Global village

This photo was taken while hiking near Bukittinggi, Sumatra, during my post-university world trip. We broke for lunch in a farming village in the shadow of a volcano (it erupted a couple of weeks after I was there - I left a trail of disaster in my wake on that trip: volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, LA riots, Thai democracy riots, a typhoon in Hong Kong, monsoon floods, and John Major's election victory).

The walk was wonderful, amazing, beautiful. We wandered through paddy fields and villages, meeting friendly people at every turn. Everyone was fascinated in me. Not often did they see lanky blond bespectacled men with hairy white legs, at least, not in the flesh. I felt like a rock star.

We found a place serving food. Within seconds of our arrival it was full of kids come to watch us eat fried rice, along with the owner smoking pungent clove cigarettes. See the picture of Maradona on his mirror? We had no language in common but somehow we managed to spend an hour talking about the football - we were in the middle of the 1992 European Championships in Sweden, which the Indonesians were following avidly.

The World Cup is obviously what got me thinking about this episode, prompting me to dig out this photo. It's a cliché, but it does unite the world, for a month every four years. It does more for international brotherhood (and to a lesser extent sisterhood) than any amount of top-down UN-prescribed festivities. As a practising internationalist, I believe in the UN, at least in the principle of the thing. But frankly if George Monbiot's vision of the Age of Consent is ever going to become reality, it's more likely to happen via football.

I've been reading the Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, a perfectly timed Father's Day present. There's a lot of very interesting stuff in there about football and politics. For example, there's a strong body of opinion that football's appeal to the working classes led to its suppression in the US in the early 20th century (later, a Republican Congressman tried to block the 1994 World Cup coming to the US by calling 'soccer' a "European Socialist sport").

Things seem to be changing in North America, thank God, definitely here in Canada where there seems to be huge and genuine interest. All matches are being shown live, everyone's talking about it, the papers are full of it, and Ottawa's highly diverse citizens are walking around wearing various national strips. It's actually a lot more fun following it here than it would be back home in England. All of the excitement, none of the simmering xenophobia.

Details: Minolta X-500, 50mm lens, flash, exposure not recorded. Near Bukittinggi, Sumatra, June 1992. Placemark (approximate, very).