MY BROTHER'S getting excited about his summer. He's off to the States for a coast-to-coast adventure after he finishes his final year at university. All well and good, but where he should have been was Germany. I've tormented him for years about how, eight years ago, I finished my final university exam, threw my books down and got on a flight from Glasgow to Charles de Gaulle. I arrived just in time to see the centre of Paris explode in tartan as John Collins equalised against Brazil. Then followed the finest holiday of my life, as a group of seven of us meandered through France in a blur of boozy camaraderie.

My brother won't be doing the same in Germany because Scotland didn't qualify for the World Cup this time. He's a little disappointed, as he's about the same age as I was for France '98. On the plus side he's looking forward to searching out Hunter S Thompson's last resting place, cruising through the Midwest and nursing a few bourbons along the way. But it's an experience he wouldn't have had but for Berti Vogts displaying the ineptitude of Bambi trying to figure skate.

We used to get all het up in Scotland about not getting past the first stages of tournaments. Now we have the poorest selection of players in living memory and a world in which far more countries have fallen for the football bug. We might not even qualify for another tournament for decades. That could be good thing: generations to come may wean our nation off football and develop a broader range of interests and possibilities - by 2020 there could be a boom in sitar players and Sanskrit scholars.

But this may be too late for me. I fear football has seeped into and colonised the farthest recesses of my brain. Is it healthy that I can still recite all the scores from the 1986 World Cup? Should I really know the birthplaces of the Aberdeen's players in Panini's 1984 sticker album? (Neale Cooper started life in India. Interesting.) I certainly shouldn't have been sitting with my trigger finger on the remote, itching to know the Inverness-Ayr United score. There must be better things to do on a Monday night.