Blame Jacques Goddet for the popular trend of starting a Tour of Somewhere, somewhere else entirely.

The Tour de France organiser from 1936-86, Goddet was unsurprisingly a newspaper mogul. He was also an enthusiastic ladies' man, explaining after taking his fourth wife: "I always wanted to marry the woman I loved at the moment I loved her".

While pre-war organisers focused mostly on making others suffer (not an unpopular policy at the time), Goddet was more interested in taking the race to the masses, cheerfully turfing tradition to start the 1954 Tour in Amsterdam, and subsequent races in places conspicuously Not France, including Dublin, Basel and Cologne.

So carried away did he get with putting stamps in his passport that only the failure of supersonic air travel stopped him from organising a Tour with stages in the US and 10 European countries.

This year's jaunt around Spain follows the Goddet blueprint, beginning in Assen, Holland – a place separated from Spain only by the tiny matters of Belgium and France.

Although the tattered neurone in the Broom Wagon's brain that understands marketing grasps the benefits in expanding what is, after all, a three-week travelling circus, we still find something pure and appealing about a race which does what is says on the box – starts and finishes in the place it is supposed to be touring.

A lusty hurrah then for the Tour of Britain, which gets underway in a fortnight - in Scunthorpe.

Whereas Monaco – the starting line for July's Tour de France – is famous for being the playground of royalty and Assen has a Moto GP circuit, Scunthorpe is best known for playing havoc with Internet filters – containing, as it does, a four-letter combination pertaining to a gentlewoman's bits.

In something known as the Scunthorpe problem, early users who ventured online, perhaps to Ask Jeeves, found themselves blocked from creating accounts. Much.

the same thing happened to residents of Penistone, Yorkshire (and possibly also of Assen), proving that censorship – usually the tool of leather trenchcoat-wearing types like Goddet's precursor Henri Desgrange – can occasionally be hugely entertaining.

So while Vuelta riders will soon be dusting themselves off from a two-hour plane ride across central Europe, Bradley Wiggins and his fellow Tour of Britain competitors can look forward to a poke around the ironworks, or a tootle out to the limestone quarry at nearby Melton Ross.

Or they could explore one of Scunthorpe's two shopping centres and turn over in their minds this line from Spike Milligan, who was attacked for including the town in the title of his book: "The references to Scunthorpe are nothing personal. It is a joke.

"As is Scunthorpe."

10 mysteries of Cadel

For all his public ups and downs, we have always found Cadel Evans difficult to read. His blushes, for example. Are they an appeasement ritual, or a cunning evolutionary response? What about his habit of nervous laughter? Is it because of our amusing jokes (surely) or our banal comments (impossible)?

And that's without getting started about the ifs and maybes of his scent radiator – or could it in fact be chafe protection?

At the Vuelta a España, beginning on Saturday, Evans will be out to make amends for a Tour de France that, much like the directorial career of Howard Hughes, began brightly but ended in infrequent shaving and dark, conspiratorial mutterings.

Perhaps it is the fact that we are trying to read his mood by Twitter – essentially the modern man's phrenology – but Evans remains inscrutable. He is after a stress-free end to the season, meeting new teammates, getting on with it, ruing some bad team news, has the best job in the world ... All of which could mean he's relaxed, race-focused, not thinking too much about tomorrow. Or it could mean he's out to ride for his racing future, for a team he knows won't be his very soon.

Meanwhile, domestique Charly Wegelius, who is much less the enigma, is a late inclusion in the Silence-Lotto roster for Spain. "Not quite what I had planned for September," he twittered this week while having his feet rubbed on a banana lounge in Mallorca. "But I'll give it my best try!"

Surely this cannot bode well.

Dispatches from the Twitterverse

Garmin-Slipstream director Matt White has a fox (let's call him Bradley Wiggins), a chicken (David Zabriskie) and a bag of grain (Tyler Farrar). He must get them all across the river, but he can only take two items at a time in his team car, which we will assume for the sake of the exercise handles well in the wet. Left alone, Wiggins will devourZabriskie, and Zabriskie will nibble a hole in Tyler Farrar. How can Matt get all three across the river? (give your answer and show all reasoning)

@iamtedking is a poet. He very likely voets.

@lancearmstrong might be getting into the cigar business. Or – who knows? – he could be looking to make a go of things in spittoons. If only Twitter allowed a few more characters so we could have these things cleared up.

'What goes BANG BANG BANG BANG at 6:40am?' asks @simongerrans. The Broom Wagon's guess was wrong and, as our mother would say, not particularly clever.

@LeviLeipheimer is 'out at the Forget Me Not Farm ... such a great place'. If the Eagles taught us anything with Hotel California, Levi might just be at Forget Me Not Farm for good.

Some rely on barometric pressure, or the migration paths of birds. Others make use of windows. @mickrogers has @markrenshaw1 to check the weather for him.

Classic YouTube

Ever wondered what the Vuelta would look like if innovation had stopped shortly after the velocipede but long before the safety bicycle? No?