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Now hold on to your hats. Next week Barack Obama sets off on his first real foray into the outside world and those of us going with him have already had our schedules for the trip, replete with 4am starts and short hops from country to country designed to induce confusion and disfunction.

I will be blogging as often as I remember - bringing you (I hope) not just analysis of the cut of the Obama jib but also behind-the-scenes access to one of the world's great roadshows: the White House travelling press bubble.

Nobody will ever rival the Rolling Stone journalist Timothy Crouse's classic but all that he chronicled in his trip with McGovern in the 1972 presidential campaign is true still of the travelling press corps.

He wrote - inter alia - of the "tiny community of the press plane, a totally abnormal world that combined the incestuousness of a New England hamlet with the giddiness of a mid-ocean gala and the physical rigours of the Long March."

From the Obama press plane, I will deliver you an insight into our fetid, squalid, time-challenged world. I remember on a previous trip having to rescue the secret service man from a Belgian breakfast (cold meat and fish) and take him to McDonalds. The same man later rescued me from the Slovakian riot police who wanted to kill me, thus forming a bond that exists to this day.

There will also be time for quick messages on whatever the bubble-minders are saying about their hosts in England, France, the Czech Republic, and Turkey. You will not have to rely on Fox TV's Czech service. Though you may prefer to.

Seriously this tour matters: it will demonstrate to the world the new reality of America, at the G20 in London, and at the subsequent multilateral and bilateral get-togethers. All will be revealed...

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