Friday 22 June

I am leaving Chicago on a beautiful day and so I went for a walk before it was time to go to O’Hare airport. I wandered along the business district’s sunless canyons - ‘measureless to man’ – making my way through a crowd of unathletic teenagers slouching past in sports wear. I wandered past the Berghoff Restaurant where I ate last night with Bill my media escort after the lecture at the Pritzker Military Library. The Berghoff is an old German restaurant from the days when Illinois was almost German speaking. The family at the next door table held hands round the table as they said grace. But there was also a group of three barely mobile obese young women sitting slouched in their chairs waiting for food like baby birds who would never be able to leave the nest. America is of course a land of astonishing contrasts as well as uniformity. It also has a taste for polished steel - in restrooms, drinking fountains and heavy trucks. I suppose its dull gleam always looks new and is easy to clean, and it provides an antidote to all those junkyards of rusting metal and abandoned factories, which represent the downside of the American dream.

Even the Wall Street Journal had fun with the football match between Germany and Greece. It reported that the Greeks were threatening to use a drachma coin for the toss to wind up Angela Merkel. After the Poland-Russia match, soccer has become the substitute, (and one hopes the placebo), for war. Still, the days are passed when Otto von Habsburg, on being asked which side he would support in a forthcoming Austria-Hungary match, was able to reply: ‘And whom are we playing?’