Days like this are heaven on earth. White blazing sunshine, cool green shade, a bit of melodrama and a bit of football (the latter on TV; the former in my living room over a bottle of wine). This is the first World Cup to which I’ve paid much attention. I remember the last one vividly, not because of the football, but because it was the summer I fell in love with London.

I was in the early clutches of an infatuation which, although it would continue for much (too) much longer, was then at its most potent, and least painful. It was the summer after my first year at university, and I took the train into Kings Cross from Hertfordshire armed with nothing but a discman and The Kooks’ ‘Naïve’ on repeat. A month later I would be living in Italy with an iPod and a new wardrobe, but that July I was still easily impressed - and consequently for me, one person came to represent a whole city.

We drank sat on the street kerb in Camden; we watched the sunset from Primrose Hill. I followed him through the cast courts in the V&A, utterly unable to concentrate. He took me to shabby bars in Shoreditch, worlds away from the London I had grown up with – the London of West End musicals, department store windows at Christmas, Topshop and water lilies at the National Gallery. It was the first time I had been in the city with someone who wasn’t fretting over the last train home, or the rules of their travelcard. I rode terrified and laughing on the back of his bike through Trafalgar Square and St James’s Park, back to the Westminster flat – where I would wake the next morning, too early, and with careful quiet marvel at the views, the office workers already at their desks in the Channel Four building, and at his library of ‘important’ French literature.

I spent those days in a paralysis of joy and fear. Out of them was born an enduring passion for this city, with whom my love affair has continued (thankfully) beyond the other. Cities are endlessly generous, at least I feel them to be so – but then snatching at summer evenings with a guy who is in a serious relationship with someone else gives one a rather warped view of generosity. So today I still find London endlessly rich and captivating – and never more so than in early summer. The arches of Green Park, cathedral-like on an early Sunday morning. The eternal fairground of the South Bank, the baubles of the Albert Bridge. The cool meditativeness of the Tate, the civilised crowds of the Royal Academy, the ebullient flowers of St James’s Park, the scarlet of the guards outside the Palace – London is worth every flicker of my passion. Whereas he was most definitely not.