You can't escape it.

Walk through supermarkets and high street shops, and you are visually accosted by the Union flag almost everywhere you go. You find it on full-length dresses in garish scarlet and electric blue, on oversized, sequin-encrusted purses, underpants and duvet covers. Like a cup of tea? Here it is in a Union flag mug, poured from a Union flag teapot.

Subtle it ain't, but we'd all better brace ourselves because in the year of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics there's going to be a lot more red, white and blue to come.

Only, not in Asda. The supermarket chain has apparently emailed suppliers warning them not to send large amounts of Union flag-branded goods to its Scottish stores (and none at all to its Northern Irish stores).

The leaking of the email has provoked a backlash, particularly the advice about Scotland. One Tory MP has even accused the company of "playing petty politics" at a time of national celebration. Yet there will be many Scots who applaud Asda for sparing them the tide of red, white and blue, as, in truth, many of us baulk at the thought of Union flags festooning our homes.

Now this is only partly to do with being Scottish. There are several other reasons. One is the unfortunate vulgarity of many such branded goods, especially handbags and clothes. The designs are as subtle as a chorus of Rule Britannia and all too often lacking in all-important irony.

More importantly, not everyone enjoys flag-waving patriotism, nor should they have to. This applies not just to the Union flag but the Saltire and any other flag. The problem is that displaying a flag, any flag, whether on a T-shirt, mug or flagpole in the garden, will be seen as a statement.

At best, it is a statement of pride in one's country, of patriotism. For many of us that is no reason to stick it on our bumper or drink our tea out of it. Must the fact of having been born British (or Scottish) become a cause for pride? Plenty of us can see the positives in our country without feeling the need to wear national symbols on our sleeves. Conversely, many of us see the negatives of being British as well, things we are not so proud of, which can make the wearing of a national symbol seem crass.

Where many Scots are concerned, it is fair to say there is an added reason: they do not identify with the Union flag as strongly as their English friends.

Being a Scot born to English parents and married to an Englishman, and someone who regards herself as Scottish and British in equal measure, I am always struck by the greater enthusiasm with which the English, particularly in the south, display the Union flag. Drive through the villages of Sussex on a summer's day and there's the red, white and blue, fluttering on full-sized flagpoles in well-tended gardens every few hundred yards, outnumbering the St George's crosses. It is hung from windows during sporting events when the English team are playing. In England it is, for many, the pre-eminent symbol of nationhood, above the St George's Cross.

The Saltire is better established as a national symbol in Scotland than the St George's Cross is in England, and it is not only dewy-eyed patriots and Scottish nationalists who feel ownership of it: the blue and white remains a symbol of Scottishness used across the political spectrum.

There are other issues: the Union flag has, unfairly, developed unsavoury connotations.

What's more, its association with enthusiastic support for royalty and merchandising for the jubilee may not endear it to Scots who were, after all, distinctly lukewarm about holding street parties during last year's royal wedding, in stark contrast to their English neighbours.

All in all, Asda may well have made a canny commercial decision. The company has not suggested that no Union flag-branded goods should be sold in Scotland, but has merely asked for such goods to be limited. If we pile 'em high, they won't sell, Asda may be thinking.

They may well be right.