Salut!

Au revoir le Tour de France, le Tour de Swaledale

In Paris days, the end of the Tour de France was an event held on our doorstep. The peloton would whizz by, five floors beneath us on the rue de Rivoli, as the closing series of laps of the Seine, rive gauche and rive droite, led to the finale on the Champs-Elysées.

Cycling as a spectator sport does little for me. I admire those taking part in a gruelling challenge and salute the winners, all the more so if performance-enhancing drugs have finally been eliminated. But that's about it. All the same, it's a tremendous spectacle wherever it goes and there was a great sense of occasion on each of the three Paris climaxes that I witnesssed.

Everyone is now back in France. The opening England section has been completed, the riders flew out of London on Monday night for today's Le Touquet-Lille stage, followed on the ferry - courtesy of the broken-down train in the Chunnel - by the grand entourage.

As we wish them all bonne continuation, let us look back on the wonder that was the Grand Départ in Yorkshire. My great friend Pete Sixsmith went to the beautiful Swaledale village of Reeth and reported on his day for readers of Salut! Sunderland without mentioning football once.

Here once again, for the smaller but perhaps more varied audience of Salut! proper, is his delightful essay:

Photos du weekend: a click, a plop and mobile finds watery grave

The 10th anniversary is about now or has just passed. Look at the pretty bay of Villefranche-sur-Mer, just east of Nice, and imagine an idyllic day in 2004.

Friends had invited us on to their boat. We dropped anchor in the bay - it's a bit like spot the ball but I could show you roughly where - and their son took some photos. One of them, when seen much later, unexpectedly caught a mobile phone on its way out of the pocket of my shorts. Unseen, it continued its journey and ended up at the bottom of the sea.

R versus Andy Coulson and others: what the judge said

This, if you scroll down, is what Mr Justice Saunders said to the five men standing before him when he sentenced them in the phone hacking trial. You may have seen the remarks published elsewhere. I felt a duty, having written so much at Salut! about Leveson, the various police inquiries and the public debate, to reproduce them in full.

I should let the judge speak for himself without too much interruption. I will just say this:

* I continue to believe phone hacking to be and have been wrong and an insult to my trade of journalism

* I accept society's right to express its disapproval by imprisonment even if I still feel these were essentially corporate misdeeds that ought better to have been punished by corporate penalties, civil redress - of which there has been plenty - and professional sanctions against culpable individuals

* the judge is quite correct in deploring the News of the World's failure to inform police at the earliest moment about what it believed to be Milly Dowler's whereabouts. He was right to see reproachable motives for this. But he was wrong to adopt the "bloke down the pub" complaint about newspapers wanting to sell more papers. Newspapers are made for that entirely respectable purpose; he implies the very objective is somehow squalid.

* I expect to become angrier about other matters as the show trials proceed

* I hold no brief for Andy Coulson or any of the others involved, but - much as this may be unavoidable - see not the slightest possibility of him getting a fair trial on the outstanding matters against him

All the presidents went ... to the Fort de Brégançon

There are no concessions for the, er, mature. Sadly, since it would otherwise have been free, I find it increasingly hard to pass myself off as under 26. So we forked out our 10 euros apiece and did what we'd long wanted to do: visit the Fort de Brégançon, France's summer presidential holiday retreat from 1968 until last year.

As Jurgen Klinsmann thanks Salut!, we invite votes for Brazil's last four

NB: Poll has been amended to take account of quarterfinal results. In all cases, votes previously cast count and will be taken into account

Decades ago, a girlfriend in Northern Ireland told me her father, a headmaster, was thrilled each year when a Christmas card from Captain Terence O'Neill, the Stormont prime minister, would flop - great US English verb for what a diving footballer does - on the doormat. No matter that every other head teacher in Ulster received one, too.

So I was not carried away when the above missive arrived at Twitter from @ussoccer_reply, the official "reply feed" for the United States Men's National Team (USMNT). Salut! Sunderland had indeed supported the USA at Brazil 2014, as a result of a readers' poll, but it was clear similar messages were going to heaven knows how many others.

Coulson and others, and the task facing Mr Justice Saunders

Flickr photo credit: vaXvine

Stop Press (seems appropriate): I shall comment on the sentences but am travelling this weekend so not just yet ...

You cannot influence a judge, in-house newspaper lawyers of my experience would say, so don't worry too much about what you write concerning a no-jury trial or during the period between a jury’s conviction and sentence.

French Connexion: when Le Pens fall out, Le Pens prosper

... and this is the second new column I mentioned. The Connexion, published in Monaco and distributed throughout France, is comfortably the best anglophone newspaper or magazine you'll find in or, for that matter, about France. I have written for it occasionally and the editor, Sarah Smith, recently asked me to contribute a regular column. Here's the first, more less as submitted and - give or take the odd tweak - as published ...