It Makes Me Cross [25.05.06]
By Jared Read
Despite being generally indifferent to the beautiful game, I’m looking forward to the World Cup quite a lot. It means beer, crisps, finishing work early, and having something to talk about other than Big Brother.
Yet there’s one thing that makes me want to flee to somewhere they’re not all that bothered about football at the moment (like Scotland): the St George’s Cross.
It’s nothing to do with the namby-pamby, politically correct arguments bandied about that it’s a symbol of our oppressionist colonial past, or causes those of non-English origin to feel excluded. I’m as much of a jingoist as the next Telegraph reader.
No, my prejudice is simply that it is intolerably pikey. Sporting a pair of flapping flags from your rear window, hanging banners from your chimney or decking out your child in top-to-toe red and white is a taciturn announcement that your teenage son has an Asbo and your wife wears gold hoop earrings.
Or at least I thought it did. A few months ago, we did a job for a client whose customers are, on the whole, not adverse to a diet of turkey twizzlers and crispy pancakes, or bothered by the social implications of driving a battered Sierra. The mailing had a strong World Cup theme, and featured a special St George’s Cross range of products, including a BBQ and a baby’s buggy emblazoned with said emblem. We weren’t all that surprised when it did a storm, because this client knows their market remarkably well.
Yet I was utterly gobsmacked when the other day in Waitrose, head filled with aforementioned preconceptions, I was confronted with an end-aisle display of St. George’s Cross t-shirts, furry dice, car flags and plastic beer glasses. I nearly dropped my six quid deli sandwich.
Will people who shell out for meat from hand-fed pheasants and bottled water imported from Fiji also be tempted to pop a brace of Rooney stickers in their X5s? I can’t imagine that the buyers at Waitrose have got it all that wrong. In which case, that means I must have.
Sociologists would probably attribute this phenomenon to some base need for collective belonging in times of potential threat. I’d argue that it’s just lots of people being silly.
But who knows? I’ve changed my mind before. Perhaps come the first England game, the pack instinct will have overcome me and I’ll be at the front of the face-painting queue.
Come on ING-ER-LAND!
Have your say...
Have you got something you’d like to add? Or would you just like to argue for the sake of it? Let us know here by entering your name and response below, and then
clicking on “send”.
