An Olympic outlaw in the land that bookmaking forgot

Holidays are all very well, but they have a habit of getting in the way of ordinary life, which I suppose is sort of the point but can be very inconvenient nonetheless.

When you’re halfway up a Pyrenee (if there is, indeed, a singular for Pyrenees), you soon find out that it can be hard to stay in touch with the rest of the world, which is a good thing if it means turning off your roaming facility and blanking out the banking adviser/credit card company/person who thinks you’ve had a car accident within the last year, but not so much if there’s an Olympics or an Ebor meeting to keep track of.

It’s at that point you realise – for all that the world is a smaller place these days and it’s possible for a start-up business in Swaziland to sell gourds to somebody in Hatfield Peverel – that when the French government wants to stop you betting on the 4.20 at York and the man who owns the satellite isn’t so keen on you watching BBC pictures of the Greco-Roman wrestling, we’re suddenly all plunged back into the Dark Ages of communications and somebody’s eaten the carrier pigeon.