This is going to make me sound really weird but when I was in Milan I had such a big amount of spare time. I found online that you can buy a Lego model of the Taj Mahal so I bought it and started building it, I only built some of it because I got injured halfway through.

It only compounds the tragedy that was the Hand of Henry against the Irish, because surely Giovanni Trapattoni, Robbie Keane & Co. would not have put on such a dispassionate display. It’s probably of little comfort to the Irish FA or its side, but the irony of Les Bleus being dispatched by a team in green more than six months after the travesty goes down as smoothly as a shot of Jameson does for me.

You can see these people standing on Court Street nightly, staring through the plate-glass windows at a dining room packed with brownstone bohemians, third novelists, people with Web sites, with good art at home. They look slightly pained, these visitors from afar wondering about the life choices they made that put them in Chelsea or Park Slope or Montclair, and not down here in Carroll Gardens, this little Italian village off New York Harbor where life is obviously perfect.