Am I as patriotic as the next man?

I don't know, as I have no idea who the next man is.

I can tell you that I am very proud to be English.

What I am very unhappy about is the appearance of flags of St. George attached to chavvy cars all because we are in the World Cup (for Americans, the World Cup is a soccer competition where OTHER countries from the world are allowed to join in, not to be confused with the World Series which is nothing of the sort!).

I am OK with England getting to the final, winning even, so long as the dickheads and chavs stop being dickheads and chavs.

I am English and proud of it every day of the week, not just when some overpaid nancy boys go to South Africa to fall over a great deal.

And I don't need to show my patriotism by flying flags of St. George from the back windows of my car.

Other countries seem to do patriotism so very well, take Johnny American for instance. Before the whale comes on, he makes you stand up and sing the Spangly Banner song and he is very proud and nice to his serving and ex servicemen. We in Britain are not.

Unless you are at a rugby match, most Brits don't even sing the National Anthem properly. The bloody Scots and Welsh and Irish don't even sing it at all. Perhaps England should sing Jerusalem instead?

Then we have Johnny France, basically if it is not French, to him it is shit and he burns it in the Champs Elysee! What a wonderful outlook on life. In Britain we just bloody moan about the Johnnies and then do nothing. Very often I wish I were French!

So, and this makes me very sad, the English are once again showing their failure to understand the essential difference between patriotism/nationalism and jingoism, something we’d do very well to learn from Johnny.

Were we to do so, our lives would improve and perhaps St. George’s Day could become a public holiday, as it should be, and celebrated properly (not with a fight!).