World cup madness

Living where we do we are, obviously, very sheltered from England mania. What is surprising though (given that France are also participating) is that unless you decided to find out about all things sporting and, in particular, football you could easily go about your business here and not know that the World Cup is imminent.

I have yet to see a child (or an adult) in a French top and there are definitely no flags on cars or outside houses. The girls haven't yet come home from school chanting "allez les bleus" and the 'seasonal' aisles of the local supermarket are still stocked with swimming pool products and suncream - no world cup merchandising in sight.

Now most of the time I prefer it this way - I am certainly very happy that my kids aren't hankering after oodles of mass produced tacky merchandising - but I have to admit that at the weekend I thought it would maybe be fun to get them a subtle t-shirt each given that England's first game is next weekend and Daddy will be here to watch it. (I should probably state at this point that although as each day goes by the kids become more and more french - shivering at the sight of a cloud and that sort of thing - when it comes to sport their Dad has made it quite clear that they are to support England - or should I say - Eng-er-land).

So I had a look at a few websites. It would seem that any sense of style or class that people might have possessed before has completely evaporated when it comes to world cup 'eng-er-land' madness.

England fake eye lashes (yes, really) , bikinis (with 'England' in jewelled lettering!) and England crocs being some of the better items available to purchase. And that is without mentionning that horror of horrors - white shiny polyester 'sports' apparel (and I use the term 'sports' lightly as the majority of people who seem to don such garments seem to work more on their guts than their abs).

If you can bear it click here to see images of offending items!!

So my new project-on-the-side ('on-the-side' because I have so many other "proper" projects also going on) is to make each a child a subtle and, hopefully, not completely style-less world cup 'eng-er-land' item - check back later this week for pictures!!

I am also very behind in photographing (and blogging about) what I have been creating...maybe I'll use the time that Daddy is explaining the offside rule to the kids to get up to date!!