Ah! -the stench of xenophobia in the air! There must be another football tournament featuring England and Germany, on the horizon. Time to start digging through the history books again! Channel Five set the ball rolling [Geddit?!] and lived up to their usual sub-tabloid standards with their trailers for the "England v. Germany" episode of the Pitched Battles football history series last week, by cutting the trailers so that a clip of the pre-war German team flourishing Nazi salutes was immediately followed by a grinning England team holding aloft the World Cup.

For miles around me, streets and cars are gradually becoming bedecked in the English flag of Saint George -which is fair enough. But a surprisingly large minority seem to be supporting "Great Britain" in the World Cup, if the number of Union Jacks hanging from the houses and vehicles of the more intellectually and historically challenged is anything to go by.

And I was also delighted to notice that one enterprising entrepreneur on eBay is marking the imminent onset of this latest replay of Word War II by offering for sale the following two classy enamel badges.

You can accuse the English of many things, but forgetting their past is not one of them!