WHAT has happened to all those England flags that, just a few weeks ago, had sprouted from more than half of the cars in the country? Apart from the odd one or two still fluttering forlornly (someone should flag those drivers down and tell them we lost), they've suddenly disappeared.

Given that all those flags laid together, end to end, would have stretched all the way from Darlington to Lisbon and back three million times (or something like that) it seems a shame to let all that red and white material go to waste.

For those football fans who aren't already using them as handkerchiefs to cry into, hopefully, my new book, 101 Uses For A Euro 2004 St George's Flag* will help.

I've found, for example, that they're just the right size to knot in each corner and make hats to protect bald British heads from the sun. Probably best not to wear them if you're holidaying on the Continent, though.

Try stitching stacks of them together, embroidering them with the names of every England player who ever missed in a penalty shoot-out, call it a work of art and enter it for the Turner Prize.

They make perfect hammocks for hamsters, parachutes for toy soldiers or, by tacking four together, large knots and crosses boards. Those who feel totally let down might just bleach their flags white and post them to Sven Goran Erikson and his team.

Otherwise, re-use them at the tennis, cricket or rugby, or put them in storage for two years until the World Cup, when we're all going to delude ourselves that England has a good chance of winning again.

But it could be worse. Imagine how many more flags we'd have been left with if England had actually had a good football team.

*It may be some time before this reaches the shops, as I've only got as far as number ten.

JEMIMA Goldsmith and Imran Khan's marriage was doomed from the start, according to our tabloid "experts". From the moment this unlucky pair pledged their troth, harbingers of doom were queuing up to tell us it would never last because of their race and religious differences. Have these "experts" ever pontificated about why so many same-race, same-religion marriages fail so frequently?

QUEER Eye for the Straight Guy is a hilarious new makeover programme on Channel 4 which involves five homosexual men transforming a hairy, Neanderthal heterosexual into a perfectly groomed, stylish, cultured, sensitive bloke. The only problem is it works on the premise straight men should take advice from gay men, because gay men are the epitome of good taste. So what went wrong with Dale Winton and Graham Norton?

I FIND the idea of adults obsessing over teenagers' sex lives quite worrying. This Silver Ring Thing, a Christian crusade in the form of a travelling show from America, charges youngsters £10 for a silver ring declaring they will remain virgins until marriage. A youngster's desire to remain chaste shouldn't be turned into such a public performance, about which countless strangers feel they are entitled to have an opinion. Teenagers are under enough pressure as it is. We should leave them alone to get on with it, or not as the case may be.