Trying to make the French connection

I thought for a moment. "So you are asking me to get up from lodgings in St Etienne at six a.m. on the morning after a late night match, to get up and catch a train to Lyon, dump my bags in that night's Kip Du Monde in Lyon and then catch a train south to Marseille, there to cover a cakewalk for the Dutch over South Korea before taking a midnight train back to Lyon to steal a few hours' sleep before getting up and using this whole conversation as a slim pretext for filling a paragraph in Monday's column."

My lower lip was trembling. My eyes were watery.

"Yes", he said. "OK", I said. "You'll be in all our prayers," he said.

He is, after all, the sports editor, thus consecrated by Our Lord. Rather than question his infallibilty I would do the professional thing and start vicious rumours about his drinking and his involvement with the Medellin cartel.

I am a bad traveller. I have been known to weep with joy at the sight of a Marks and Spencers in a foreign city (Manchester) and once tried to claim sanctuary in a McDonalds ("I was in school with Ronald.") I have never even taken the trouble to learn the few phrases necessary to carry out a basic conversation in Cork.

I am a bad traveller but the World Cup is about nothing if it is not about me travelling badly. Ruud Gullit said so himself on ITV the other night.

I am a bad, grumpy traveller with much to be grumpy about. Can there be anything more hellishly depressing than confinement in a reclining seat on an early morning train with Billie Holiday on the headphones and France outside the window as the morning finds its heat and the fresh orange juice lapping against the lip of the glass threatens to spill over making the croissants soggy. It's the case that Amnesty International have been dreading.

The train reached Marseille not long after mid-day and myself and a bemused wire reporter from the Press Association were corralled into a car by a taxi driver who proposed the exceptional deal of charging both of us 100 francs for a short, 75 franc journey.

He was a rough looking sort so we eagerly nodded our heads and I sweetened him up by uttering the words which bring a smile to the lips of most men in these parts. Tony Cascarino.

In the shadow of the Velodrome all the by now familiar faces were gathered in one of the tall cool halls where we do our work. There was the group of Spanish journalists I keep encountering whose task is to follow that portion of the World Cup not directly concerning thier national team.

By Saturday afternoon they were glad to be far away from the napalming of Javier Clemente by their colleagues.

And there was the English freelance whom I meet on a train every second day swapping a couple of lines of small talk as one or other struggles past with bags and baggage.

"Brief Encounter The Sequel, eh?"

"Who'd have thought the south of France would be hot in summer ?"

"Real shame is that they don't give rail miles." "You said it, mate. You said it."

Saturday was an off day of sorts for those of us who work for daily newspapers and we sat in the press centre restaurant chatting philosophically about the bastards back in our offices and jousting tiredly about whose bastards were the bastardliest and detailing all the things which the bastards didn't understand about our harrowing lives riding the iron rails up and down France.

But outside there were scenes to gladden the leathered heart, pictures to have you walking on air. The World Cup is a better party than any Olympic games. There is a corporate strand to it surely, but it doesn't overwhelm the competition: the fans and the people do.

The coaches which had brought the Dutch fans to the game made a corridor all along the tree tended avenue. Many of them had Irish scarves with shamrocks hanging from the rearview mirrors. The Dutch themselves, an ocean of orange, were having barbeques along the Avenue de Prado, the scent of sizzling meat mixing with the sound of drums in the beery shimmering air as the South Koreans, a little smaller in number and a lot less outgoing, walked among them like tourists.

Hugs and scarves and hats were exchanged and a small group of smiling South Koreans were prevailed upon to sing a song to the carousing Dutch and soon they were all carousing together. It was an extraordinary atmosphere.

Inside the Velodrome, the merriment was not shared so generously. The Dutch made poetry on the pitch as the orange stands swayed like tulip heads in the breeze. American sports teams retire the jerseys of great heroes. Those World Cup teams with beautifully evocative jerseys should never have to change them. Brazil, Argentina, Holland. Seeing the Dutch in their luminous glory confirmed that the World Cup had started.

High in the stands a billion moths fluttered like mad thoughts against the brilliance of the floodlights and down below on the green cloth men of vivid orange flew in dizzy patterns and scored five goals. The glory of it all made the day short.

Or so it seemed then. Lyon with typical French fussiness has two major train stations and at three in the morning the train from Marseille pulled into the wrong one. I awoke just in time and considered staying on board just to see if the next stop would be the right one but the man from SNCF walked down the aisle and made it clear that the next stop was Frankfurt and for a man who had left his travellers' cheques in his hotel room, waking up in Franfurt on a Sunday morning could be a minor inconvenience.

Now there are two hotels of the same name in Lyon and I had left my bags in one of them that morning. Not only do the hotels have the same name but the street names sound similar to the untuned ear. One is on Rue de Rondelet. The other is on Rue Bonnelet. With the jaunty bluffer's confidence of the man who breezily committed to print the opinion that Nicky Butt might play for England against Tunisia (I know, I know, I know), I chose the wrong one. Must get that ear tuned. Thus I splurged my last 100 francs of hard cash on a taxi ride to the wrong place.

Traipsing through Lyon as the street cleaners headed home and the metro workers started out, how I longed to set eyes on the hotel porter, (Rab C Nesbitt out of Serge Gainsborough). To watch him rub his hammy nicotined hands down over the hairy voluptousness of his string vest as he slapped the room key down on the counter and asked gruffly if the Monsieur might be having the petit dejeuner in two hours time.

Ah! To smile at him with glazed, fearful incomprehension and whisper enigmatically "peut etre", then to toil up the stained concrete stairs to the moist refuge of my room, to slip my lithe body between the cheapest nylon sheets that money can buy, to feel the static electricity dancing playfully on my leg hairs and to think of all the nasty rumours I will invent about the sports editor.

Bah!