Diary – 5 July 2003

On Saturday, I shall be beside the Eiffel Tower, hoping to see David Millar win the Prologue of the centennial Tour de France. Until last year, I’d long followed the Tour at a distance, but never in person. Then I was asked to write a history of the race, and to cover it for the Daily Mail, subsequently transferring to the Financial Times on not quite Beckhamical terms. My reinvention as a sportswriter – FT columnist, Tour historian, not to say lecturer on sport in English history at the University of Texas – has surprised me as much as anyone, but very enjoyable it is. The Tour in particular is the most extraordinary of all sporting events, and anyway, if one is going to cover any such event, France is the country to do it in. Three weeks around the hexagone only increases my already besotted francophilia, and not just because of the hotels and restaurants, though they are exhilarating enough for anyone who knows our own. The splendour of French railways and roads could convert me to higher taxation, and driving on a July evening through la France profonde, with its heavily subsidised, scenically glorious cornfields, vineyards and orchards, could almost convert me to the old CAP.

A less obvious passion is Northern Ireland. It’s true that for more than 30 years the reasons for going there have often been gloomy, and so, after too much time spent covering a bloody and intractable conflict and the dishonest attempts to end it, it was all the pleasanter to go to Co. Antrim last weekend for a very happy occasion, the wedding of Thomas Pennybacker and Flora McDonnell. But whatever had taken me there, or whenever, I learnt years ago the well-kept secret that Ulster is the single most beautiful corner of the British Isles with, what’s more surprising, the nicest people.