Pretending To Be a Footie Fan

If I'm honest (which I am, sadly, most of the time), I'm not much of a football fan. I enjoy the big games, but I'm a floating voter when it comes to supporting any particular team, although I always enjoy it when Real Madrid don't win. So maybe that makes me an anti-fan of RM. In this World Cup, I'm secretly hoping England do well (despite 44 years of evidence to the contrary), but I'm pretty sure Spain can go all the way, and that'll be just grand.

So, I don't own any footie shirts or scarves, and I don't paint my face in team colours.

Until last night, that is. I met up with some friends to watch Spain beat Chile and a pretty young lady came in and gave everybody a baseball cap. I was grateful for the cap, because we were having prolonged thunderstorms, and I'd mistakenly assumed we were in summer now. The caps have 'Yo soy de la roja - Mundial 2010' (I am of the red, World 2010?) on the front, and the backside tells us that Cruzcampo is the official beer of the Spanish team (poor sods - Cruzcampo is a loooong way from being a beer I like).

When I went to the bar, Enyaki noticed my cheeks were unadorned, and pulled out a little box that he swiped across each one. I expressed astonishment, and he gave me a couple of the wee things. Like a triple-gang lipstick, one swipe gives you a perfect Spanish flag. Unlike how it was done in the olden days:



The swiper (also supplied by Cruzcampo, bless 'em):



Now I'm wondering if we'll get any England freebies tomorrow afternoon - massively unlikely, what with Guinness not actually being English. Hmmm. Can England beat Germany? I recall it happened at least once before - 1966, in fact. I was nine years old. It's nice for me to have the option of supporting a team that can actually play football (sorry, Wayney-boy).

And continuing the theme of footie fandom, it was brilliant to see lotsa Flagsa Sint George in Engerland last week. They were hanging over balconies, tied to the front of houses, and we even saw a pub that had fixed a horizontal red band and a vertical one to their almost-white façade. But mostly, at least half of the cars I saw had one or two little flags attached to the tops of their windows. Coming back to Spain, I noticed the car-flag idea hasn't got here yet. But, just to prove me wrong, on the way to the bar I saw three parked cars in a row, each sporting a Spanish flag. Except, in the centre band where you would normally see a small coat of arms, they had the letters 'DYC'. DYC (pronounced 'Dick', of course), produce whiskey in Spain. And flags, now, apparently.