The party's over

Well, we lost, and for the next few days we will be going about our sadly resumed duties in a sober, inward state, shaking our heads like a nation unable to wake from a deep sleep. The joy was terrific, the hope almost unbearable, the loss, when it came, correspondingly bleak. June has passed in a dream, a dream of sunshine, community, party spirit, national exuberance, happiness, and now the dream is over. Midsummer's Day finds us back in working clothes, clocking in to the humdrum reality of normal life.

I can now get back to planning my mother's 80th birthday celebrations which, and I tried to conceal this from her, have been seriously threatened by England's prospects in the World Cup. She had the bad judgment to have her birthday on the weekend of the World Cup final, and even the few handpicked relatives and close friends chosen to share the day with her have been showing wobbly tendencies. My mother was understanding. Of course we would suspend lunch until the match was over, but only an 80-yearold could fail to capture the magnitude of the moment.

Once, and I'm thinking back to 1966, it was sufficient to watch a World Cup final on your small black and white television with your family. We watched that particular match with my deaf granny and it only added to the fun that she cheered when Germany scored and exclaimed in horror when England got one. But England has changed immeasurably since that day, glorious as it was.

We have wide-screen television and sports pubs and we have pubs which weren't sports pubs but wisely got in screens and applied for extra licences in time to hook the crowds. Pub takings have outpaced the stock market. The streets have become a place for public displays of joy. World Cup 2002 was not about experiencing ecstasy in a corner of your living room. It's been a national, tribal thing. It was about being happy in public. The bigger the public, the greater the happiness.

The national mood was magnified for being shared on every street corner and the mood, for the past two weeks, has been joyful. It helped that for one long weekend in June there seemed to be everything to celebrate - extra holiday and the Jubilee and sunshine and street parties and football and flags.

Republicans had never had it so bad, though there might have been a few takers for Beckham for president. There was a Christmas-like suspension of normality everywhere. Bosses, not so much understanding as recognising the hopeless irrepressibility and inevitability of party spirits, smiled at, even encouraged, football fever, though not everywhere. I'm told a couple of local council employees in Wandsworth got into trouble for being unfortunately caught out on camera watching the footie when they should have been sweeping the streets. But who really cares? On the great day when England beat Argentina, the streets were used for dancing and playing football in one of those dreamlike moments when you know the normal rules for living in England have been unofficially and universally suspended.

It's been a time for letting things go hang, a time when you could talk to people on buses or exchange a joke with your neighbour, when you could smile at young people dancing in the streets wrapped in the England flag, rather than wondering if they were about to steal your mobile phone. Tolerance, good humour, communication and optimism ruled.

If you want to know what we've all been having a break from, look at the gloomy statistics of the latest Neighbourhood and Community Involvement Survey. Modern Britain is a fractured and isolated place. We've been temporarily smiling at our neighbours in a country where 54 per cent of people claim not to know anyone in their neighbourhood. We've been swapping football gossip with strangers when one in three of us have no close friends nearby and just under half have no relatives in the area either. Family breakdown is blamed for our increasing social isolation but briefly, thanks to football, the isolation has been suspended. There has been something bigger to belong to.

Even people who aren't interested in football have been caught up in it, but if you were keen already, the last two weeks have been a taste of heaven.

Last night I heard young fans saying they wouldn't know what to do with their lives once the football was over. They belong to a generation who first fell for football when Paul Gascoigne burst into tears at the World Cup in Italy. They experienced ecstasy in a football crowd before they moved on to the chemicals that are sold in clubs. Once you've experienced the purity of a goal, the unthinking euphoria of backing a winning team, life changes for ever. It's addictive. You have to know that feeling again, even at the high price of endless bum matches and dismal losses.

But football teaches you about the unpredictable, unreliable business of living. As William Blake wrote, "Joy and Woe are woven fine." The frame of 90 minutes is a metaphor for the shifts of fortune, the agony and the ecstasy of life. Real football fans learn how to deal with pain.

They get lessons in philosophy that go in deeper and last longer than any university seminar. They can handle what fate has handed them today.

It's been good. For two weeks the ghastliness of London traffic, the horror of the Tube, the dreariness of working life, the impossibility of rising house prices have all been diminished to life lived at the small end of the telescope. Londoners have been living life afloat on hope, tribal belonging and collective optimism. There won't be partying in the streets today but maybe we can be united in national disappointment. If we can't joke with our neighbours we can commiserate with them. And people can get out their diaries and make plans again. I can relax because everyone will come to my mother's birthday party now. And Wimbledon starts on Monday. Don't put the flags away just yet.