BY the time you read this I’ll be on holiday, enjoying a week off to watch the Tour de France in gloriously uninterrupted bliss.
When the Why Don’t You? gang urged us all to Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go Out and Do Something Less Boring Instead they clearly weren’t talking about the Tour. Especially not when this mesmerising spectacle reaches the mountain stages.
My viewing snack of choice is Wham bars which I think stems back to when I first started watching cycling in my teens (yes, it was the early 1990s). After a long afternoon in front of the telly my teeth can have an inch thick coating of sugar.
I equally like to dabble in a spot of cheese and biscuits. And wine. Lots of wine.
In fact, I have devised a fun game that combines two of my favourite pastimes: cycling and alcohol. It goes something like this. Spot a Lidl on the race route = take a shot; ditto when you see hay bales/tractors/a human centipede arranged into a display.
A dog runs onto the course = two shots. A sighting of Dieter “Didi” Senft, the self-styled devil of the Tour de France (rumours he had hung up his trident joyfully appear to have been unfounded) = pour a drink for a sofa buddy.
Any time ITV4’s Phil Liggett mistakenly refers to Michal Kwiatkowski as “world champion Rui Costa” = down the full glass of whatever is in your hand. You will be bleary-eyed and hiccupping by the first ad break.
Other exciting things on my to-do list over the coming days include a cull of my cycling apparel. By that I mean the piles of greying, mud-stained socks I typically refuse to part with on account of them being “lucky” (I wore them on the rare occasion I picked up a QOM on Strava) and all the jerseys that have holes, unsightly pulled threads and indelible, crusted splodges of energy gels in the pockets.
I will also venture out on my bike. If you see someone cycling past clutching a stash of smelly cheeses and Wham bars, you will know who it is.
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