To Bar Italia in Soho on Sunday night, after the World Cup, with a friend, to bask in the happiness of London's entire Italian community under the glow of the giant flatscreen, drinking the best coffee in town. Or at least that's where I thought I was going. But I never stood a chance of getting through.
A joyously rampaging army of people wearing Italian flags and Italian colours face paint, cheering, hooting, mooning, yelling, laughing and hugging each other had already seized central London so completely that cars like mine, all also honking with happiness from completely stationary positions fifty yards from Piccadilly, gradually realised there was nothing to do but make a U-turn and a wistful trip home.
Once there I found husband and two small sons all collapsed on the sofa, asleep and curled up together like happy kittens. The smears of red white and green make-up slowly being transferred from tiny faces to cream upholstery were the insignia the smaller boys had wanted to wear because they're about to go on holiday to Italy (their father had preferred France because he's really an Arsenal supporter, and the French team included Thierry Henry; he had, mercifully, abstained from painting his face).
Wrapped in national flags most of us never really think about, millions of people have watched a lot of indifferent football (admittedly with some great moments) played by national teams of players who don't usually play together because they're playing much better games as hired guns for club teams in wherever they happen to have been bought and not worrying their pretty heads about national prestige at all.
However unpromising a formula the World Cup alternative to reality sounds, we've gone as mad for it as any Florentine backing his team in the fierce Renaissance football game, Calcio Storico, fought between the city's four teams, the reds, whites, blues and greens, which so enthralled Renaissance Italians that it is still replayed every June 24 to this day.
We've bought new TVs, guzzled our way through a potato famine of crisps and enjoyed the whole experience enough to sit happily indoors through that rarest of British summer phenomena, a heatwave. The American writer Paul Auster is among those who say - in his case in an essay called "The Best Substitute For War," - that it's because of the World Cup and the excuse it offers to retreat into a ritualised fantasy of harmless national togetherness once every four years that we've managed, for more than half a century, to avoid global conflict.
But now this glorious period of living like medieval armies - all decked out in our battle colours, ready to shout murderously at the TV in defence of the national honour of whichever country's team we are for the evening, or go happily marauding in the middle of London in the middle of the night - is over. We've turned into ten million or so surly, self-obsessed individuals in London, and anyone caught mooning from a lamppost wearing nothing but a flag will be taken in and given a solemn ticking off at the nearest police station.
Lying around our house, still, is the flotsam and jetsam of the last month's football mania. An unspecified number of wine bottles, beer bottles and cans (awaiting recycling once the bin men get back to work properly after all the excitement is over). A rather larger number of takeaway containers cluttering up the fridge (awaiting tidying, ditto). And a vast number of pens, bags, face paint, home-made posters, flags and even an ironing board cover in the white and red colours of the St George's Engerland flag.
If we can't be Engerland any more, what on earth will we do with all the Engerland things? Bin them, I suppose, except that (a) the ironing board cover is brand new and (b) the dear old St George's flag has been given a bit of a lift by the latest bout of football mania.
Until a couple of months ago, I thought of the Engerland flag as a skinhead flag - something that went with knives, piercings and repellently blue and veiny tattoos, a sign of seventies-style racism. If ever I'd come across any, which I didn't, I'd have chucked them out with a shudder inside at least two or three plastic bags. And when our local, run by white men with extremely short hair and rubbish taste in loud music, started decking out its windows with red crosses this spring, I winced in a superior North-London-Liberal sort of way.
But now that we've spent weeks riding round town with two flags of our own trailing out of the back windows, and every child in my kids' school, whatever their skin colour, has been wearing bits of red cross on white backgrounds on whatever bits of clothing or body they could pack them on to for practically as long as they remember - now that the flag's only association for all those children is with innocent happiness and a sense of open-mouthed, slightly confused, wonder at that funny one-legged dance Daddy's doing in front of the TV while he kisses the screen - the things seem perfectly innocent to me. It feels mean-spirited to put them in the rubbish.
A lot has been written about how the World Cup has allowed the symbol of Englishness to shed its nastier connotations from a generation ago, and given the English a new go at having a non-Welsh, non-Scottish symbol of their own, and, perhaps, some sort of innocent English collective identity of their own to go with it too. A few bits of uncouth behaviour from chippy Scots north of the border - beating up England supporters in their red-and-white kit - have even helped England flag wavers reinvent themselves as that most appealing of 21st-century categories; innocent victims.
But will this continue once this gush of patriotic sentimentality recedes? Is World Cup magic as potent as we like to think?
I couldn't help noticing, on my way home from the Italian supporters' occupation of Little Italy and Soho, that the half-dozen cars I passed that were still flying their Engerland flags, over a week after England was knocked out, were all driven, not by absent-minded old ladies who just might have forgotten to take the flags down but by strangely familiar crews of white yoof with number one cuts and painful looking tattoos, chucking beer cans out of the window.
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