Me and Sven The Svede have bags in common, most obviously that we have a young lad called Theo in our care.

Few pointers for Tord's left hand man: give The Boy plenty of exercise up the local rec, buy him a copy of Dr Who Adventures plus a Tropicaca To Go on the way back, then sit him down in front of Kerching! And make sure he reads his Biff And Chip book to you before heading up the hill to Bedfordshire. Works for me.

So you can't have failed to notice all those standards of St George hither and thither. Not all of us want to play along, so here's my own Top Ten Reasons For NOT Having An England Flag:

1. unavailable in Waitrose, dahling
2. that vertical stripe makes me look fat
3. 99p for the flag, £50 for the Renault flag attachment device
4. not the product of a Blue Peter colouring competition
5. unwilling to endorse all that dragonslaying nonsense
6. if I'm going to splash out, I want more than two colours
7. couldn't cope with loss if snapped off by an undertaking cyclist
8. don't want to upset the small but highly volatile local Togolese residents
9. can't find one with the correct Ingerland spelling
10. would play havoc with my drag coefficient

16 days 18 hours 14 minutes to go ...