Not before time the miserable English football (soccer for those in the US) team have been dumped out of the World Cup Competition in South Africa by an evidently superior team - Germany (again!).

The scoreline (4-1 to Germany) indicates the level to which the English team under their Italian coach (Signor Al Cappello) managed to sink. To describe their performance as dreadful would be to risk a visit from the Understatement Police. Composed of highly paid football stars from the English Premier League, these so-called soccer heroes were so bad that losing 4-1 to somebody (even Germany) was not just inevitable it was totally predictable.

So now we can look forward to another glorious set of morale boosting results for the rest of the summer (not!). Andy Murray will get through to the semi-or even the finals of Wimbledon next week, only to lose (magnificently of course) to an injured obsessive Spaniard (Nadal) or an elegant but out of form Federer), or perhaps to some dimunitive Argentinian. A week later the Open Golf Championship at St.Andrews will be won by a left handed Japanese with acute dyspepsia.

And so it will go on. Defeat after glorious defeat until the English nation, rallied by our glorious leader, Montgomery ("I see you - You see me") Cameron, we summon up the sinews and defeat some mythical enemy (The Dreaded Deficit Jabberwocky) at our own version of El Alamein.

There will be casualties of course, The Poor, The Pensioners, The Unemployed, the Disabled and Dispossessed, the Rich (but fewer of them of course), and mostly everyone else too, but then there usually are casualties in a War.

Somewhere in the mess, we will get kicked out of Afghanistan for the third time, but of course that won't be a defeat, we won't really have finally gone down the Karzhai of history, it will be a glorious victory for democratic principles, General Petraeus and Obama Obama bin Obama in that order.

And as the whole sorry caravan that is currently Britain shuffles off into the desert twilight we can hear the hollow applause of those Con-Demmed to relive history echoing after us.

Oh Joy!