Look at this! barked my boss, liberally splattering her keyboard with a mixture of iced triple venti soy caramel macchiato and indignation. Google have got an iceberg on their logo today! Today!

Mmm I said, not looking up, finger hovering restlessly over the 'bid now' button on a pair of pink assless chaps. It's Earth day or something, I think.

But on St Patrick's day you can't move on here for bloody shamrocks! she fumes, looking as though she might punch the screen.

I stare for a second or two before I realise. Yes, I say. But then this Guinness and big green hats business goes down well with the Americans too. They like that kind of thing, I hear.

St George's day should be a national holiday, she mutters, stomping unsteadily off to the bathroom in a pair of five inch cork wedges the soles of which, I notice for the first time, are painted with the Union flag.

Yes, I think. It is fitting and proper that the death of a Turkish soldier seventeen hundred years ago should be celebrated by me not getting out of bed. I will raise a glass to any random saint or martyr that means I have a days respite from signal failure at Highbury and Islington and George is as good as any to get me a day off. But if I have a choice, I'd rather take St Jude of hopeless causes on October 28th than suffer the sight of a single piece of red crossed bunting or have to listen to constant Harry Secombe-voiced advertisements for Jerusalem ringtones.

On my constantly updating and disturbingly long mental list of Ridiculous Things, such fervent patriotism has held a steady top twenty position ever since its first appearance there in the early Nineties, currently residing just above watermelon Jolly Ranchers and just below any sentence that has the word 'empower' in it. The conviction that your country of origin is in some way admirable or worth celebrating in some fashion because you happen to have been born in it is no more credible than being proud of all the fabulous things that brunettes throughout history might have achieved because you happen to have brown hair. And being proud of glorious England either as a concept or an actuality - and I use the 'g' word most advisedly and with no small amount of sniggering - when you have done nothing to contribute to either but blutacking a Support Our Troops poster from The Sun to you living room window is like standing shoulder to shiny tressed shoulder with the dark-haired with a bottle of Nice'n'Easy stashed behind your back. Not so much the last refuge of the scoundrel as the last resort of those so uncertain in themselves the insecurity can only be filled with identity leeching and petty tribalism.

All this of course I made plain to my boss when she returned.

In my mind.