Bonjour and welcome (0)
- 30 Aug 07, 10:16 AM
The other day, as I passed a queue snaking out of the door of a KFC in Romford High Street and became embroiled in my third set-to of the afternoon, a voice appeared in my head.
“Dirsy,” it said, sounding a lot like Richard Littlejohn, “it’s time you gave this great country of yours and the rabid lunatics that infest it a swerve for a month or two.”
As luck would have it, Tommy Fordyce and I are off on Monday to the Rugby World Cup in France, a country that has given the world more than its fair share of culture and sophistication down the years.
Indeed, to paraphrase the mighty Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday, a little bit more than a Chicken Zinger Burger - know what I mean?
“TWO BLOKES JOLLYING IT UP ROUND FRANCE IN A FIVE-BERTH WINNEBAGO FOR SEVEN WEEKS?” I hear the angrier licence fee payers among you splutter.
Well, yes. And no.
I sincerely hope it’s going to be jolly, because the occasional missive containing a blow-by-blow account of our latest game of Chase the Ace is not going to get any juices flowing.
But, what with writing blog entries every day, knocking up video packages, sending back pictures and helping out our colleagues from Radio 5live, there will, rest assured, be plenty of graft involved.
Of course, there will be times when I’m grafting on a beach with a Gitanes hanging from the corner of my mouth while staring at bikini-clad Frenchwomen behind a set of extra-tinted sunglasses, but, as they say in France, c’est comme ca le cookie f’emiette.
That said, this trip would be nothing without you.
We need to know the best bars to watch the games, the best places to get our heads down for the night, the best places to sample a bit of culture, and whether, for example, you need a lift from Nantes to Bordeaux on a given date.
We’ll need plenty of banter on the blog and plenty more from those of you who will be in France supporting your team, whether we bump into you on a campsite in Cognac or a bar in Aix-en-Provence.
We will be attending plenty of games along the way, but our main brief is to bottle the flavour and colour of the tournament, the human angle if you will.
Another reason we need you involved as much as possible is because two blokes holed up in what is essentially a big car for seven weeks is a sure-fire recipe for a spot of knuckles.
I don’t drive, and, when it comes to languages, I make Derek Trotter look like Peter Ustinov. Oh, and I smoke like Dot Cotton. Luckily for Tom, I don’t play the acoustic guitar, but I still suspect he hates me already.
There will be time apart, which will come when Tommy, a very accomplished tri-athlete, gets on his bike, which he’s strapping to the back of the van, and cycles up the side of some mountain or other.
And if he wants to steam up Mont Blanc while I’m wallowing in some serious Ben Time, getting intimate with a block of blue vein, some Jacobs crackers and a carafe of Burgundy, that’s his outlook. I suspect the time apart will smooth our progress no end.
Tommy, who will fill you in with some more details of our trip this weekend, will be picking me up from my flat in Rommo, Essex, at 12 o’clock on Monday and we should be on French soil by late afternoon. So, as our old friend Shaw Taylor used to say, keep ‘em peeled.
Au revoir, adieu, en esperant vous voir en chemin! (My brother told me how to say that as well. He’s going to hate me as much as Tom by the time this World Cup’s over…)
Ben Dirs is a BBC Sport journalist travelling around France in a camper van with Tom Fordyce. Click here to search for all of Tom and Ben's blog videos.
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