George looked through the window. ‘Hey, Nicky, they're waiting for you.’

‘Yes,’ said John, eyebrows bristling. ‘There's about twenty of them. They're cold.’

I looked up from my panniers. ‘I'll be right out.’

‘They're cold,’ repeated John.

‘Make it now,’ insisted George. ‘They want to be off to their Sunday dinners.’

I wheeled the bike to the front door, opening onto grey bleakness and the mewing of gulls. Trying to look casual, I lifted the eighty-odd pounds down the caravan steps.

There was a distant cheer. Concentrating on balance, I swung my leg over the saddle. Goosefleshed but steady, I made my way past rows of caravans towards the crowd by the gate.

Surrounded by hungry well-wishers, I held out a mittened hand for them to shake.

‘The best of luck,’ said the Mail subeditor. ‘You have more courage than I. And remember to write those articles.’ He held my hand firmly. ‘Here's to the first of those eight thousand miles!’

I smiled back as courageously as I could while cameras clicked and my pointing feet fought cramp.

‘Thank you, thank you,’ I said. ‘You've been very kind.’

An opening appeared in the crowd. With reasonable steadiness I cycled between groping hands.

And I was away.

The first of what eight thousand miles? What was I doing? In the name of common sense, what was I doing?

It had nothing to do with common sense of course. Here I was on Sunday 30 September 1990 riding out of Walney Island into Barrow on a mad trip round the Mediterranean, fifty-seven years old, lamed by a painful hip, quite unversed in cycle mechanics. My qualifications were pitiful.

And my timing was worse than mediocre. The United Nations had imposed a rigorous trade embargo on Iraq, and Bush was already threatening war. If the expected Armageddon came, the visa I'd obtained would not get me into Jordan unless I arrived there before the outbreak of hostilities. And - if I did make it there in time - what then? Had I paused to reflect that, once I was in the Hashemite Kingdom, roads might be closed to me, or that Saddam Hussein might bombard Israel, involving Jordan in an uncomfortable game of pig-in-the-middle? - No. With typical Western bias I'd assumed the American President would exercise more caution or restraint than the Iraqi President.

        I'd seen myself as a kind of Don Quixote: he had taken windmills for giants; I was taking bicycle wheels for windmills. But there was more in me of the eccentric than there was of the quixotic; I now saw in fact that I had less of the Spanish knight than I had of his squire's donkey.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake.

The great affair is to move.

              Stevenson wrote these lines in Travels with a Donkey. I reflected as I pedalled over the bridge into the dim rose of Victorian Barrow-in-Furness that not only did they apply equally to my own journey but that Travels of a Donkey might well describe the feat I was undertaking with such asinine obstinacy in the face of all reasonably prudent considerations.

* * *

           Within days I became a televore, a consumer of distances. There's an elation, an excitement about the eating up of miles - or rather the slow chewing up of them - that creates its own appetite. At the beginning of each day the craving was strongest and, as in a meal, it became progressively weaker during the day till I was sometimes sick to the stomach with the feast of distance, my world all but restricted to one anal ache. A short night's sleep revived my hunger for miles: once more the white lines raced towards me, cat's-eyes detonated under tyres, and friendly truck drivers nuzzled me onto the verge with the kiss of their slipstream. Calves and thighs whirred between bouts of pain.

On the B roads I was often alone; in South Shropshire I flew under faster clouds and great lakes of blue, feeling high on nitrogen-rich greens and the mortuary tints of autumn leaves.

          Yet I was soon to have problems. Some five days out of Barrow, all hills were purgatorial: even downhill I was pedalling with effort. The huge downs of Gloucestershire conspired in my defeat: sweat smarted in my eyes as I laboured harder and harder, less and less effectively. What! I said. Am I to be beaten after a mere two hundred and fifty miles? I dabbed at my eyes with the handkerchief now hanging permanently from my hand and felt on the edge of cramp.

‘What's up?’ asked a cyclist as he drew abreast.

I told him my problem. ‘Would you mind looking at the rear wheel?’

We rested our bikes against the barrier. ‘Know what you've got here?’ he asked, smiling. ‘Your brakes've been on. Probably all day. Look, your panniers are pressing in on the brake blocks.’ He wished me good luck and was gone. I shook my head, smiling sheepishly.

* * *

               I was on my way through the Duntisbournes when I first reflected seriously on time, muttering ‘Carpe diem’ to myself. Sartre likens time to jazz and speaks of the irreversibility of its moments, of its notes. I find this an excellent analogy: time slips by and no conjuror can slow it down; what we regard as the fixity of eternity is not even momentarily possible outside theological argument; if we are ever 'to live in the present', all we can do is to be intensely aware when we can of the fading notes. Autumnally dying colours, evening sun on old stone, cold water running deep in the combe beneath are all part of the unrepeatable score. This realisation gives a pathos to life; poetry may turn it into bathos, but in itself it is real, beautiful, and sad enough.

              Before long my Peugeot began to let me down. In Salisbury a self-possessed mechanic assured me as he changed all the spokes in my rear wheel that they were of low quality steel: the ones he was putting in were more expensive but would take me thousands of miles. I believed him.

* * *

              At last, on October 8, my journey through England was coming to an end; east of Southampton, however, there were no signs for Portsmouth. An RAC man sent me off in the wrong direction; a young German on a bicycle raced me across some town in the hinterland between the two ports to his flat for a map which he spread over my bicycle, insinuating me further into the web of roads signposted to everywhere but Portsmouth; a chain of passers-by and petrol station attendants sped me on my way like a bucket to the fire.

When at 10.30 that night the ferry marshal waved me towards the waiting jaws of Pride of Hampshire and I pedalled up the ramp onto the upper vehicle deck, it was a bridge of dreams.

After minutes of sleep and hours composing myself for it on the floor of the 'Fore and After' eating area (a carpet in pretty pastel shades), it was the call to action, the clanging down companionways into the fumes of engines already turning. Wheeling my bike under a truck, I glanced up at trails of pink hanging above a pale yellow bank of sky where lamps still gleamed; beneath these, buildings still slept in their blackness.

I was flagged forwards into frosty Le Havre.

* * *

               I first met Brian at the youth hostel in Rouen and immediately took to him: an electronics engineer in his mid-thirties from Sydney, New South Wales, he worked on contract just long enough to permit him to cycle round the world like a wandering Jew happily condemned to journey forever. Sunny, debonair, he was, I think, one of the few people I've met who have decided what to do in life. Pensions? Security? There was time enough to worry about these later. And who could guarantee he'd be there to enjoy them anyway?


                Wednesday 10 October was like wine - heady, room-temperature, velvety, but its colours gold, gem-green and heraldic blue. This was the valley of the Eure, a river that makes its Lombardy poplars look at home (unlike those smug sentinels guarding our cricket fields); the glow, sparkle, gleam of that sky unrolling leisurely towards the sea was almost aphrodisiac; and I thought: this is a day to be drunk deep, a day to intoxicate.

                  Today, it was July in October. Once more I said ‘Carpe diem’ to myself: I must squeeze the fruit dry. Eliot's ‘quick now’ became plain - ‘Quick now, here, now, always’: the comma after quick has not simply been forgotten, the 'now' being a noun here, not an adverb; the poet is speaking of a brief present that must be 'taken on the wing'. He continues: ‘Ridiculous the waste sad time stretching before and after.’ As I cycled through the glowing landscape I wrote a French poem in my head about the River Eure; some of its lines, which I translate here, give an idea of my feelings at the time, feelings that were becoming so important to me:

                              ‘It's time, it's high time,’ I said

                               ‘. . .to glue-sniff this October day,

                              to snatch each instant as it flies,

                               only to let it go at once. . .’

              Life has a way of compensating for such moments with others less pleasant; the only way of avoiding these is to average out all experience in one anodyne muesli, yawningly safe. On this particular day the last ten miles were cycled in the dark with a defective rear lamp on a busy narrow road; most of the way, neck aching with the strain, I rode on the rough grass verge, alternately blinded with light and dark.

And then the upswing once more: the nightly relief upon arriving at a sleeping place, this time the hostel in Chartres. Australian Brian had arrived three hours before me, but he too was exhausted.

* * *

               Next morning, leaving my bike at the hostel, I took a train to Paris to see my brother Christopher and his wife Clem, who live in the suburb of Levallois-Perret. That evening after a delightful day with them, I met the portly Algerian Mahmoun at my Algerian hotel Le Cadran Bleu, and we went shopping together. Over supper he put pellets of dough into the bread basket, spat out bits of soup he didn't like and rolled his plump brow up and down, up and down. First I thought this his way of winking, but there was nothing to wink about.

‘You look a little like Farouk,’ I smiled. ‘You know - King Farouk of Egypt.’

Mahmoun's forehead rolled up and down.

               One of the kitchen hands, a hunchbelly Quasimodo in sweating vest, gave him his favourite dessert behind the waiter's back and was rewarded with a pinch of evil-smelling Belgian snuff. Mahmoun himself packed a wad of the powder in a cigarette paper and popped it into his mouth.

Back in Chartres, I saw the dying evening through cathedral windows, colours muted, and listened in the deepening gloom to a steady soprano cantor's voice of stirring beauty.

               In a night by now fully established I looked across at the cathedral from my table outside Le Week-End, drinking my health in French lager and writing my journal. A skinhead brawl burst like a boil upon the quiet peace of the square; a sudden half-dozen lean youths in braces and army boots kicked and punched balletically among the rickety tables while glasses broke on cobblestones and I sought a safer place to write; the dance finished with a triumphant, narcissistic shaking of fists; truly impressed, I was only deterred by prudence from applause.

                Another unchoreographed dance at the hostel: as I ate my supper in the members' kitchen, students of Rudolf Steiner's Waldorf School of anthro-posophy (yes, anthroposophy!) did their washing-up to impromptu music, willowy twenty-year-olds and neatly bearded thirty-year-olds weaving the exiguous space in a ballet that would have scandalised 'les skins'; washing-up cloths became kerchiefs, pans tambourines as they warbled an anthroposophical madrigal and everyone looked reborn.

* * *

                October 14 was the seven hundred and thirtieth anniversary of the consecration of Chartres Cathedral and the first day of the hunting season. Out across the rolling stubbled flatness of Central France, water towers staring blindly over the anaemically grey earth, strode hunters in olive drab, slouching guns beside pointing dogs; in the lee of plantations others sat absurdly erect in troop carriers, toting firearms. Thousands of men (not a single woman) converged on hares, rabbits, partridges, any creature offering a few mouthfuls of meat and the excitement of watching it die in sudden paroxysm at the touch of a trigger; sometimes a circle of twenty or more hunters made a gradually tightening snare that converged on the hiding game, determined to let none of it go.

             As the massacre of the innocents continued, I approached the village of Cormainville; young trees well spaced against the sky looked, I thought, like men taking aim. It was noon and I was hungry, so I dismounted in the village to eat my bread and cheese. I was upset by what I saw.

             Men had been taking aim: a plaque on a cemetery wall told me that on 17 August 1944 five men in their early twenties had been shot by German soldiers in the wood behind the graveyard; this was a mere two days before the Paris insurrection: both firing squad and condemned men must have been aware the Occupation was almost at an end; this will have made the act even harder to bare. My silly simile of the trees taking aim became ugly as it crossed from imagination to fact.

As I cycled through the next town, Patay, I noticed one of its streets was called 15 August 1944 and, remembering what happened two days later in Cormainville, I stopped to ask a young man the significance of the street name.

‘Oh,’ he said, happy to help a foreigner out, ‘that was when Joan of Arc chased the Germans out of France.’

Well, that's the power of any legend: it's not tied in the popular mind to a particular date; it's universal. Who knows? - The young men of August may have been inspired by St. Joan.

I crossed the road to a petrol station; the elderly attendant, a large man with a neighbourly smile, glad to enlighten me, called his wife out to fill tanks while he told me what he'd seen.

A consignment of V-Two's on flatcars exploded (through the Grace of Mary Mother of God) in a freak storm on 15 August 1944, destroying the street that, rebuilt, now commemorated the explosion. On the 16th some American soldiers arrived; tricolour flags were brought out of hiding and German prisoners taken. My teacher now disappeared to return with a compass his father had taken from a German soldier.

‘Yes,’ he continued as I examined the heavy compass, ‘there was the French Canadian’ (I was asked to look him up when I returned to Canada) ‘who parachuted into Patay. One of his legs was shot up as he landed. They gave him shelter in a farmhouse. The doctor was sent for. Commandeering a bicycle, the doctor was on his way to the farm with his bag of tools when a German soldier hijacked his World War II flying boots.’

Next day the Germans were to retake Patay, and in Cormainville five young men were shot in a plantation.

This was the most living history lesson I've ever learned. I realised now how many Frenchmen must still have stark memories of the Occupation.

At the Beaugency hostel I was to meet quietly smiling Brian for the third and last time.


On 16 October I crossed the Rivière Néant (River Nothingness) after 666 miles of cycling.

                South of Bourges, red oaks and maples, glowingly dead bracken lit up the woods. The soil was still darker, and I had a fine sense of purpose in the burning sunlight. ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done,’ I thought.

The earth was now a redder brown, the countryside more intimate, almost English; there were hedgerows Thatcher would have been proud of. The national difference is to be seen in the houses: instead of the grey horror of pebbledash, the French daub their stone or brick with a plaster that ages well. Besides, there are fewer new houses: at the turn of the century the French population fell due to alcohol abuse while ours increased and we scarred our villages irremediably.

* * *

                Gradually the soil became yet redder as I entered the country where churches chime the hours twice (in case you weren't counting the first time). Soon, like Moses, I was to see the Promised Land - the Massif Central, a distant band of blue smoking with mist and threatening arduous climbs. Now in azure Auvergne, my high forehead and baldness were as brown as the beechmast littering the roadside. And I was drunk, not on wine, but on distance, on the heady succession of horizons.

              High above golden Dordogne in the market town of Mauriac, I put up at the Hôtel des Deux Gares, where I had three bowls of a succulent consommé with noodles, a Gargantuan heap of mussels in orgasmic sauce, lamb chops with peas that were more than peas, cheese and cheese, dessert. Over a second bottle of Cuvée du Patron, I relaxed with the Belgian Serge, the most delightful of anglophobes: a prejudice can become an almost attractive foible if joined to a charming personality. I made the conventional British arguments about Dunkirk, but Serge, by now endearingly drunk, countered with scorn for Perfidious Albion. The patron, loud as Pavarotti, argumentative and friendly, agreed with Serge.

The anglophobe now rose unsteadily to leave. His deerstalker and overcoat were brought. Quite proudly he showed me the coat label.

‘Aren't you ashamed of yourself,’ I smiled, ‘to own a Burberry? I thought you disliked everything English.’

He swayed. ‘You thought wrong. It's English people I don't like. They make very - they make very good - very good coats.’

We listened as the Belgian did a noisy six-point turn in the street outside.

‘Just lost his wife,’ said the patron. ‘Very depressed is poor Serge.’

* * *

              Over the Massif Central's blue distances are scattered towns of extraordinary beauty: there is the grey medieval stone of Salers with its whispering fountain, its blackened turrets and that arch through which I spied the words CARPE DIEM (that was surely a day to be seized). Conques in its pink-grey splendour clinging to the wooded slopes of mountain domes; Salles des Sources, a heap of glowing roofs among poplars, birches and oaks.

* * *

              So far I'd had no mechanical problems since Wiltshire - not even a puncture. I felt quite invulnerable: after all, the Salisbury mechanic had assured me his spokes would last me several thousand miles. And here I was south of Aurillac, a bare five hundred miles from Salisbury, and it was happening all over again. One spoke snapped, and the rear wheel was already buckling.

             Somehow I limped into Aurillac just in time for its Festival of Cinema and Television. Here at a shop called Gitane I was given the same sales talk and believed it all over again (though not quite so uncritically): my spokes were of poor quality; the wheel must be reconstructed again, this time using spokes of well-tempered steel that would last me thousands of miles. I make no excuses. Quite simply, I'm gullible.

              Next day I cycled into my third summer: from the coldest morning (obliged to stop in the fog to put on a sweater), I careened over the sodden sea urchins of Italian chestnuts, down the longest hill yet beside the crags and mist-exhaling pines of the Dourdou Gorge and found myself, stripped to shirt sleeves, among butterflies at a street crossing for hairy caterpillars.

* * *

              The closer I was to Spain, the more the south pulled like a magnet. Only at midday did I allow myself any leisure on the way. I was now buying wine to go with my bread and cheese, and most noons were contemplative moments when, seated on a stone or the coping of a bridge, I chewed and swallowed without fear of the climbs ahead, eyes resting on mountains.

                Most people were kind and welcoming, though many peasants of South France that I came across in bars pretended that I was not there; this was a subterfuge I sympathised with: if I'd seen my own double I'd have done the same, ignoring myself as politely as I could: no elderly, balding man should be displaying his calves and thighs in this scandalous manner.

One Sunday, however, after fifty-seven long miles in the saddle, I questioned a citizen of Lacaune about accommodation.

‘Ask the priest,’ he said.

I was taken aback. Without thinking, I said, ‘And where's the priest?’

‘No idea,’ he smiled.

‘Bastard,’ I muttered after him in English.


               Next day I battled into the teeth of a violent wind. No mistral this (that would have helped me on my way), it was a southerly of spiteful fury. At the top of the first rise it almost unbalanced me, but I was soon exulting in the very extremes of its violence. Its bark was worse than its bite.

Rushing down towards La Salvetet, I was assailed by almost horizontal rain, so cold my fingers were numbed and my eyes near blinded down the long hill into le Midi. Up again, this time into la Montagne Noire - a fifteen-mile pause for the rain to restore its strength -, I ascended with snail-like pace.

                 Near the top, as it began to rain once more, I stopped to pick some naive blue crocuses and to read the red lettering of a memorial to another shooting: ‘On this spot,
15 June 1944, thugs of the German army,’ (des soudards allemands) ‘having looted and burned the hamlet of Col de Sérières, murdered Marguerite Iche, 58, Alma Iche, 28, François Valière, 43, Roger Gaubil, 23, André Houlès, 21. Remember, passer-by! They died so you might live in freedom!’ At the foot of the stone someone had recently laid two bouquets of red roses tied in tricolour ribbon. Under the dripping trees the offering against this slab of polished granite was quite moving despite a weary rhetoric that dimly echoed Simonides.

                 Down the twelve-mile hill in driving rain, there were glimpses of superb mountain beauty and brash yellow flowers that wind and rain did not allow my eyes to linger on; sometimes a venturi effect, as the wind was funnelled up through the gorge, increased its velocity to such a pitch that I had to pedal hard down the slope to stop myself being blown back up again.

                That night, entering under slashing rain by a drawbridge the walled city of Carcassonne, once the centre of Albigensian heresy, hobbling beside my bike through the glistening narrowness of medieval streets, I reached the haven of the hostel, where I paid in notes so drenched they almost disintegrated as I laid them on the counter.

Two Dutch girls taking a sabbatical from art history talked well into the night with me of art, euthanasia, racism, religion (both of them atheists), and all the things one talks about in hostels.

* * *

               I was drawing closer and closer to Spain. After Carcassonne there was a fine day among cypresses, outcroppings of white rock, and the pale green of canes; the vineyards were red and yellow but still carried bunches of the small grapes that are left for anyone who cares to take them. Lagrasse mirrored its ancient bridge a dark brown in pale brown water; the primitive, unrenovated beauty of its masonry, lichened brick tiles, grey rocks and rosemary, glimmered in hot sun. The abbey, I was told, is now inhabited by theoso-phists.

Finding myself lost, I knocked on the frosted glass door of an isolated house.

‘Come in!’ said a woman whose outline swam before me.

I waited.

‘Come in!’ She opened the door. ‘We're just finishing our lunch. You must join us in a cup of coffee.’

Her husband and father-in-law greeted me warmly; they'd been hunting boar in the mountains that morning.

I was given coffee and white brandy while the husband drew a fool-proof map for me of a route that would take me past the Château de Termes. When I asked the woman to fill my water bottle, she offered to lace it with wine; I declined regretfully.

                 This land of white rocks, of sage and rosemary, was the country of the Albigensian heresy, a bloody paragraph in the history of Christian intolerance and private greed. The Albigeois made themselves unpopular with the Establishment by preaching against the materialism and corruption of the Church, so in 1209 Pope Innocent III demanded a crusade against them. Simon de Montfort, father of our own baronial rebel, led the crusade and was responsible for the deaths of thousands. Carcassonne and Béziers fell to him along with countless other strongholds, including the spectacular Château de Termes. Above, immeasurably remote and guarding every horizon, quite impregnable, one would have said, glowered the white ruins of Olivier's castle, which de Montfort was to prove, against all expectation, pregnable. The only traffic on the road, I was reduced to true scale by the mountains around me.

                 After Perpignan the Pyrenees folded out their massive blues ahead; beneath them black cypresses and red roofs clustered among orchards and vineyards. For the whole of 25 October I climbed laboriously towards the peaks, spending my last night in France in the walled town of Prats de Mollo; I opened my hotel window onto a diminutive square and the whispering of its fountain while above hung the half-ruined Romanesque church and the hugeness of mountains.

* * *

There was another morning's climb, and I was finally warming my hands over the stove at the French border post (open from eight in the morning till ten at night) five thousand feet above sea level.

The two French officers were politely disinterested in the ageing cyclist before them. Their Spanish opposite number from the hut a few yards to the south was quite concerned.

‘Why didn't you take the coast road?’ he asked.

‘I wanted to come this way,’ I replied. ‘It's pleasanter.’

‘But why? - Why all the sweat up the mountains when you could have - when you could have cut them out?’

‘A good question. Maybe we English are a little mad. I like to keep to the minor roads. I don't like heavy traffic.’

I was allowed to continue of course, but this was less due to understanding than to a final concordance with the French officials' indifference.

‘And where can I change my money?’

‘Compradón,’ said the Spaniard. ‘At the foot of the mountain.’

I limped out to my bike and the cold mountain air, looking down on Compradón. Wound up like a mechanical toy, I glanced back at the warm browns and greens of France, then ahead at the grey-green mountain heath of Spain.

               Swinging a leg over the saddle, I slipped into high gear and moved like a skier towards the edge of his run. The hours of patiently stored energy were converted disconcertingly into a kinetic feast down a wild Spanish road.

End of Chapter One.