Eat football, sleep football, wear silly hats

Mexican football fans were easy to spot as they prepared for their team's World Cup clash with Iran in Nuremburg. Picture / Reuters

PARIS - Now that World Cup 2006 is under way, Europe has put its brain on hold.

From England to Ukraine, football fans exult, despair, paint their faces, don replica shirts, wave flags and send their country's economy into a spin as they throw a sickie, nurse a hangover or secretly watch television at work.

"A month's partying," crooned the daily Le Parisien in France, while in local supermarkets, trolleys groaned with beer, nuts and crisps as shoppers loaded up with essential supplies.

Shops are reporting enormous sales in giant plasma TV screens - hefty beasts were being snapped up at the rate of one every 20 seconds.

Children have pestered their parents to buy a brand of pasta offering a souvenir World Cup book.

Across the Channel in England, St George flags have sold by the bucketload. A punter has placed £200,000 ($600,000) on England winning the coveted trophy at £6 odds.

Mars has renamed its Mars Bar a "Believe" Bar - although optimism may be limited given they only made enough to last until the quarter- finals.

The Cumbria Tourist Board, meanwhile, in northwest England has launched a patriotic World Cup anthem, with local sheep bleating out Land of Hope and Glory.

Germany, meanwhile, sees the World Cup as a showcase for its mature and tolerant democracy, its transformation into a land of ideas and - this is the uphill bit - a place of mirth and merrymaking.

One such attempt is a rather bilious tournament cocktail: Germany's black, red and gold are represented by three horizontal stripes of rare black vodka, grenadine and blood orange.

With any populist event, however, comes the backlash, and the World Cup is no exception.

While bars, hotels and restaurants are offering giant-screen TV transmission right up until the final on July 9, some are digging into the lucrative niche of being a World Cup-free zone. Anti-Cup websites offer solace and advice to women unable to detach their husband's or boyfriend's eyeballs from the TV for the next month.

"Every match which they spend in a sports bar should be punished by giving us breakfast in bed, and they should be washed, shaved and sober when they serve it," says Women for a Spain without Football on its website.

Worldcupwidowsclub.com goes further: "White shirt with red cross + face paint in same colours = not getting any for two weeks".

But it's not just relationships that could suffer. European watchdogs have said that just watching the games could be bad for health.

The number of fatal heart attacks among men can rise by nearly a fifth when it comes to a penalty shootout.

"Football, beer and pizza will be a triple danger for fans who follow the World Cup on the sofa," said Italian agricultural group Coldiretti.

Italians fans could end up 5kg heavier by the end, it said, and pleaded for junk food to be replaced with salads.

Yeah, right.