Still brooding about England’s defeat, I went to Cape Town last night to watch Spain play Portugal. I find that at this stage in the competition, a sort of fellow feeling settles in amongst the followers of defeated nations. On the plane down, I sat next to some Chileans who were still licking their wounds, after their team’s 3-0 defeat by Brazil the previous night. They told me that England had been unlucky; I told them that Chile had been unlucky. Near the ground, a bunch of fans in Mexican shirts noticed my England scarf – and we jointly cursed the referees in this competition, and agreed that both our teams had been victims of incompetence or worse. Then queuing to get into the ground I got chatting to a Japanese fan, who had just seen his team go out on penalties to Paraguay. I told him how impressed I had been by Honda, the Japanese forward. “He’s called Honda, but he plays like a Ferrari,” replied the fan, who was over from Tokyo for the week.

Sitting in the stands last night, waiting for the Argentina-Mexico game to start, I texted a South African friend about England’s loss to Germany earlier in the day. “We were robbed”, I wrote. Her reply reminded me that “In SA, that phrase is ambiguous”.

Actually, one of the things that most visitors to this World Cup agree about is that South Africa feels a lot less scary than they expected. I have been here four days now, and I haven’t been murdered once.

The Afghan war effort is in chaos; the Australian prime minister has resigned and the G20 are meeting in Toronto. But the global event that I have decided to concentrate on is the World Cup. I have just arrived in Durban and later this afternoon, I will be attending the Lusophone derby: Brazil v Portugal.

One of the things I love about the World Cup is the way that it takes a country over. Even the air hostesses on my flight down from Johannesburg were wearing football kit (a marked improvement on the fussy uniforms that BA put their cabin crew in). Out on the Durban waterfront almost everybody is wearing either a Brazil or a Portugal shirt.  The miles of golden sand are playing host to lots of Copacabana-style games of beach football (the Durban beaches knock spots off the Copacabana). Everybody is in a good mood. At one stage, a street hawker began to shout at me rather loudly, in what I ïnitially took to be an aggressive manner. But then I made out his words: “My brother, your flies are undone.” I bought a Brazil cap off him, as a reward for his tip.

Just after England’s abject 0-0 draw with Algeria in Friday night, my friend Stephen turned to me and said – “The whole world is laughing at us.” That’s the thing about the World Cup. I invariably fall into the trap of seeing the England team as representing me personally – and so their rare triumphs and frequent disasters can never be shrugged off. Searching desperately for consolation, as England head for the exits, I can only note that we are not the only big European country to be struggling: France are all but eliminated; Germany lost to Serbia; Spain, inexplicably, lost to Switzerland.

But, let us not dwell solely on the negative. Here are my World Cup highlights for the first week:

1) Best game: USA 2- Slovenia 2: A fanatstic comeback by the Americans from 2-0 down. This US team has a college-boy charm; they work hard and they are good sports. They barely protested when they were inexplicably denied a perfectly legitimate winning goal that would have made this one of the all-time great comebacks. The second best game was Denmark 2- Cameroon 1, last night. Fantastic attacking football – I was just a bit sad that Cameroon didn’t get the result they deserved.