I am nothing if not thorough, but my preparations for cycling around the Mediterranean exceeded all bounds: spare spokes, brake and gear cables, pedals and chain, an impressive array of tools backed by lessons in how to use them, and a first aid kit recommended by St. John's Ambulance along with their own course to enable me to use it. I even had ten letters of good will from the Mayor of Warrington to Muslim mayors along the way (these I would deliver in town halls of North Africa and the Middle East as serious proof of my own good will and, I hoped, as convenient photo opportunities). My route was planned on a scale of 1:100,000 and happy hours consumed in an armchair rehearsal of the year-long trip.

Before long - I must confess it - I became bored by my own meticulous planning and longed to exchange armchair for saddle and pharaonic preparations for present reality.

             Finally (sooner or later it was inevitably to come) I found myself on the eve of my momentous journey, a bowl of oranges before me and four packed green panniers leaning against a wall. I took my sunglasses from their case - bat-like glasses with the word TURBO in white on the left lens - and stood looking at the mirror. The metamorphosis was stark.

And Dunbar's refrain came back to me (its connection as far-fetched as many in life): Timor mortis conturbat me: I am harrowed by the fear of death.

               Taking off my glasses - my sitting room at once relieved of its pall of black -, I smiled my crooked smile and took an orange. The air was at once punctured by minute spores of acid scent, acrid nose-irritation; my teeth closed round sweet pulp. Timor mortis conturbat me. Why? I shrugged. Turbo: Conturbat? - The connection was tenuous and trivial. And another thing: why should the orange appear to be part of the same miasmal harrowing? There was of course dental coincidence, the meeting of incisors through the sweetness - a mere punnish coincidence that left me, nonetheless, disturbed.

                Not for long, however. As I bruised my ancient behind through seven English counties and eleven French departments on my black and orange Peugeot, the memory of my fear evaporated; not even glimpses of TURBO on my glasses were sufficient to revive it. French beauty and avarice, my own anal numbing and the simple succession of days cleansed the recollection from the barrel of my mind as effectively as a soldier's two-by-four.

                 And one afternoon, as I careened at speeds of up to thirty-five miles an hour down a Spanish switchback, my sun glasses were not sufficient to stop the cold tears that distorted mountains, precipice, ribbon road, and a distant cyclist ahead of me. Oh, it was only a rear view of him, a far, far rear view. But, prismatically shattered though the image was, I was certain the cyclist was riding a black and orange Peugeot, that his panniers were green and that, while I could not see the face when he turned for an instant - almost inviting death -, his sun glasses bore a white legend on the left lens. It would be no exaggeration to say that I was indeed harrowed by the fear of death.

                At Monroyo I saw him again; between Albaida and Pinoso on a desolate road threaded among pine trees; and approaching Vélez Rubio - or was it Alhama de Murcia? - I saw him again and again, his distant figure hunched over the black and orange bike (orange: what significance? what insignificance was there?)

In Murcia as I stopped to drink my coffee or eat my bocadillo, the barman stared.

More and more, the barmen stared. In Andalucia at a place called Baza the man stopped washing glasses for a moment. ‘Thought you were going to Granada,’ he said.

I answered with a fine sense of irritation which I could not have explained: ‘I am.’

                What was happening? I could not shake the feeling that there really was someone that had gone before me. What his purpose was I could not surmise; yet I knew that it was of evil intent. And again, was he flesh-and-blood, or was he some emanation from the sicker corners of my mind? At night in my sordid sheets I would tease the frayed edges of this thought till it fluffed up, filling the vacancy of the tiny room, smothering me gradually, alveolus by alveolus.

                 And finally there was the barman in Guadix. Instead of serving my coffee with the usual instant nonchalance, he took a step back (there was room for no more); his chin retracted into his neck while his eyes attempted to cross themselves.

‘Black coffee,’ I repeated. ‘Please.’

‘Changed your mind, eh? Didn't like Granada?’ His hands let the coffee drip, his eyes remaining fixed on me as if I had been a ghost. ‘But you can't have got to Granada and back - not in one day!’

I took the coffee.

                So this incubus, this thing that I was pursued by in the very act of following it,- I could not call it a person - was finally letting me catch up with it? I would meet it face to face? Somewhere after sunset, I supposed, on a lonely road, it would step out from behind a rock or a pine tree. . .And then what? What indeed had I to fear? What could it do? So far I had only been permitted a foretaste, a prevision. It was something like the spectral first notes of a record barely heard above the gentle hiss. Yet precognition it certainly was not: too many people had seen it or claimed to have done so for it to be some mere quirk of the mind. I smiled humourlessly and stirred my coffee.

                  With extraordinary speed, however, I forgot my problem. . . Not forgot it, then - just put it out of reach as a thought unworthy of a sane, rational mind. By the time I cycled into Granada I could concentrate on nothing but the bumper ahead of me and the other perilously close behind.

                   There followed, in the twilight, a brief affair with Inmaculada, one of those flower girls that ambush cars with their single carnations; morning followed in good time, lighting the face beside me on the grey pillow, adding fifteen years to the smile that had won me the night before. I was sickened. But I was no longer pursued by a relentless ghost.

              And so, having finally exorcised the sick fancies that had followed me from the Pyrenees to the Costa del Sol, I crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and cycled the interminable uphill of the Rif Mountains - past lazy flocks and the whizzing stones hurled by little boys - and on to Tangier.

               Here, at la Province or Town Hall, I prepared to present one of my mayoral letters. The first secretary sent me padding after a flunky in djellaba to an airless waiting room where women in abas fanned themselves; from here I was at length summoned to appear before the second secretary, who sent me behind another djellabaed lackey to the Secretary Himself.

‘You will have tea?’

    Tea was poured, returned to the pot, poured again. My happiness was sublime: I knew that to go from one secretary to a second and from him to a third was to progress from good to better, maybe to best. I raised the glass of mint tea to my lips.

‘Why?’ he asked patiently, letting his own tea cool.

‘Why what?’

‘Why return? Your gesture was fine in its way. As a single gesture. Do you plan doing this several times?’

I was angry. And disturbed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Simply this.’ He referred to notes. ‘A week ago - on 1 December - you handed this letter to the Président du conseil in person. At that meeting he graciously presented you with a medallion of the City of Tangier.’

He handed me a paper. It was a photocopy of my letter from the Mayor of Warrington.

Somehow I found my way out of the building.

             Once more my mind reached the end of its tether; I subsided into deep depression. However, slowly I came to realise that I was cured for good - assuming the ill derived somehow from myself - or that, the opposite situation obtaining, my tormentor had left me at long last. I visited Casa Blanca (finding it all too technicolour and the Great Mosque too great), bathed in the bracing Atlantic. I lingered there several weeks, lodging at the youth hostel where I quickly became a plump Claud Raynes on tangine, couscous and marzipan fruits.

Then, alarmed at my softness of mind and body, I threw my leg once more over the saddle and headed east for Marrakesh.

         Here somehow the evil caught up with me again. As I picked my way between snake charmers and fortune tellers on packed Jemaa el Fna, my mind, too long at ease, sought refuge in the old terrors. Nothing less would satisfy me, I told myself, than a final meeting face to face with the presence that had preempted my every move.

‘Get away from me!’ I cried after a persistent young man. ‘I don't need guiding anywhere! And I want to be alone!’

              The latter was only partly true: as you know, I now craved the company of a certain stooped gentleman in blue sweat pants and rain jacket, wearing a stylish pair of sun glasses with the letters T-U-R-B-O blazoned on one lens. The very - ‘person', I was about to say (no matter: let it be) - the very person I had so longed to avoid I now was frantic to see.

               One afternoon in the vastness of the ruined El Badi Palace (it was late December, I remember: the oranges in their sunken groves were ripe), I spurned the entreaties of the official guide who had the effrontery to ask for ten dirhams (something like 70 p). A stork fanned its wings above the pixie- hooded djellaba of the guide as he weathered the storm of bad French, smiling reproachfully.

               ‘Vous le regretterez!’ he shouted after me as I entered the dark tunnel; his tone had more of the benediction than the curse. For a while I could see nothing; soon the gloom resolved itself into a sharper focus of contrasting blacks. I stepped cautiously round fallen rocks, hoping others would not fall upon my head, towards a pool of light beneath the hole in the vault; here once more my eyes adjusted themselves. Then, as if drawn out of the light, I edged into darkness. There was a faint splintering beneath my feet. I stooped to fumble for the object and backed into the light to see it more clearly. I had a pair of shattered sun glasses in my hand, the O of the TURBO still intact.

‘May I have them back?’ came a voice from the shadows. ‘My glasses?’ Into the spotlight I had now backed from he stepped, holding out his hand. ‘My glasses.’

I leapt at his throat. All the torment, all the questions remained ob- durately blocked as, like Inmaculada, the lines round his mouth and eyes. . .

The guide I had spurned, his robe no blacker than the dark he stood in, his face alone faintly gleaming, helped me to my feet, half lifted my body into the far sunlight where my strength returned as if powered by a solar cell.

‘Hold on!’ I screamed, pushing him away. ‘Where are my glasses? - Où sont mes lunettes?’

             But he was already making for the distant figures of tourists. My scream became a roar; the guide did not turn; he did not even shrug. I vaulted the two metres into the orange grove, twisting my foot as I landed. Branches whipped into my eyes, oranges into my nose and hands; I tore the fruit feverishly from its stalks and hurled it incontinently over the concrete revetment. I could not help myself: these were my only weapons. ‘Christ!’ I moaned (non-believer as I was), ‘where are they all coming from? What is this army treading towards me?’

             From all sides down the grey paths above me the crowd advanced, each individual identical (identical individuals?) wearing sun glasses, in a fragment of which, by a prodigy of vision, I could clearly discern the white O. Ah yes, I was harrowed by the fear of death. And Dunbar, his Latin drumming robust and true in a sandwich of lowest lowland Scots, kept repeating the goddamn phrase till it banged and clanged inside my head, turned somersaults and laughed and sang. TIMOR MORTIS CONTURBAT ME. TIMOR MORTIS CONTURBAT ME.

And the poet's dead, he's dead, rotten dead! And where does that leave me?

He stands above me in his many hundreds wearing my glasses, impervious to the oranges, mostly poorly aimed.

‘Brother,’ goes his thousand-lipped refrain, ‘brother!’

I fall weeping to my knees.