactly where i was and what i was doing during every world cup or european championship over the past 20 years. one of my earliest memories is of meeting the entire saudi world cup team in the airport, right after they had been knowcked out of the tournament. i was young and ran over and asked the guys to sign my diary (this was before blogs, clearly) they were all very kind, some even drew little pictures in the book.
the last european cup coincided with one of the roughest times of the past few years. I was back in buda, and had just learned that i would not be able to stay in the country for another year. i watched all the games with my friends at liszt ferenc ter, shouting at the screens in the open air cafes. there were always loads of us there, watching. marci and ferenc as our hungarians, marko and jelena in their croatian tshirts, oliver from estonia whose team wasnt even playing, and dogan and bilge from istambul. they were my friends, my circle, and i knew my whole world was about to come to an end. sure enough, we have never all been in the same room together since those days of football. the last game (portugal-greece) i watched in new exile in paris, on my friends couch. i called back to the buda guys, longing to be with them, and hating france for having been dumped there so randomly.
as this cup moves into the semi-finals i cant help but remember those dark days 4 years ago. the first match i watched in a dodgy bar in holloway, munching a veggie kebab (only in england could you buy such a thing!) with a pole, an azeri and a russian from latvia. part way through the game i looked around and realised that i have somehow managed to reconstruct my life here. it is not the same, but i have friends here none the less.
amazingly, dogan and bilge arrived just in time for the start of the tournament. i hadnt seen them since 2004, and it was a delight to see them again, just as the turkish team was advancing in a most surprising and unpredictable way. it is good to reunite, especially over football.