"What a weekend to be British,” whooped a front-page newspaper headline this week, referring in breathless prose to 14-year-old Laura Robson winning the girls' singles title at Wimbledon and Lewis Hamilton triumphing at the British Grand Prix.

Well, forgive me if I don't run my Union Jack knickers up the flagpole and sing Knees Up Mother Brown just yet. Robson, lovely and talented as she is, is technically Australian, while Hamilton loves Britain so much that he moved to Switzerland to avoid the taxman.

But the thing that most stops me from joining this fabricated wave of patriotism is that, frankly, it's embarrassing.

It's nice that they won and everything but, really, must we cling to every morsel of national sporting prowess like safari-park baboons to a car roof, and work ourselves into a lather of excitement over it? It all feels a bit, well, desperate.

Yes, it seems that we must. Ladbrokes is already offering 6-1 odds on Robson becoming Wimbledon ladies' champion despite the fact that only two women since 1960 have won the girls' title and gone on to win the main prize. Headlines have included “Glory Laura Hallelujah!” and “Tell Laura We Love Her” as we confidently dust off the metaphorical trophy cabinet. There is hyperventilating talk of the “new tennis sensation” becoming “the richest player ever in this country” and earning a possible “£5 million a year by the age of 25”. No pressure, then, Laura love.

The Los Angeles Times is understandably bemused by our premature spasms of ecstasy. “...so starved is the motherland for tennis promise that you'd have thought she had just beaten Serena Williams with élan and serves to the body,” noted its writer, Chuck Culpepper.

Chuck, mate, you don't know the half of it. You should see us when the England football team manage to scrape a win in a friendly against Andorra - you'd think it was 1966 all over again. As a nation we have literally prayed over photographs of David Beckham's (I think he's known as David Beckenham over there) injured foot. If we get to a quarter-final we are more overstimulated than a bunch of schoolboys in a Soho porn shop. It's pathetic, but it's what we do best. Better than you. You are the Land of the Free, we are the Land of Hype.

Last month I was in Spain while the Euro 2008 semi-finals were being played. When Germany beat Turkey to reach the final, the Germans in our bar cheered and applauded politely before resuming their conversations. When Spain beat Russia there was a roar from the Spaniards, klaxons sounded for a while, then everyone got on with their lives. They did not wave millions of plastic flags, display their bare buttocks to passing traffic and spend the next three days on an alcohol-fuelled orgy of unrealistic expectation. No wonder so many people sank to their knees in gratitude when we were knocked out.

Maybe we could reflect this summer on why our sense of national pride is so fragile, our inadequacy so painful that we will build up our national players into superheroes one minute, then salt them like garden slugs the next if they dare to miss a penalty under the most unbearable pressure - a pressure created largely by us.

Perhaps then the penny will drop that this is why football players perform like goliaths for their clubs but often bottle it for England, aware that the pubs are full of rabid plastic patriots ready to pounce on their every wrong move and tear them to bloody shreds.

“Tiger” Tim Henman carried the heavy weight of national expectation for years. When he failed to deliver we turned on him, sneering that he had spoilt our summer. “He's useless. He's a loser every time,” was a quote that you would hear year after year from fans trudging dejectedly from Henman Hill, when hours before they had been telling television cameras, ludicrously, that he would wipe the floor with Lleyton Hewitt. Why did they feel his defeats so personally?

Do you envy Laura Robson bearing all of this on her young shoulders? If I were her mother I'd be tempted to get her on the next flight back to Australia (she was born in Melbourne but has lived in Britian since the age of 6), where there is not quite the same hysterical anxiety to succeed and penchant for slaying those who are idolised.

If we don't ease off the pressure, leave her alone and stop our rampant expectations growing out of all proportion, we could find that by the age of 20 she sticks two fingers up to the game. Then we'll have strangled another golden goose and will once again be drowning our sorrows down in loser's row.

Just a thought on the British Medical Association's hilarious idea that films that portray “positive” images of smoking should carry an 18 certificate and a warning about evil tobacco to stop young people from seeing smoking as glamorous.

I would take the opposite approach. Far from shielding kids from smoking scenes on screen, we should drag them by the ear and force them to watch. Particularly the soaps.

If teenagers can gaze on the desiccated visage of chain-smoking Dot Cotton in EastEnders, then watch queens of mutton Liz McDonald and Deirdre Barlow in Coronation Street sitting in the back-alley smoking shelter behind the Rovers Return, sucking their cancer sticks through mouths as puckered as cats' backsides, and still say that smoking is glamorous, then I'll gladly eat a whole packet of John Player Special.

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