Chateau La Coste is a vanity project created by multi-millionaire Paddy McKillen on a 600 acre estate just north of Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. It is internationally heralded as a paradise for lovers of wine, architecture and art. The wine is eminently enjoyable; the architecture and artworks not so much.

Jill and I visited last week on a day when temperatures were in excess of 40o and the rarest commodity on the domaine was shade. I eventually found some solace in a rail car, overlooking a vineyard and a couple of structures designed by Richard Rogers.

The rail car in question is an art installation by Bob Dylan. It’s a collage of iron pieces, and it’s life-size, set on rails along the perimeter of the vineyard. It’s a couple of miles from the main reception of the estate, all uphill. It’s not on the map that you are given, and it’s un-signposted. I, and a Bob fan from the States whom I met randomly when we both asked each other where it was, found it by accident and perhaps that is how it is intended to be found. A kind of serendipity.

Bob says that it “represents perception and reality at the same time. All the iron is re-contextualised to represent peace, serenity and stillness.”

It does.

From across the vineyard it is monumental. Massive. But come closer and one sees that it is also delicate, with the motifs - tools, wheels, ladders - intricately positioned to create a form a tracery of branches, veins, offshoots. It’s a form of topiary I guess, with Bob inspired or at least prompted by the location on the old Roman road that meanders through the forest at La Coste.

Alongside the rail car (alongside in terms of time rather than geography - the two are on opposite sides of the huge estate) is an exhibition of a couple of dozen original paintings from the Drawn Blank series.

Most of us know these from viewing or owning the prints. To see the originals is to see that Bob is a very painterly painter. His works are shown with works by Monet and Matisse, Chagall, Pissarro and Picasso.

The hanging is a brave thing to do, even for Bob. But the love of the Provençal landscape exhibited (literally and figuratively) by all these painters made a show which, collectively, works. As does the rail car itself. Part Bob, part Provence. Part nature, part fabrication.

"Part perception, part reality."
​
It was well worth the schlepp. And to prove it, go to www.halcyongallery.com and watch the professional video.

Today from the everysmith vaults: ​Shadow Kingdom, the on-line show that Bob put out during the pandemic to keep us sane. Just seems appropriate.

It’s the evening of the day that the Commons voted itself into irrelevance by refusing the opportunity to have a final say on the Brexit negotiations. Jill and I are sitting with a German friend in the grounds of his Second Empire chateau in Uzès, looking out across the wooded valley of the Eure towards the cathedral and the Fenestrelle.
 
This is where the Romans came to get their fresh water, from the fontaine de l’Eure, building the Pont du Gard to ensure a precise gradient over 50 kilometres of aqueduct from here to the city of Nemausus, now Nîmes.
 
But Guido is in no mood to admire this idyllic view or contemplate what the Romans did for us.
 
“You are fucked” he tells us.
 
We nod in agreement. We know what this mild-mannered, liberal European citizen thinks of the shenanigans in the UK.
 
“And the reason why you Brits are fucked” he continues, “is because you have forgotten your history. We are European, all of us. In Germany, we know this. My generation of Germans understand only too well the dangers of nationalism. You Brits seem to have forgotten.”
 
We nod in agreement.
 
“So why aren’t you doing anything about it?”
 
We explain that we are active supporters of the Labour Party, that we had campaigned and voted to remain, that a few days before we arrived in the south we had sat at a table with Sir Keir Starmer discussing exactly this point, that Leamington Spa had been a remain oasis in an ocean of leave, that we had overturned a Tory majority of more than 6,000 in the last general election, that we didn’t actually know anyone who voted leave, that we continued to argue and debate and demonstrate to stay in the EU.
 
We tell him about the tweet we had seen, that the 58% vote to leave has been rounded up to 100%, and the 48% to remain has been rounded down to zero.
 
“So you really are fucked.”
 
We nod in agreement. “Pretty much.”
 
“Your economy. Your legal system. Your technology. Your agriculture. Your universities. Your whole fucking country!”
 
We nod in agreement.
 
“What is it about you Brits that make you want to turn your back on the institution that has kept peace in Europe for more than half a century? What is it that makes you refuse to take more than a handful of immigrants? And treat them disgracefully?”
 
We remonstrate mildly, pointing out that Germany has its own UKIP, as does France, Italy and Austria.
 
“But in England they are setting the agenda, running the country. Face it, you’re fucked.”
 
There is no answer. We sit in silence with our wine, looking out over the Eure valley.
 
We never even mentioned the football.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Still no news of the Never Ending Tour arriving in the UK in 2018, so I'm enjoying some of the European shows from a few weeks ago, notably Barcelona. The set list remains unchanged, but there are some interesting refinements in the arrangements and both Bob and the band are on top form. That will do me for the moment.

 I think I’m a collector. Jill says I’m a hoarder.

​We’re both right. And Jill is certainly right when she asserts for the umpteenth time that we have too many books, that 99% will never be read again or even taken down from the shelves, and that they are merely dust-gatherers.
 
So I am, reluctantly, embarking on a cull. The shelves in England and France are being emptied. It is a gradual and time-consuming process, because a couple of pages of each of the couple of thousand books need to be at least scanned before being dispatched to friends, charity shops and in some cases such as the old green-backed Penguin detective novels which are falling apart – the tip or déchetterie.
 
It is, of course, true that, as Bagshaw famously remarks through the pen of Anthony Powell, “books do furnish a room”. But mine offer me more than this.
 
To read my ownership signature dated sometime in the early ‘60s in an old paperback is to bring back a flood of memories. In this sense, a book can be as evocative as a Dylan album. It locates me precisely in a time and a place and with an attitude which I remember with affection and nostalgia, guilt and embarrassment.
 
In 1964, for example, I seem to have acquired A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, Nova Express by William Burroughs, CP Snow’s Strangers and Brothers sequence, The Italian Girl by Iris Murdoch, Ernst Fischer’s The Necessity of Art and a plethora of thrillers by the likes of Ian Fleming, Rex Stout and Len Deighton.

Sounds to me like a fifteen year old trying to find his way. It was.
 
From my shelves, I can also date my discovery of particular author: Patrick O’Brian, for example. His work starts in paperback, and ends in hardback as new novels in the sequence were released.

And here I can see that moment when I discovered the joy of owning a first edition of a particular novel – I have relished a copy of Simon Raven’s first published novel, The Feathers of Death, with a hand-written dedication by Raven to EM Forster on the fly-leaf, and a first US edition of Advertisements for Myself, with Norman Mailer’s own suggestions in pencil for changes to the first UK edition (which I also have).
 
At about the same time, I got into the habit of buying two copies of some ‘literary fiction’- Paul Auster, McEwan, DeLillo, William Boyd et al: one to read, and thus to risk a broken spine and damaged dust-jacket; and one to … well, just put on the shelves for posterity. And yes, okay, to gather dust.
 
But many of these first editions appear to have a market still, so I can justify those purchases on the grounds that they were investments. My book-dealer friends will be benefitting from them in due course.

As, I hope, will I. I’m going to need the cash to download these works onto my Kindle. For re-reading one day, you understand. Nothing to do with completism.
 
Next stop? Vinyl, CDs and some paintings. Watch this ever-growing space on shelves and walls.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Railroad Earth revisited, with special emphasis on shows from the mid-nineties.

The English voice from the adjacent table was unmistakable as it soared over the terrace of TEN, the new and fashionable fusion restaurant in Uzès*. “And, of course” said the voice, “I’ve now missed the deadline for paying the £25 each to buy the right for my daughters a vote in the election. It’s disgraceful.”
 
I admit that this eavesdropping, which referred to the Court of Appeal judgement, has overtones of overheard-in-Waitrose about it, but even in this – usually idyllic - part of the world, there is no escaping the machinations of the proponents of the attempted coup. After a 10 day sojourn in the UK, which coincided with our Constituency Labour Party nomination meeting (93 – 25 in favour of Corbyn since you ask) and included a dozen or more impromptu and pessimistic discussions about the future of the country and the party, I had expected to return to a few day’s grace and welcome respite from the day-to-day debate.
 
But it was not to be. As the British Left move south, they bring with them their concerns and commitments. And they find a ready audience here in Uzès where the ex-pat community tends to eschew the stereotypical Englishman abroad and embrace a more cosmopolitan worldview. Equally, the Uzètiens, not solely through self-interest, are as anxious about the impact of Brexit and the turmoil in le parti travailliste as are we all.
 
In fact, the French struggle to understand much of what is going on. Trotskyism in France, for example, is not a gratuitous term of abuse but a description of a particular and legitimate ideology which was forged in opposition to Stalinism. And where does Trotsky advocate “entryism”? (He doesn’t anywhere, as a French friend pointed out forcibly to me the other day. Exactement!)
 
But the requirement for precision and accuracy – dare we call it truth? – in political discourse is pretty much de rigeur in France. And you don’t need me to point out that this is very different from the standards of our British politicians and journalists, where a recent academic study has found that precisely 0% of Corbyn’s speeches have been accurately and comprehensively reported in ‘newspapers’ such as The Mail and The Express and barely at all at the BBC and The Guardian.
 
I suspect that the French tradition is the result of its respect for les philosophes and a well-established tradition of rigorous and challenging intellectual contribution to political thought. In Britain, this is despised; in France, it is welcomed, embraced. In Britain, we dismiss people as “too clever by half” or “Two-Brains”; in France, we read them, listen to them, learn from them.
 
It is this tradition which prompts the support which Corbyn commands amongst our French friends and the shock and amazement provoked by the abuse heaped upon him by his opponents inside the party: on the one hand, a man whose contributions are reasoned, thoughtful, and quietly spoken; on the other, snide sound-bites, shouted.
 
But, as Voltaire famously put it, “The true triumph of reason is that it enables us to get along with those who do not possess it.”
 
Let’s hope so.

* I commend this place to you, particularly as they bring down from Brittany, really good, cool water oysters and the multi-national staff are exceptional.

Today from the everysmith vaults: The Cowboy Junkies and a live show at the Newport Folk Festival in August 2008. Plus a rendition of Dirty Water, part of my own small and solo celebration of the Sox winning the make-up game in Cleveland last night, which I didn't see live because of a dinner date.

Jill and I decided to take a break from what was becoming an obsession with endless news updates to enjoy some of the things that Europe has to offer. We needed an away day without wi-fi and iphone notifications pinging into our consciousness. So we drove south.

We started with Chagall and the presentation of his works in a multimedia exhibition held underground in an ancient (since Roman times) cave-like quarry. This is Les Carrières des Lumières at Les Beaux, near St Rémy de Provence.
 
Chagall: Midsummer Night’s Dreams is a spectacular creation. All the famous masterpieces have been digitized and projected onto the columns, walls and the floor of the quarry. Initially, the experience is disorientating, even disturbing; within moments, however, one eyes and ears adjust: one is inundated with colour, close-ups and creativity.

Every phase of Chagall's life and work is here in one form or another: 100 projectors showing his works from the love paintings and landscapes to the stained glass windows which brought Jill to tears when seeing them for the first time a decade or so ago.

Accompanying the imagery is an eclectic but sympa soundtrack, put together by a friend of Chagall, Mikhaïl Rudy. Through 27 speakers, it moves from circus music to grand opera to Janis Joplin and back again.
 
We were entranced and enchanted; in awe and in thrall. We were tempted to remain for a second run. But we had to return to St Quentin-la-Poterie because, that evening, Stéphane Reynaud was opening his new restaurant, La Cuisine de Boucher, in St Quentin and we had coveted tickets to the launch party.

​Stéphane’s new venture is in a large and imposing building overlooking the market square. It has been empty and à vendre for many years, and as each summer passed without a new owner, we speculated that its refurbishment would become even more difficult and even more expensive. I suspect it was both. But miracles have been achieved and the party did it justice, with the great and the good of St Quentinoise society – including the Mayor and the council – turning out for fine wine and delicious canapés.
 
It was a great day, a day during which we almost forgot the strife back in the UK and our own concerns and misgivings over the implications for us and our business, and for the future of our children and grandchildren.
 
Almost, but not quite.
 
Turning one’s back on Europe is not something for which we voted and not something that should be done frivolously, although that is what has happened. let's be clear: it should not have been done at all. But it has and somehow we must live with it.

How? No idea. But when I've worked it out, I will let you know ...
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I am continuing my exploration of Indie Pop with the carefully nuanced and tuneful work of Ultimate Painting, a UK band which owes much to the Velvets, and to which I was introduced by a show in New York recorded by the exemplary nyctaper.

It is about class. It usually is.
 
Jill and I voted by proxy and with our feet, so we spent the day of the referendum firmly in Europe. During the day, we exchanged our estimates of the majority for Remain with fellow ex-pats and with French friends. That night, having watched the Red Sox beat the White Sox 8-7 in extra innings, I reflected that the referendum result might be equally tight. 52-48 Remain seemed to be the consensus.
 
At no point had it crossed my mind that the Leave campaign would win. In England, only one friend had confided that he was going to vote that way. In France, I know no-one of any nationality who thinks that the the UK would be better off out, nor that Europe would be better off without the UK.
 
It started slowly. Gibraltar voted Remain with an unanimity which would have put Stalin’s Soviet Union to shame followed by Newcastle – tight but pro-Remain. The egregious Farage appeared with inside information from his ‘mates in the City’ who had told him Remain had edged it.
 
Then came Sunderland. Then Sheffield. And we all knew we had lost it.
 
We had lost it because, despite the evidence of the General Election, we had failed to understand that the austerity imposed by the Tories had left the working class throughout the north and Midlands without hope. “How can it get any worse?” asked a woman in Hartlepool to a bemused BBC journalist, who was patronizingly attempting to explain the economic case for Remain and the Osborne-briefed consequences of Leave.
 
As we have noted many times before, the present government has imposed an economic policy which owes nothing to economics and everything to political ideology.

To ensure and reinforce the hegemony of a privileged and super-rich elite, Osborne has bought the middle-class. Literally.
 
People like me have colluded with them. And while we may embrace the EU in the same way as we embrace our multi-cultural and multi-racial lifestyle, we need to remember that for many years the Tories have made the EU their whipping-boy. Boris Johnson, in a previous life as a Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper, famously invented and exaggerated scare stories. But despite his best efforts to appear so, he is not daft. He knew the way the wind was blowing.
 
Cameron did not. A shallow chancer, he has no idea of the world beyond his circle. And every time that I saw the leaflets and social media posts listing those who were pro Remain and those pro Leave, I knew it was losing us votes. Lined up to encourage us to stay were the great, the good and the loaded of the establishment - all powerful individuals, almost all millionaires or more. They were the leaders of political parties, governors of banks, CEOs of multi-national companies who paid less corporation tax than I do, non-doms and tax exiles who nonetheless control vast swathes of our economy.
 
Even I, a passionate European, was occasionally tempted to register my protest against this overwhelming show of force from the haves against the have-nots. I didn't. Remain and reform was my position.

I regret the Leave vote, but I do not blame the Leave voters.

Most are not racist, nor are they bigots. They are certainly not fascists, nor are they unthinking. They are people who have experienced a simple truth of the class society.
 
“When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Some variété Française - Cabrel, Greco, Debussy.

I can’t remember precisely when my love affair with football started to wane. It must have been sometime after the 1997-1998 season, because I remember the events of that campaign vividly, even without being reminded by Rick Gekoski’s excellent Staying Up: A Fan behind the Scenes in the Premiership. I remember particularly our win at the Villa on the 14th February in the FA Cup, the goal scored by Moldovan, and that dreadful penalty shoot-out at Sheffield United which ended our hopes of another 1987 Cup triumph.

So I’m guessing that I stopped going to every game sometime in the early 00s, and my attendance since has been limited to special games and those to which I was invited to share rare roast beef and red wine in the Directors’ Box. I think this is partly because Guy went off to university and Rick Gekoski himself to London, but it is also because of a growing disenchantment with the way football was going: cheats on the park and crooks in the boardroom, as someone – maybe me - has said.

But I still get it. I still get the extraordinary euphoria that football can generate. And I still get the sense of identification of a fan with a club.

Hell, as readers of Staying Up will know, I was part of it. Rick reports my lachrymosity on one occasion and my anger and depression on many, so it must be true. Or at least accurate. And his book records the travails of fans who live for results over which they have no control. It produces the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.

Staying Up is one of the few books which chronicle this from the inside. Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch is more personal but has the same resonance for fans of any team. A Season with Verona by Tim Parks has a slightly different agenda, using his away trips to develop a theory of national character. And The Miracle of Castel di Sangro by Joe McGinness is about passion and corruption and, incidentally, about the growing involvement of the author in the affairs of the club: from objective reporter to passionate and ultimately disenchanted supporter.

Now, there is a new (or newish) book which addresses these issues. It is by Nick Davidson and it is entitled Pirates, Punks & Politics: Falling in Love with a Radical Football Club. It is a football book but it is primarily a political book, about a club which is a creation and reflection of a left-wing, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-fascist and anti-homophobic community from the wrong side of the Hamburg tracks.

Nick Davidson was a Watford fan who, before finding true love with FC St Pauli, looked to non-league football (in the same way as I – somewhat desultorily – tried out Leamington) but found the same kind of squabbles and pettiness in the lower levels as he had identified at the top of the game.  In St Pauli, he found a warm welcome from a club and, more importantly, fans (pirates, punks and street politicians) who shared his purist and non-commercial hopes for the beautiful game.

I am late to this bandwagon and, to date, my interest and involvement is limited to checking St Pauli’s result every weekend and watching Youtube footage of the antics of the club’s extraordinary fan base. But one day, I will get to Millerntor.

And I will get there before it’s too late, before St Pauli goes the way of almost every club; its values lost as it finds that the game is merely another cog in the machine.

As all political lives end in failure,  so all fans’ lives end in disillusion. But in the meantime, I commend to you all the volumes mentioned above, especially Nick Davidson and Rick Gekoski. While you are reading them, you will be reminded – however briefly – why the beautiful game is, well, beautiful.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Still with Yo La Tengo. This isn’t Mozart – it needs time to appreciate fully.

Twenty five years or so ago, lying in hospital after a brain operation or two and struggling to come to terms with the physical and psychological changes caused by the abscess which had taken over and destroyed much my hypothalamus, I asked Jill to bring me some books about the workings of the brain.

A couple of days later, she returned with a small library. She brought academic treatises which were, and remain, beyond me. (Susan Greenfield's excellent The Human Brain: A Guided Tour was still half a dozen years away.) But there was also Memoir of a Thinking Radish by Peter Medawar, who had won a Nobel Prize in 1960 for his work on immunology and organ transplantation. He suffered a number of strokes, which caused a massive right-sided cerebral haemorrhage and impaired the use of the left arm, left leg and the left half of each eye. Although of different provenance, these were my symptoms, too, so I read his account of the event and its consequences with interest and, as he described the various treatments and therapies to which he was subjected, trepidation. Much of his advice, however, was sound, particularly his tips for surviving hospital. Sample: "if you are well enough to read books, they are crucially important for entertainment and keeping the mind in working order. Some serious works should therefore be among them. Remember, however, that if you didn't quite follow Chomsky when you were well, there is nothing about illness that can give you an insight into the working of his mind."

I can also confirm that, if you were incapable of understanding neuroscience when well and sentient, there is no chance that you will gain wisdom reading the same stuff in a hospital bed. The academic stuff about the nature of the brain made absolutely no sense at all.

What did make sense was the wild card in my library, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For His Hat, by Oliver Sacks.

I did not have the same visual aphasia as the eponymous man - Dr P, as I recall. I did not mistake Jill for a hat - given Jill's striking good looks, I suspect that even Dr P would be hard pressed to make the confusion; but I did experience, at the time, some parallel issues, more dysphasic than aphasic.

For example, I 'mistook' a good-looking Afro-Caribbean night nurse for the great Sir Garfield Sobers and regaled him in the wee small hours with my recollections of his greatest achievements as bowler, batsman, fielder and skipper.  I spent some days convinced that Jill and I were living in Paris, and several times asked her if she had time to nip down to the boulangerie by Notre Dame for croissants and decent coffee. I remember each of my visitors, but rather than the visits extending over the six or seven weeks of my stay in hospital, my brain compressed all into a single episode, in which I was hosting a farewell party for all my friends. Bizarre.

The major benefit of reading Sacks, however, was his belief that the essential self was unaffected by illness. Like R.D. Laing, he questioned what was normal and abnormal, healthy and unhealthy. And for someone recuperating from the attack on my brain, this was important.

Especially as the late Professor Hitchcock, who performed the two operations which saved my life from a clinical point of view, was not a man from this culture. He was a surgeon who understood exactly where the various bits of the brain were located and how they were linked. But there his role ended. If the patient was alive and made a full physical recovery, then he had done his job.

I was lucky. I had Dr Sacks to take over the next stage of my recovery. He was a scientist, but he was also a writer. He was a neurologist but also a psychologist and a psychiatrist at a time when none of those disciplines met. He brought a wider perspective to each individual's neurological issues.

Together with Jill, it was he who taught me to fight the numbness and the lethargy and to begin a self-initiated programme of physiotherapy. (It took over a week to get permission from the hospital to go outside and just walk!) It was he who taught me that, although I felt different, I was not fundamentally different.

And although my physical condition remains pretty much as it was when I left hospital, my mental state - I hope family and friends agree - is not that of a man with left-side numbness and a damaged hypothalamus.

That is due primarily to two people: Oliver Sacks, who died yesterday, and Jill Every, who celebrates her birthday today. I owe them both a great deal.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Yo La Tengo, a recent discovery. Working my way through their 2013 Hannukkah shows at the Bell House, with thanks to nyctaper.

La véraison is that magical moment when the grapes start to mature and change colour from green to purple. At this point in their development, the grapes no longer grow but, instead, ripen. (Actually, there’s a great deal more to it than that, but this is not the place to learn about it. Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine should be the first port of call for those of you who relish the minutiae of making fine wine.)

Suffice to say, it is a crucial time in the vigneron’s year, and it is celebrated in vineyards throughout France. But in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, they take it a stage further. Here, la fête de la véraison combines not only la véraison itself but also a celebration of the traditional arrival of the Avignon popes at their summer home.

This means that, in addition to dégustations on every corner, the whole town steps back five hundred years. Medieval knights joust and do battle; jugglers and tumblers, magicians and minstrels are everywhere; mules process through the crowded streets bearing barrels of  Chateauneuf-du-Pape: buy a specially engraved tasting glass for €5 and top yourself up as they pass. No, I didn’t need to be asked twice. The repetitive rhythms of medieval music may grate after a while, but this does not matter. We are meeting Nigel and Abigail at Le Verger des Papes for lunch.

Le Verger is located just short of the summit of a four hundred step climb. Continue to the top and you arrive at the chateauneuf itself. One assumes that the Pope was carried, because it is very steep indeed, leaving one in serious need of a glass of chilled rosé before one can even attempt to read through the wine list and the celebratory Véraison menu.

The food is good – the smoked duck and foie gras salad especially so today. But it is the wine menu to which you should devote your attention. It runs to a dozen pages of closely typed listings of all the great Chateauneuf names and all the great vintages, and if you happen upon the wrong page, your bank balance may be severely diminished.

But we’ve been here before. We know that Le Verger also has a cave. What’s more, we know that it has its own cuvée of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, exclusively available from them. At €49, it is not inexpensive, but in this town, it is remarkable value. It is the classic GSM – Grenache, Syrah, Mourvèdre. It is ripe and rich, lush and luscious. It is also very powerful, admitting to 15%ABV, but probably more. We drank the 2011: the Grenache was big and fruity; the Syrah was nuanced and spicy; the Mourvèdre was gamey and full on, its notoriously tough tannins already softened and fully integrated. 

We managed another glass.

We walked off our lunch on the way back to the car, parked in the vineyards a kilometre or two from the centre of the village. The internal combustion engine has no place in a medieval village and the route was barrée some distance away. But it was a good walk in every sense, taken in company with others who had enjoyed similar experiences, and – indeed – were still doing so, having topped up their special glass from the final mule at the edge of the village.

Ripeness is all.

Today from the everysmith vaults: There is a brilliant piece in the current Boston Magazine about Van Morrison’s time in the city and the writing and recording of Astral Weeks. So I’ve been listening to that important album, which was loved by almost everyone whose opinion I valued, but not by me. Maybe they knew something I didn’t.

Just as, in the States, American football is simply football, so, in France, Le Lour de France is simply Le Tour. It shows on screens in bars, it dominates conversation, it is the subject each day of the front page headlines in L’Equipe, the national sports daily. And it also features on my iPad between 2.30 and 5.30 each afternoon. You’re right, Le Tour has become yet another obsession. When I saw at first hand the riders taking a 90 degree left turn at around 50 kilometres an hour in Uzès a few years back, I was fascinated and full of admiration. And when, on the 14th of July three years ago, Le Tour came through our village, with Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome at the front of the pelaton, I became a real fan. (See, if you are minded, Lettres d’Uzès #26.)

Le Tour fits neatly into my self-appointed schedule. La canicule, the heatwave, has been dominant for several weeks now, keeping the temperatures up in the high 30s, or close to 100 in old money. Which sounds idyllic, but can be too much of a good thing. Domestic chores must be completed early in the morning before it becomes too hot to attempt them or even contemplate doing so. And my determination to write the final 100,000 words of this damn thriller can wane as quickly as the temperature rises.

But I am persevering. Two of the three planned murders have been committed. The protagonist has assembled his team of co-conspirators. And the location of the action has been successfully moved across the Atlantic. It’s going well.

I try to work at it from first thing until TV coverage of Le Tour begins, when I stop pondering the fate of ‘60s radicals and instead marvel at the power of Froome and Quintana, Contador and – our new hero – Geraint Evans.

Are they doping? I think not and I hope not. In my capacity as a member of IBWAA, I have refused to vote into the Hall of Fame the likes of Bonds and Clements, Sosa and McGuire. I am totally opposed to PEDs in sport. But I am also conscious that, because most of us have no access to hard evidence either way, our reaction tends to be based on whether or not we like the individual concerned.

I like Big Papi. I don’t like A-Rod. I like Froome (although not as much as I like Bradley Wiggins) but I didn’t like Armstrong.

I am aware of the parallels between Team Sky and US Postal. I find the ranks of Team Sky, riding en masse in their black uniforms, unfortunately reminiscent of a Panzer brigade powering through Belgium. I am also, of course, instinctively antagonistic to anything funded by Murdoch.

But I do believe that extraordinary burst of power on the first day in the Pyrenees was the result of innate talent and very hard work. It was unexpected. It was exhilarating. It was sporting in every sense.

Vive le tour!

Today from the everysmith vaults: There is something of a Nashville fest going on at the moment, inspired perhaps by the anniversary of Blonde on Blonde. I have been listening to The Dead in Nashville in ‘78, now the latest official release, although I listened to the excellent Charlie Miller AUD recording. But right now, I have playing Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats. The Dylan and Cash tracks are less interesting(because more familiar) than the work of Nashville cats themselves. I commend it to you.