There are a lot of flags around at the moment.

You see them fluttering from car doors and suspended from flat windows. They’re plasted across shop displays, printed in newspapers and magazines and on sale in practically every high street outlet.

It’s the football, of course.

I’ve never felt the need to fly a flag - or at least, not my own.

When backpacking around South America, a sneaky Maple Leaf sewn to the top of a backpack worked wonders - people didn’t think you were Canadian, they just knew you weren’t yanqui.

The closest I’ve ever come to nationalistic flagwaving is at college. I was the only English person in a collage of 200. There was a girl from Scotland, too, though ironically I was more Scottish than she, and vice versa. But as representatives of our countries, we clubbed together and did the best we could for each other, and our respective heritages.

This meant that we celebrated Burns night, and taught various Venezolanos and Singaporeans to dance Strip the Willow, but also hosted a Tea Party once or twice a year. Tea from a pot, with biscuits - or maybe beans on toast, if we could find them on sale in Western Canada.

A lot of people at the college owned and displayed flags, proclaiming their origin or allegiance, or both. It didn’t seem appropriate for me to wave a St Geroge cross - or a Union Flag - partly because I’ve never done it at home in the UK, and partly because I didn’t want to stand under a waving flag as if it represented everything I was, or as if I represented it.

The closest I came was a Union Jack teatowel, which was bought in a tat shop in Vancouver.