The walls are shaking. Fireworks pop. In Samara, where England have just beaten Sweden in the quarter-finals, Sunday morning is gripped by the final knockings of Saturday night. Russia and Croatia are playing in the late game and I’ve stumbled back from the stadium to the bar at the bottom of my apartment tower. Here the mood is a mix of head-clutching hysteria and almost parodic Russian stoicism. As Croatia score the winning penalty everyone just wanders off without a word. Three hours of sleep later I’m off to Moscow via a connection in Mineralnye Vody, a dry, dusty place somewhere near Georgia. But not before taking in the breakfast options at the airport. “Dried Horse” says the sign above slices of brown matter being sold by weight. Well, it’s honest. Up front. And a bit salty.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest More hmm than mmm. Photograph: @barneyronay/twitter

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Monday (Moscow)

England are in the semi-finals. Semi-final in the England are. Semi‑England final are in the. No matter how you phrase it, the day is still spent trying to accommodate this state of affairs. That’s my excuse for what follows, anyway. This is the night of my Guardian colleague Jonathan Wilson’s birthday dinner. My job is to turn up with the embarrassing surprise cake complete with candles and sparklers. I find a football‑themed one in between tapping out 1,400 words on England. I’m at the restaurant 10 minutes late. Except, no one else is here. They have no record of a Wilson booking. Hmmm. Oh. Checking the long chain of emails I realise that we’re actually meeting at a restaurant by the same name in … St Petersburg. I’m in Moscow, a mere 450 miles away.

Well, we’ve all done it. I send Wilson a picture of the cake from around the corner where my colleague Stuart James and I have a final farewell Moscow meal. Four weeks ago we turned up clueless in a foreign city with no idea about Russia. Now here we are clueless in a foreign city with a very small idea about Russia. What a journey it’s been.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The cake that’s 450 miles away from the birthday party. Photograph: @barneyronay/twitter

Tuesday (Moscow)

And so to the Luzhniki Stadium for England’s final press conference before the semi. It has been fun seeing the evolution of Gareth Southgate from likeable, slightly gauche former player to dreamboat, sage and all-round mainstream star. The press room falls into a hush at his approach. Cameras whirr, necks are craned. Gareth looks immaculate, poised, in control, all the more notable because by this stage the travelling press are starting to fray and moulder – four weeks of bad meals on the hoof and declining levels of personal grooming have taken their toll.

By the end of this week, I will have seen not one but two of my Guardian/Observer football colleagues attempt to launder their clothes using dishwasher tablets. And not carefully disguised dishwasher tablets. Dishwasher tablets with “dishwasher tablets” written on them. Neither Stuart James nor Nick Ames would appreciate me naming names at this stage, so I will keep quiet on exactly who.

Wednesday (Moscow)

Nothing happened on Wednesday.

Wednesday Redux

OK, one or two things happened. England played their semi-final, a 9pm start that left an endless amount of day to get through in Moscow. Key to this was the purchasing of appropriate snacks for the late kick‑off. The local supermarkets in Arbat are astonishingly good, with entire Serrano hams, a million kinds of cheese and lovely friendly staff who humour you even when you have no idea what you’re doing and have just wandered along to get a little bit of that great supermarket vibe. Later, England will go down 2-1 in extra time to a manically committed Croatia. Football is not coming home in any triumphalist-open-bus-ride kind of way. It never really was. But it has been a ride.

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Thursday (Moscow)

A wander down to Gorky Park to see Qatar’s World Cup 2022 installation, which turns out to be a frightening black cube moored on the river with flashing lights and spacey installations. Moscow tends to throw up these strange sights in any case. It is a city of vast, striking buildings, with a warm, occasionally hidden, street life. Even the long, thin park by the seven-lane highway outside our apartment seethes with activity. In the evening the courting couples appear: teenagers who sit on the benches, talk chastely, hold hands and enjoy the dusk. By 1am the nightshift is in: shoeless drunks and groups of homeless people, who use the benches for sleeping quarters. There is an integration between the various groups. At breakfast time local babushkas sit on benches opposite the grimy hungover men and eat their buns. Then as dusk falls the teenagers are back and the place is transformed again into a little touch of 1950s small-town America. I have to say nobody mentioned any of this in all the pre-tournament stuff about being punched, bugged and imprisoned.

Friday (Moscow)

The World Cup is dying. At this stage even the stadium staff look exhausted. The journalists wander like late-stage George Romero zombies, babbling about flights and escape routes. In Moscow the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino (above), turns up to his final press conference dressed ostentatiously in a World Cup volunteer hoodie. Infantino receives £1.4m a year plus perks for running football. Russia’s volunteers are unpaid. No prize for guessing which one has made the last month a pleasure to travel around and been relentlessly patient and helpful. (Clue: it’s not the bald Swiss bloke banging on about how he has personally overseen “the best World Cup ever”.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mr Modest. Photograph: Joosep Martinson/FIFA via Getty Images

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Saturday (Moscow)

Third‑place day. England are in St Petersburg to play Belgium. I’m in Moscow for the final, with a chance to do that rare thing: actually watch an England match while not tapping wildly away at a laptop to a deadline. It turns out they actually have second halves to these things. Who knew? It is just France v Croatia to go from here. It has been a wonderful, massive-scale World Cup, but with a feeling of end times, too. On now to the winter absurdity of Qatar in four years ...