The anniversary of Hiroshima fell this week, as it usually does, in the middle of football’s silly season.
Millions for a few weeks consecrate every spare minute to fretting over what coloured shirt a dozen or so millionaires will be wearing next month; or to reading significance into meaningless matches.
Yet 68 years ago this happened.
It’s progress, I suppose.
Football and Hiroshima are bracketed in my mind because I went to the city during the 2002 World Cup.
I found it a deeply melancholic place, partly I think because of the shock of being thrown back on the reality of what human beings can do to each other, after three weeks wallowing in the best escapism on earth.
You steel yourself against the horrors documented in the museum, yet the accumulation of detail, set out in flat, limpid prose, soon overwhelms you.
I noted down some of the most numbing sentences, including this one:
“The memorial mound houses urns containing the ashes of about 70,000 victims; the names of 841 of these are known.”
And this one: “The white mushroom cloud moved like a sea slug.”
The much-pictured dome, preserved in a state of ruination, was smaller than I had expected.
I sat for a long while staring as sparrows socialised in the clover-rich grass around it.
Two children, playing, walked along a low wall next to the path. As I watched, a man accompanying them stooped and carefully picked up some litter that I was sure he was not responsible for, prior to dropping it in a bin.
After all this, the greatest football competition devised by man seemed an infinitesimally tiny thing.
The World Cup has been juxtaposed repeatedly in recent times with the 20th century’s most disturbing monuments.
Four years later, after attending a World Cup match in Nuremberg, I looked on with mixed feelings as a group of visiting fans had a kick-about on a terrace of the Zeppelin Grandstand overlooking the Nazi-era rally grounds.
And in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, a man called Tony Suze showed me around Robben Island, the notorious prison near Cape Town where Nelson Mandela and other opponents of apartheid were incarcerated.
On going to these places, you wish with all your heart and soul that the events associated with them had never taken place, of course you do.
But the meditations that such visits give rise to, while so many are fixated on something as trivial as a football tournament, are in some ways therapeutic.
They certainly put the monstrous self-importance of the game that took over the world unanswerably into perspective.
What, I wonder, will fulfil that function next year when the World Cup returns to the land of football, Brazil?
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938