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It was the day that Pierre Belmondo was born. Deep in the Charente region of France (coincidentally - or not - this is a region in which I spent a happy family holiday in 1981), little Pierre was opening his eyes and gurgling at his mother, and feeling for the first time the pull of the earth, sucking him to the planet's surface. Inexorably, inevitably, gravity was - is - binding him to our spinning globe.

At the time of writing, Pierre is just two years old. He toddles across the bare floorboards of his parents' large house, and when he hears the dogs barking in the yard, he goes to the window to see his father coming home. He is happy, I believe, though already inquisitive, unsatisfied with the few things he knows. He realises there is much to learn I think, and he is eager to experiment, to test, and to try things out. It exasperates his mother as he tips milk, scoops mud, scatters peas; he weighs, measures and considers all things.

But he is just a child, and is only partly self-aware. He probably does many of these things just for fun, not because his destiny is to one day challenge Newton.

There I go, you see. I'm using my curious sense of hindsight to read meaning into the actions of a boy who's two years old. I don't even know him - I've never met him. I've never had contact with his parents, and I couldn't tell you his precise address. If you want to find him, you have my best wishes, but no further help can be forthcoming.

The fact is that Pierre Belmondo may not exist. But some time in 1995 while sitting at an old Apple Mac in an office in Liverpool, I conjured him up in just a moment. I needed a name for a character in a fiction, and suddenly, there it was on the screen. Pierre Belmondo. I felt he should be French, so I stabbed at the letters of the most French name I knew: Pierre. Then I thought back to French lessons at school, and a text book we used that pretended to be a magazine for teenagers, with pages devoted to music, to fashion, to movies. One of these articles was a photo-story about a French film star of whom I'd never heard, who seemed notable mostly for the potato-esque nature of his nose: he was Jean-Paul Belmondo.

So, I had my name. Pierre Belmondo. And in that moment as I wrote, he became a man, an important man - the director of European anti-gravity research. He was a rebellious scientist, devoted to following instinctive urges even as they set him against governments, institutes and global conglomerates. He would become the single most vital figure in a new world of technology, of transport, and of competitive sport.

He would break gravity's bond, and in so doing, would invent anti-gravity racing.

Pierre Belmondo. A clever man indeed.

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