One More Croissant for the Road. Felicity Cloake
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a steel-framed (more flexible than aluminium on bumpy terrain, less risky than the pricy but delicate carbon frames used by the pros) Condor touring bike in Paris Green, a colour which feels auspicious. I spend an expensive afternoon in a basement on the Grays Inn Road being measured up (‘your arms are … really long’) and then a nervous month praying he will be ready in time for the off after discovering belatedly that delivery is scheduled for around the time I should be in the Loire Valley.
Fortunately, after I look ready to burst into tears in front of other customers, they manage to hurry things along and he arrives a week before the off, a thing of rare and lustrous beauty, though unfortunately I’m so hungover after a work party the night before that I fail to listen when they explain technical points about how to trim the chain, on the basis I have no idea what this means and am in no state to learn. Instead, I have a vivid flashback to telling a completely sober Nigel Slater that I loved him, over and over, and clench my fists around the handlebars in hot shame.
So I’ve got the bike and the kit and the rudimentary vocab, having enrolled in a panic cramming course at the French Institute in South Kensington and ploughed my way through various Inspector Maigret mysteries instead of packing. This at least means I’ll be able to discuss murder weapons with confidence on my journey, if required.
Yet such is the rush before I go that I don’t quite make time to check if all my gear will fit in my new bright yellow panniers. Sitting in the corner of the bedroom gathering dust, they look vast in comparison with the one I’ve used previously, yet I have a sneaking suspicion that once I’ve included important morale-boosting items like Marmite and sloe gin, there might not be an awful lot of room for luxuries like spare inner tubes and plasters.
Naturally, instead of dealing with the problem, I insist on throwing a Royal Wedding Party for the nuptials of Harry and Meghan, to the evident dismay of my friends, who nevertheless come and support me, because that’s what friends do. Gemma even brings me a tiny bottle of Echo Falls rosé to stick in my panniers.
‘I’m really looking forward to it,’ says Matt, who is accompanying me for the first few days and claims he’s ‘all sorted’, as the three of us – the last survivors of the Happy Event – sit outside the pub at dusk, drinking snakebite and black (it seemed funny when I ordered them).
I giddily watch the dog begging for crisps on the other side of the bar, and vaguely wonder who he belongs to. ‘Yeah, me too,’ I say. ‘Do you think I should go home and pack?’
* With the exception of breakfast, picnic food and cakes, all of which I reckon the UK has the edge on.
† Don’t get me started on the iniquities of the Women’s Tour.
STAGE 1
The Grand Départ, London to Cherbourg
Douillons aux Poires – or Pears in Pyjamas
The Norman equivalent of an apple turnover but with a much cooler name. Considered rather homely fare, you won’t see them on many restaurant menus, but you may well find them in boulangeries. They’re best eaten warm from the oven, with a big dollop of crème fraîche.
It’s 3 a.m., and things are not going according to plan. Instead of the sound night’s sleep I’d been planning, perhaps after a couple (definitely just a couple) of farewell drinks with friends, I’m sitting glumly on a pile of new Lycra, chilled fizz unopened in the fridge, the bin overflowing with packaging, struggling to keep my eyes open and wondering if I should just open the Echo Falls and be done with it. An old friend who offers to pop in on her way home from a night out to say goodbye ‘if you’re still awake!’ gets a couple of paces through the door, regards the chaos before her with visible alarm and declines my kind offer to stay and chat – ‘you look like you’re a bit busy’.
Frankly, I don’t know how I do it, let alone find the time to post a jaunty photo of my almost-empty fridge on Instagram (‘I hope those ferments don’t explode,’ someone comments, once it’s far too late to be helpful) and send friends a mad-eyed selfie wearing my ridiculous new sardine-patterned cap … but somehow I get a couple of hours’ kip before getting up to check yet again that I have the essentials, like a salami knife and a pot of pink nail varnish, and enjoy a final, vast cup of tea.
It’s a solemn moment. I start every day with a mug of English Breakfast, the colour of damp – but not wet, not even soggy – sand, made with boiling water and fresh milk, which definitely rules out anything from the train catering trolley, let alone any prettily tinted tisanes the French might serve under the name of thé. This will be my last cuppa until July, and let me tell you, it’s emotional. Though to be honest, that could also be the exhaustion setting in.
Pushing past Eddy waiting patiently in the hall, I go to meet a friend and her baby who’ve come to wave me off – and, listening to the gory details of the birth, feel relieved to be able to spend a few minutes revelling in someone else’s suffering instead of my own. I’d planned to have a symbolic full English, but in the end, thinking of what’s to come, I wimp out and go for avocado on toast with a feral-tasting kombucha on the side as a final taste of Islington.
Back home, while Hen changes Gabriel on the sitting-room floor (there’s about as much dignity in being a baby as a long-distance cyclist, it seems), I change my own clothes from those appropriate for breakfast with a friend to those needed to ride a Grand Tour – or at least the 4.73km I’ll be covering on the way to Waterloo. To their credit, neither of them laugh when I emerge.
Sweetly, Hen obligingly takes several photos of me standing proudly with my unwieldy steed outside the house as passers-by gawp, trying her hardest to find a good angle for a food writer clad entirely in Lycra, and then I can delay no longer – it’s time to leave. Eddy and I wobble unsteadily out of the gate and down the kerb, I manage a half-wave and smile for the camera, and ride straight into the back of a stationary double-decker bus – thankfully at very low speed, denting nothing but what little is left of my pride.
After peeling myself off an advert for an evangelical concert in Leytonstone, I discover, within two turns of the pedals, that my shiny new yellow panniers are on wrong. As I said, I didn’t have much time to prepare, what with asking the dog if he was going to miss me 63 times and spending 13 minutes staring vacantly at socks in the wee small hours. Luggage situation sorted and finally over-taking Hen and the pram, I race across town – a familiar journey fraught with new significance. I become obsessed by the idea that I’m going to have an accident of some sort before I even leave London (it’s not beyond the realms of possibility dressed like this; at least two vans make an attempt on my life on the Farringdon Road), so it’s with some relief that I finally unclip my feet in SE1 and click-click my way into the scrum within to pick up the train tickets.
Here I encounter a new problem. I haven’t had the chance or indeed inclination to ride Eddy fully laden before, and the vastly uneven distribution of weight means I’m destined to spend the next five weeks battling his desperate desire to plunge to the floor at every given opportunity. Waterloo station on a Friday afternoon is not, I discover, the ideal location to kick off this particular fight.
Tickets safely stuck in my back pouch, I locate Matt, a university friend and a veteran of that fateful first Brussels trip. He’s recently been working so hard doing something mysterious for the Civil Service that he hasn’t had much of a chance to get on a bike full stop, though I have in my possession a text claiming he’s been