BRITAIN first entered the European cycling community through its main gate the Tour de France 55 years ago

BRITAIN first entered the European cycling community through its main gate, the Tour de France, 55 years ago. 'I must play good now,' he said.If Lomas does not exactly have the pedigree for taking centre stage - winning the Audi Quattro Trophy on the Challenge Tour last year has been a career highlight - his caddie, Paul Stevens, is accustomed to the limelight. In a call of omnipotent garrulity, Tony Benn assured us of his own personal immortality. A word appears, projected on a wall, followed by its synonyms selected from a thesaurus: one of these is isolated, then followed by its synonyms; and so on. It is quite astounding how casually people who think of themselves as sensible take financial decisions.We all do this. Nearly everyone else got booked (offences included failure to produce a hanky and yawning without covering the mouth). I went to a local police station, expecting to be given an appointment at headquarters as in 1983.

And then I fell prey to feelings of an entirely different kind - overwhelming, heart-crushing, gut-twisting envy. A thumping header into the corner of the net was just reward for his run, and gave this semi-final a fitting conclusion.Goals: Shearer (7) 1-0; Welsh (88) 1-1.Aberdeen (4-4-2): Burridge; McKimmie, Irvine, Smith, Robertson (Miller, 69); Grant, Richardson, Kane, McKinnon; Jess (Paatelainen, 84), Shearer.Dundee United (3-4-3): Van de Kamp; Cleland, Petric, Welsh; McInally, Bowman, McKinlay, Malpas; McLaren, Brewster, Nixon (Dailly, 63). Then she knocked at the palace gate and announced that she had come to ask for the prince's hand in marriage.'The first question is easy,' said the prince 'It is this. A little boy frightens himself and the farmyard animals by threatening the arrival of Big Bad Mole.

In England, she immediately joined the service of the Dutch government-in-exile and worked as editorial secretary on its newspaper Vrij Nederland ('Free Netherlands'). Supposed to be mentally ill, she seems just eccentric, wearing a snorkel and wielding a ping-pong bat to do the shopping. The unidentified punter had placed the bet at a William Hill shop on Monday. It is not only the title of one of the parts of John Hopkins' excellent television drama, Talking to a Stranger, but belongs to the long tradition, among children, of misinterpreting the dreary words they used to sing in church. He is a self-employed carpet broker, one of half a dozen who have privileged access to the IOCC.The broker's job is to guide private clients through the bewildering stacks of carpets where normally only the trade is allowed to tread. The turf delivers little to raise the spirit, with a disappointing field for the main steeplechase of the day at Newbury and a feature race of the weekend, the Lincoln, which excites no one quite as much as the bookmakers.