I had to run from the Olympics. I care about it too much

The London 2012 Olympics, seen from a distance of more than a thousand miles, is a peculiar, shimmering thing. Our capital city dominates the news every night but, for reasons which I cannot explain, the Croatians are not exultant about the fact that we have won lots of gold medals at rowing and stuff. It always brings one up short, being abroad and finding that these swarthy foreigners do not think that we are as important as we think we are. Here in Dalmatia the Olympics coverage concentrates almost exclusively on those sports played with great enthusiasm by fractured bits of the southern part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the cabal of squabbling countries who were commies but not Warsaw Pact. So every day, all day, it’s water polo and — even more so — handball.

This is a game which seems to have been based on that quite funny Ben Stiller film Dodgeball, and might be best described as basketball for whites.