Why I watch the Tour de France every year

Recently I tweeted something about the Tour de France, having just finished watching highlights of the day’s stage and a friend responded, with “Still with the #TourdeFrance. Requesting the original thread about how you fell in love with it.” In my early days on Twitter, I did a series of tweets – before threads were threads – on why I watch the Tour de France every year. It is the only cycling race I follow religiously. When I was writing my book Listen To Your Footsteps, I wrote a short essay on the same topic, but it didn’t make the final edit; it didn’t feel like it fit. But, in response...

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Book Extract: Escape

This is the fourth in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc. THE RUSSIAN author Fyodor Dostoevsky is quoted as having said, ‘To think too much is a disease.’ I have always wondered how one measures thinking too much. I have spent a lifetime in my head and been told I think too much. I have always felt, in some instances, we don’t think enough and what children should be taught is how to think. So many things in the world seem to happen because zero thought has been put into a situation...

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Book Extract: My heroes were on the walls

This is the second in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc WATCHING A documentary about Muhammad Ali, I was struck by how big an impact he had on me when I was a child. I was eight years old when he lost to Larry Holmes, and I have memories of watching the fight with my father. I has heartbroken because, even at that young age, I could see that Ali was at the end of his career. I read a copy of an early biography of his as a young teenager and, by then, had watched a lot of his...

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Book Extract: Photographs

This is the first in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc IN SOME quarters, as photography spreads across the world, photographs were feared because it was believed that they captured the spirit of the subject. We went from that to documenting our lives incessantly with photographs. If you want to see how far we have come, try explaining what photography looked like in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to a child who has grown up with cameras on just about any device....

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