While Scotland has its own pair of high-profile sporting events next year - the Bearsden and Milngavie Highland Games in June and September's Camanachd Cup Final - there is also the small matter of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil which will see the best teams on the planet (and England) fight for the right to lose to Germany in the final.
A Mintel consumer trend report this week states that as a result we'll go bananas for Brazil next year. As well as Brazilian wines (they do have some) and culinary delicacies - I can see pudim de bacalhau, or codfish pudding, becoming a firm favourite in our house - there are fashions and fashion labels to enjoy.
No, really, there are. Mintel points to Brazilian brands such as Salinas, which makes beachwear, and Agua De Coco, which makes beachwear as proof of the latter. Despite searching the Salinas and Agua De Coco websites, all I could find was pictures of women in bikinis so I assume they don't do a men's range. But there's also Blue Man ("Rio Lifestyle Since 1972"), which offers - you'll never guess - beachwear and does have a men's range. It's mostly knee-length board shorts in floral prints and tie-dye but there are also some shockingly short trunks in geometric prints not coming to a council-run swimming pool near you any time soon. Or let's hope not, anyway.
But just as there's more to life in Brazil than the beach, so there's more to Brazilian fashion than beachwear. Sao Paolo Fashion Week is considered one of the most important after New York, Paris, London and Milan, and among the menswear designers wowing punters at the spring-summer 2014 shows was Alexandre Herchcovitch, a fast-rising Sao Paolo-born designer.
But if we do go bananas for Brazil next year, let's not forget another fact: it was ruled by a military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985 and, while Katherine Hamnett could annoy Margaret Thatcher by turning up to a Downing Street beano wearing a 58% Don't Want Pershing T-shirt, her Brazilian counterparts found their protests met with a little more than just a frosty stare.
Brazilian fashion luminary Zuzu Angel, for instance, was a fierce critic of the regime and died in mysterious circumstances in 1976, aged 54. Her son, Stuart, a left-wing militant, was arrested in 1971 and never seen again.
Brazilian musical greats Chico Barque and Gilberto Gil, whose music will doubtless soundtrack much of next year's activities, referred to Stuart Angel's probable murder in their 1973 song Calice, and Barque even dedicated his 1977 song Angelica to Zuzu Angel, making her a symbol for all the mothers whose children had "disappeared".
Today, our overriding view of Brazil is of insouciant, Girl-From-Ipanema beach chic, crisp white shirts and linen-suited modernity and it's that, I suppose, that Mintel foresees us swallowing. But it's worth remembering that life in the country wasn't always a carnival.
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