Back in Britain

Back in Britain for two weeks, during which it has rained every single day. What are the ten most important things I learned from a year of travelling around Europe, meeting people, seeing new places, riding my bike, and paddling my surfboard?

1) France is really good, but the lunch thing is quite annoying. 12.30, everything stops. 2.30, some things start again. 3.30, almost everything's started again. (And 6.00, everything's closed again.)

2) The Basque Country is also really good.

3) Spain is actually a bit rubbish, except the bits where the place names have lots of x spellings that you pronounce 'ch' and pelota is a religion. The thwack of those pelota balls hitting the wall is the most evocative sound.

4) If you're going to spend a year living in a camper van, get one with a shower and toilet.

5) Drivers in Europe either don't mind cyclists, or actively like them.

6) Viewed as a whole, British drivers really seem to hate cyclists. And motorcyclists. And, now I think of it, other drivers.

7) TV in general is better in a foreign language, because there's a lot more room for you to imagine what's happening. The plots are better when you're making them up yourself.

8) Not watching the evening news or reading a newspaper is very good for me. 

9) Watching/reading them really isn't.

10) All Tories are heartless shits. Plus ça change. I think this lot is actually worse than the last bunch. At least some of the 1980s Tories climbed up the ladder under their own steam before booting everyone else in the face, rather than being carried up by Daddy's servants.

Hiding from the heatwave

We've spent the last few days hiding from the heat, high up in the French Alps. Since we were last here a large hole has appeared in the ground next to Hammy's chalet. This has made late-night returns hazardous, as we used to short-cut across the adjacent plot. Must remember to go round...

Bits and pieces here, mostly work: good, because I don't want to become one of the town drunks down by the fountain outside the tourist office, and without money to pay for stuff that's what could happen. Also because it's been too hot to do much else. We've done a bit of biking, a bit of walking, and one gorge exploration that ended in a wonderful swimming hole underneath a waterfall. The Glamorous Companion, and even the dog, took the plunge. Chilly, but that's what you want when it's 40 ºC and rising.


Now we're en route for the Basque Country. Waves! Too long since I got my scales wet, over a month. In a ritual every surfer knows, the board has been taken from its cover, inspected and replaced. The van has been reorganised in a get-into-your-wetsuit-quicker way. And I've woken up dreaming about dawn patrols on a little reef break south of... Ah, but I can't say, can I? Not without risking a car bomb. It's a spot between Guéthary and Lafitenia: easy to find, with a bit of wandering, but a long paddle over dark water. Bigger than it looks from the cliffs.

Soon come.

The world's best swimming pool

Two weeks in Chamonix, mountain-sport capital of Europe, finishing a book about snowboarding. In August. We arrive to afternoon thunderstorms that roll around the valley, bringing the Mutt trembling and shaking to lean against my leg. Later, after the showers, a walk in the cooler air and perhaps an ice cream. Allowed, because every day the Glamorous Companion and I swim in the World's Best Pool.

Where else can you do backstroke looking up at the continent's tallest mountain? Well, nearly, if we forget about Mt Elbrus in Russia... and in Chamonix, everyone does. An outdoor, 50-metre pool of the kind most British swimmers can only dream of (hence the woeful performance of British swimmers in London: it may no longer be true, but there used to be more 50-metre pools in Sydney than Britain).

In fact, the mountains loom everywhere here. I'm writing this in a shoebox apartment (the block is shown on the right) with a view of the glacier below Mont Blanc and the Aiguilles du Midi. It's easy to forget – you're walking along a normal street in a normal mountain town, then suddenly you look up and there they are, towering above.

We're leaving tomorrow, heading back to the Southern Alps for a few days and then out to the Basque Country. Too long without waves! We'll get a few days in Guéthary, then north an hour to meet up with my friend Moose, his partner Nicola and their shared horde of children, all jammed into his new-old pride and joy Hymer. Then, sadly, we're on our way proper north, slowly back to the UK in time for winter. Boo.

You've got to love this...

Hubris I and II

A few days in the old stomping ground of Allos, and I take the opportunity to get my cycling legs back with a climb of the Col d'Allos, down to Barcelonette, and back. It's 12 km up to the col (which is the penultimate of the five that did for Eddy Merckx in the 1975 Tour). Then 25 km down to Barcelonette, then reverse the route for home.

Any sportsman, of any stripe, knows to beware of hubris. I know to beware of hubris. Nonetheless I expect to manage this beast of an afternoon, near 40 km of relentless climbing, without having ridden a road bike for 2 months. The idiocy of this is brought home about 2.5 km from the top of the col, coming back. Suddenly, I start to feel like Dorando Pietri, the Italian marathon runner who was so exhausted that it took him 10 minutes to cover the last 350 metres of the 1908 Olympic race. I push on the accelerator, but the vehicle doesn't really move much.

I eventually grind over the top too tired even to pedal one more stroke, and coast all the way back to Allos. Tomorrow is declared a rest day.

Two days later, more trouble. My friend Hammy and I decide to explore the woods around Allos on mountain bikes. We grind up out of Seignus, where in theory the Tour du Verdon bike route should take us all the way down to Colmars for a coupe. In practice the Tour du Verdon bike route only makes infrequent appearances, signposts even fewer, and we very quickly get lost.

Six hours later, we roll down through Seignus again, bloody, battered and weary. We've manhandled our bikes further than we rode them, at least it feels like it. Having rekindled my love of off-road riding in the first hour, I now never want to see a set of suspension forks again.

It'll wear off, though.

Tour fever

“Wiggins is four minutes down. Nibali’s attacked.”

“Wiggins has cracked.”

Rumours fly up and down the mountain, word of mouth flashing through the atmosphere faster even than modern electronics. British faces start to fall. A Swiss driver in one of the Tour cavalcade cars sees the Union flag on the road and slows to enlighten us: “Cadel! Cadel attacks! Wiggins – twelve minutes down already!” He zooms off, blasted away by a welter of honking from behind. The heat – nudging 40 º all day – beats down.

Even watching the Tour is a marathon of endurance. We arrived here 3 days ago: driving up, all the parking spots on the roadside are full. Places that aren’t parking spots are full. Cars and vans are stopped at crazy angles, or with one wheel hanging over an abyss, advertising their owners’ non-sleeping intentions. People have laid out sleeping bags on the roadside, £3000 carbon-fibre race bikes are parked in bushes, naked men are showering using tins hung in trees. The whole mountain has been transformed into some kind of crazy vagabond camp.

Our van ends up parked in a field, where we and about 3000 other vans and campers have paid €35 to stay. The money’s apparently going to repair the local church; tours are offered. There are a lot of people in this field, and others like it up and down the mountain. Not all the vans and tents are self-supporting. There are no facilities. The sun’s been baking down all day, every day. It smells like a London back alley in the 1600s.

On the third day the organizers realize their mistake and bring in some Portaloos. Eight of them, reserved for the use of those without their own toilets. But give the owner of a white-box camper van a choice between: a) emptying the van’s waste cassette and b) shitting in a Portaloo, and he picks – extraordinarily – b) every time. Within hours the four Portaloos the organizers have opened – the others are being held back against some future poonami – are an overflowing poomageddon. The queue to use them is notably free of female customers, heavy on massive-bellied Frenchmen wearing unsuitable sports shorts. Back to a trowel in the woods, then.

The day of the race’s arrival, the endurance challenge ramps up. It’s baking, the sun hitting open spaces like a blow, but by 11.00 in the morning the roadside’s starting to get jammed. The riders aren’t due for another five hours.

We head down at about 3.30 in the afternoon, having sent an umbrella-ed, be-flagged advance party down to claim territory. Muscle in at the edge, between them and a bunch of plastered Basques (how did this get to be the richest region in Spain? They’re always drunk). The Union flag on the road, British bunting, nylon football tops, cheap lager, inappropriately large and brightly coloured trainers, and shouting all mark this out as a little corner of England in a hot and foreign land. I don’t spot any pickled eggs, bomb craters, cloth caps, plump ladies playing pianos in pubs, or ferrets, but they’re here in spirit.

And spirits are low, due to the rumour mongering. Then, thankfully, we’re all distracted by the arrival of the publicity caravan. Yippee! A chance to get loads of free plastic tat. I bag an inflatable beach pillow advertising a hire-car company, a money-changer’s shopping bag, a dog-food rubber keyring thing, a rubber wristband, and two sachets of fruit-drink sirop – though I do have to wrestle a small, fat child for the rare and sought-after tangerine-flavoured one.

Then, at last, the race arrives. Voeckler goes past looking, as always, like a demonic child. He’s ridden away from some of the world’s best riders, over four fearsome cols, 197km in 40 º heat. Tomorrow every French newspaper will have a photo of him on the front page. 

Then a group of three, then, a couple of minutes down, Nibali, Wiggins and Froome. They’re clearly moving faster up this final climb than anyone we’ve seen yet, or will see later, but Wiggins – Wiggins is smiling. I think at that point, with the hardest stage behind him and his biggest rival unable to shake him, he knew – rightly or wrongly – that the Tour was won.

The next day, Basso and Nibali do everything they can, but the Englishman won’t be shaken. In the end it’s Nibali who cracks, and Wiggins takes more time from him. The day’s marred by Froome’s showboating in the final kilometres, but nothing can really take the shine off it – barring disaster, Wiggins converts Olympic track gold into stage-racing yellow. I can’t, for now, think of a more incredible British sporting achievement. Answers on a postcard, please.

Portugal and Spain

Long time, no blog. We’ve been in northern Portugal, which was too nice to spend much of our time there writing about, and northern Spain, which definitely wasn’t because our time was mostly spent leaving. Readers who also follow me on Twitter will have seen the photo, shown left, of the official* Worst Campsite In Spain. It may be of interest that we actually drove round an even worse one (though this is a bit like saying that the Somme was worse than Verdun). Probably it goes without saying that we chose not to stay there.

*not actually official at all.

Portugal, in contrast, remains a favourite place to visit. The people have a tinge of amity and engagement that reminds me a bit of Australia: helpful, but not too much so. Staying with Sao near Ericiera was as much a treat as always – the best breakfast fruit bowl in the country. A larger one was pressed on us as we left: “I got up early to pick them, I know you like the fruit.” 

From there we rolled up through the Minho, green, green Portugal. This was a new landscape to the Glamorous Companion, though I’d visited it years ago with my friend Bonga. In retrospect I’m a bit embarrassed that we didn’t explore more, even just in surfing terms: we surfed pretty much the same break every day, in an area I now know is rich in waves. Mostly I surfed standup, but once in a while I managed to find an un-lifeguarded beach and get out on the mat. Image below, shot by the GC from the comfort of her beach towel – which is why it’s rather distant.

One change in Portugal: the people have, in general, got tremendously fat. It was like Chubby Night at Brighton’s Wild Fruit night club, all day, every day. I think they must have spent the EU cash on cakes. The country’s similarly bloated with empty property: beautiful modernist apartments and houses, all unoccupied, all for sale. Someone somewhere made a bundle on this, but it’s not – of course – ordinary Portuguese, who are suffering badly.

Spain saw us make first acquaintance with a gloomy band of drizzle that followed us across the entire country like a rheumy-eyed, smelly old dog. This will clearly elicit little sympathy from British readers busy building Arks in their back gardens. It’s a tough place to travel with an actual dog, Spain: they’re not allowed inside anywhere, so the pavement table is the dog-owner’s domain. OK if it’s sunny, but it wasn’t. The campsites – stop me if I’ve mentioned this – are also dire. The best night we spent in Spain proper was in a beach car park; also the last night before we reached the safety of the Basque Country.

The highlight of non-Basque Spain was probably Galicia. It’s a wild, wet, rugged country, where the grain stores have to be off the ground to keep them safe from vermin and damp. Two or three jaw-dropping surf breaks, out in the far west, made me think this would be a good place for a full-on surfing exploration.

The Basque lands always feel like a good place to be, and after a not-particularly wonderful time in the rest of Spain, it was very welcome to reach them. The coast road between Zumaia and Zarautz is an Amalfi? What Amalfi? treat, and the campsite in Zaratutz is a real gem. A few days there to recharge in the sunshine, and now we’re in the Pyrenees, waiting for Wiggins with about… actually, I have no idea how many other people. We’re camped in an enterprising farmer’s field near the top of the Col de Peyresourde, and there must be at least 1000 other camper vans within sight already, more arriving all the time. I can see about 10% of the col from where I’m sitting. Go figure.

I rode up the col this morning, feeling slightly out of place among the lycra and carbon fibre, then sat in the sun at lunchtime, alternately writing and watching the amateur riders going up and down the route the pros will travel at double-quick time on Wednesday. All the lovely bikes on display gave me that terrible itchy-credit-card feeling.

Oh no, not again. 

Strange days

Met a red-eyed South African, out in the dawn surf this morning – let's say his name's John. I called him into a wave; he paddled back out and we started chatting.

"Thanks, bro. Stoked to be out here. I live outside Madrid, just back from three years in Iraq. Not too many waves there." OK, I'll bite: what were you doing out there? "Bomb disposal."

Just stop myself asking what he thought of The Hurt Locker, and instead say I hope it was well paid? "Shit, yeah. At the end I was pulling down $15,000.00  month. But I can't do it any more; I'm retired."

So here's this guy, taking home (tax free) $15,000.00 a month, for disarming bombs that are probably only there, in some sense, because he is.

Strange days, these.

So long, old friend

Warning: this post is only of the remotest interest to surfers. Everyone else, move on please; nothing to see here.

It’s a poignant thing when a much-loved surfboard leaves you. Surfers and their boards go through a lot together. Nightmare sessions when you couldn’t catch a single wave, or the locals were ganging you, or your leash broke and you had to swim in and see whether the board had come to rest on rocks or sand. Epic sessions where you seemed to hoover up everything that came through, or you caught just that one wave that made it worth paddling out, and which stuck in your mind for a long while. Most of all, those regular go-outs – onshore, crunchy, too small, closing out, dirty, cold, rainy, foul-tasting, shivery, aggro – which make up the median life of a British surfer.

The Fat-Assed Wombat and I experienced it all. It was a pretty short board for me at the time I bought it – 6’4”. No one ever believed it was that short though, because it was so, well, fat-assed. It looked more like a longboard than a shortboard, and latched on to waves like one, too. I took it to the Outer Hebrides for the best-ever (so far) surf trip. It endured many skunky sessions huddling away from southwesterly gales in the lee of Brighton Marina (and once got blown along the undercliff path by a wicked gust). I lent it to my friend Bonga, and he dropped his microwave oven on it. Portugal and Morocco both saw the Wombat making me look a much better surfer than I really am, by virtue of its design. And now it’s gone; gone to the second-hand rack at 58 Surf in Baleal, though probably not for long. Someone will snap it up, and André’s immense turnover of boards will continue.

Disloyal to say it – but I’m glad. The Wombat, you see, had become a bit of a crutch. It worked in just about every kind of surf, from knee-high to a little bit overhead. It always caught waves, performed reliably, resisted airline baggage handling’s every attempt to crush it (I once saw it being thrown nose-first to the ground from the top of a teetering luggage stack, then having a load of prams and golf carts chucked on top: not a mark). But if it did everything well, it didn’t do anything brilliantly. It was slower down the line than my twin-fin; harder to turn on steep faces than my 6’7”; didn’t ride bigger waves as well as my 7’6”  – all in all, a bit of a Ford Focus.

So, we’ve both moved on. No hard feelings, on my part at least, only gratitude for all the things I learnt while we were together. The Wombat will find someone new: a neo surfer from one of the schools in Baleal, perhaps, keen to change up after an intensive couple of weeks learning. It’ll be a bit much at first, but they’ll grow together. Ride on, Fat Ass – ride on.

Twice in two days!

Told off by the lifeguard again, this time at Baleal, for bodysurfing when an orange flag was up. At least he waited till I'd got out, and said he hadn't come to order me out of the water because "I can see you don't drown." An improvement, I think.

Meanwhile, England claw their way to group-match victory against Sweden. There's no pleasure in an England win, just a release of pressure. It's like riding an Italian motorbike: you spend your time in the saddle with buttocks clenched, constantly wondering what new way it will find to break down before you reach your destination. If you do actually arrive, you can relax – until it's time to climb back on and go home.

Kooksville

Did I really write the sentence, “I never, ever have a bad surf on the mat” in the previous blog entry? Consider this a correction.

I knew I shouldn’t have bothered, but sometimes you just need to get your scales wet. It’s onshore surf, crunching on to some kind of sandbank. The wave are really just folding over all along their length – but once in a while, an unpredictable shoulder appears. It’s just enough to tempt me in.

After last week’s glorious mat session, I elect to go in on that. Getting out through the crunchy shorebreak turns out to be really hard work. Several minutes of paddling and about halfway out, I’m starting to feel a bit like Katie Price: the airbag seemed a good idea at the time, but now I can’t get rid even though I’d like to.

I finally make it out the back just in time for a cleanup wave to sweep through. Unlike the Buddha Wave, I’m most definitely not in the spot. I make a try at getting through the cresting lip, but without really thinking it’s going to work. Almost straight away I get the same feeling in the pit of my stomach that Captain Matthew Webb must have had, the moment when he realized halfway that his attempt to swim across the rapids at the foot of the Niagara Falls wasn’t going to come off.

I’m pulled back over the falls, and get royally rinsed. Bounce on the sandy bottom a couple of times, and come up in waist-deep water, still clutching Katie to my chest. I’m standing in the shallows trying to decide whether to paddle out again when I hear a whistle. Turn round with a sinking feeling: this can’t be happening. But horrifyingly, it is; the lifeguard’s whistling me in. The thing is, I qualified as a lifeguard myself, years ago, and I’d be whistling me in too. What a kook.

In the end we have a chat. His name’s Junior, which is a hell of a misnomer: he’s the biggest, most muscle-bound, most heavily tattooed Portuguese man I’ve ever met, and looks more like a member of Da Hui than a municipal lifesaver. Junior tells me it’s OK to come back with a surfboard – but “Not this thing”, he says, pointing at Katie. I can’t blame him for doubting.

Poor Katie: some you win, some you lose.

Buddha wave

The thing about the Buddha Wave is, you have to know it when you see it. Most sessions, you won’t catch it at all. It’s a good wave, and a wave you couldn’t have ridden better. If you catch the Buddha Wave, paddle in. Anything else will be a diminution.

Yesterday a new swell hit the coast: about 2 metres, a good size, but lumpy and bumptious. A good day for sightseeing – so that’s what we do.

Back that evening, I wander down to the beach to have a look at the waves. Still junky, still big and a bit wild, but I decide to go out on my surf mat. This has been an object of guarded reaction on several continents, notably Australia, where one surfer took a look at it and said: “Jeez, I thought those were only for kids.” I tried to take this as a compliment on my youthful exuberance, but I’m not sure that’s really how it was meant.

To be fair, there probably is something childish about going surfing on what’s basically a cut-down li-lo. I like the portability, though: last night’s full kit is shown in the photo: board shorts, fins, thermal rash vest, short-sleeved wetsuit top, surf pursuit vehicle. Also, I never, ever have a bad surf on the mat.

The shorebreak was a bit tricky: chest high and heaving with sticks, bits of weed, small pebbles, etc. I stood there for a while working it out, charged ahead when I thought I spotted a gap, tripped over my fins, splatted, and got washed up the beach, hoping no one had noticed. There was an older couple on the beach, and one of those general-issue blonde-dreadlocked surfers you get living in beach car parks around Europe. He’d studiously ignored me as I walked down the ramp to the beach: one of the Mat Haters, clearly.

There’s a knack to getting out through big waves on a mat. On a surfboard you duck dive, shoving the board under water. That’s pretty much impossible with a mat, which is basically a giant bag of air. Instead you can either swim out with the mat tucked into your wetsuit and blow it up out there; or roll over as a wave hits you, clutching the bag in the kind of death hug the wrestler Giant Haystacks once used. The second option is my preferred technique: I get scared of sharks if I have to tread water too long while blowing up the mat. I know this isn't the reaction of a strong, powerful man, but I can't help it.

A couple of waves ridden, I start thinking how smooth and fast the mat is compared to this morning’s surfboard session. Then the horizon darkens: a whopper of an outside wave is pitching up, approaching the crease like Dennis Lillee wearing a pair of uncomfortably tight trousers. Amazingly, I’m in the spot.

The wave lifts me up, up, six, eight feet, and then chucks me at the beach. I’ve got the mat at such low inflation that it’s more like bodysurfing than anything; we take off together, bounce once about halfway down, then again near the bottom. For a moment I wonder if the mat might burst – but then it finds the sweet spot about two-thirds up the face, and we’re flying along.

How do you measure a wave? Height, speed, distance travelled? This one is big, long, steep and fast. It breaks perfectly, all the way to the shorebreak. Given a hundred chances, I couldn’t ride it better. It’s a Buddha Wave. I paddle in.

As I walk up the ramp giggling like a schoolgirl, dreadlock man leans across. “Eh!” I catch his eye. “Mat man. Bonne vague.” 

[Bonus photo of Glamorous Companion enjoying The World's Biggest Beer on the terrace above the beach.]

The music of life

Three days of good, head-high waves out here on the far western tip of Breizh. This country’s very like Cornwall: windswept open moors or fields, tight little valleys with trees huddled in the bottom, granite coasts, low houses.

Just down the road is a beach with at least three names. An attempt by local surfers to keep its identity obscure? More likely the product of being somewhere with two languages, and an uneasy relationship with the rest of France. The local Mairie has a plaque outside, noting that two deputies from this region voted NON to Pétain’s accommodation with the Germans in 1940.

The surfers here are the usual mish-mash: kids practising aerial 360s in the shorebreak, older gentlemen on larger boards (more and more, stand-up paddleboards), everything in between. You couldn’t, in your wildest dreams, say the surf was busy. I haven’t seen more than 20 people in the water, in conditions that would have an equivalent British beach looking like a sea of fibreglass.

I’ve been riding my 6’4” Bear Wombat. It’s a board that has a particular feel to it. The soundtrack in my mind when I’m riding it is always the late, great Michael Petersen in Morning of the Earth: all pivoty, jangly 70s fun. Though obviously there's less hair, less style, less speed, and quite a lot less heroin involved in my version than MP’s.

In an attempt to give the board a different soundtrack (Sure Feels Good by Brian Cadd wears thin after a while), I’ve been experimenting with different fin setups. (Apologies to non-surfers reading this: just skip to the photo of the food, if you prefer.) The results so far:

1) Single-fin only: slow, boring, ponderous – some Wagnerian overture, or one of those mind-numbingly endless guitar solos by Lynyrd Skynrd.

2) Full-size FCS side fins, but nothing in the middle: unreliable, frivolous, you shouldn’t like it but you do – it’s got to be Middle Period Kylie, some time around I Just Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. Or maybe the Pussycat Dolls' Don't You (Wish Your Girlfriend Was...). 

3) Proper Mark Richards twin fins: fast, zippy, snappy – no-brainer, it's Acid 8000 by Fatboy Slim.

4) Thruster setup, made possible by Ade Keane, a well-respected former shaper who got tired of the toxic fumes of board manufacture. I was telling him how I wanted to try a thruster setup, but couldn’t because an FCS centre fin wouldn’t work in the longboard-style finbox. Two days later, a thing of great beauty (albeit to a very specialized audience), shown left, turned up on my doorstep: a handcrafted fin. Merci beaucoup, Ade. I haven’t tried this fin combo in good waves yet, but I have high hopes the opening chords of The Ace Of Spades will start to play as I paddle for the first wave.

Meantime, yet more beauty. Yes, my Glamorous Companion – but also, look at that fish supper! Without going into detail, it tasted as good as it looked – apart from the cockles. Why do they always have to put in a bum note like that? An Islamic stitch?

Back in business

We apologise for the interruption to our service over the last 6 weeks. The author has been cloistered in a low-ceiling cottage in Dorset, alternately banging his head on the beams and writing Swim Better, Swim Faster (Bloomsbury, available in all good bookshops next year).

Manuscript sent to publisher this afternoon, van being packed up tomorrow, Eurotunnel on Friday, and we're back on the road. First stop, Brittany. Whoo.

President Claude

“No no – you must stay another night and ride with Claude and his friends in the morning. He is the President!” Too good to miss: a club run with the Vaison la Romaine bike club in the morning, a bit of wandering around Roman ruins with my glamorous companion in the afternoon, a quick ascent of Mt Ventoux tomorrow, then home.

At 8.00 a.m. the next day I’m feeling self-conscious about my lowly Cannondale. It doesn’t even have a four-figure price tag, for God’s sake. On a quick tally up, the 30-odd bikes gathered in the car park have a total value of about €75,000.00.

Fortunately one or two of the riders aren’t, without wanting to be unkind, quite as lightweight as their machines. Isn’t it the way? Start to feel relieved – at which point, my overweight safety net saddles up and rolls off on the débutants ride. What’s left behind is me, Claude, and a bunch of wiry old roadies with hair-free, sinewy legs and a kind of lean looseness that spells trouble. “Allez!” And we’re off.

Actually, they’re very gentle. They still screw me, with just short of 100 km in three hours of classic puncheur territory – but at least they’re gentle about it. I even get to top out a couple of climbs ahead of the pack, and take a few good pulls on the front of the chain gang that rolls through the last 25 km in about half an hour.

Next morning, 10 km into the climb from Malaucéne to the summit of Mt Ventoux, those pulls don’t seem like they were such a good idea. My aim of roaring up here like a mountain lion is long forgotten. This lion has mange and a thorn in its paw. Possibly also toothache and a touch of cat flu. Canine dysentery, even. This is a hard climb, almost all of it spent on the triple’s 30-tooth inner ring. A couple of times I have to look around to make sure no one’s watching, then click it on to the 28 at the back. Not a soul here – the road's closed – but I'm embarrassing myself.

The snow that blocks the road and forces a Torvill-and-Dean ice dance in cleated shoes almost comes as a relief. 2 km of tippy-toes later I’m out of the trees and into the lunar landscape of the summit dome. Spooky-lonely, like an old Doctor Who set – the ones that were all filmed in a deserted quarry somewhere in Hertfordshire, and which had the 7-year-old me hiding behind the sofa. Keep looking behind to make sure nothing’s creeping up on me. Must be the altitude.

From the top, rather than skid down across the ice I carry on across the summit and down to Bédoin. Anyone who races down here without shouting Whooooooooo! Woo-hoo! Whaaaaa! at least once just doesn’t have any love in their heart. Think of my friend Tim, the demon descender, who must have loved this. Miss the Simpson memorial, but that’s easily done at 70 kph on a sun-dappled road surface. Concentrate.

Bédoin very pretty; the ride back to Malaucéne over the Col de Madeleine even more so. Back at Vaison there’s just time before we go for President Claude to sandbag me one more time. “We drink a good beer, yes?” It turns out to be a Belgian leg-wobbler that makes steam spout from my nostrils and my feet start tingling, and sets me up nicely for the drive home.

[Bonus photo of the Sky boys shepherding Wiggins, B. through Castellane, on the way to victory in Paris-Nice:]

Altitude Inflation

Joy, joy, joy in the morning! The launderette at Colmars has opened again after a six-week break.

There are only two launderettes within driving distance of the cabin. One's 10 km down the valley in Colmars. It's a sweet little launderette, made all the sweeter when you notice that it has a bar attached. Even better, the bar is staffed by a friendly, welcoming, helpful landlady – not exactly a rarity in France, but not a commonplace either. You can nurse a grand créme or a pression through the hour-long wash, gorging on the free WiFi access madame gladly dispenses. If Heaven doesn't feel like this, I'll be giving it a very bad review on TripAdvisor.

The other launderette is 10 km up the valley in La Foux d'Allos. I HATE this place. If I met the owner, I'd tread on his toes really hard. Unless he was bigger than me. Or as big, actually. Or one of those nasty little fellers who come at you from below and are tougher than they look. Anyway, fifteen minutes in this place is enough to make you want to throw yourself under a piste-bashing machine.

It's also the worst example of Altitude Inflation I've ever come across. Down in Colmars (altitude c.1200 metres, at a guess) a machine big enough to wash an entire rugby team's away kit after a tour of Flanders in winter costs €6.00. Up in Foux, with an altitude gain of about 400 metres? €13.00. Yes: eleven English pounds, to do a load of washing.

Even lettuce doesn't increase in value that much as it gains height.

Snowbound

At last, a huge dump of snow hits the Mercantour National Park. The shopkeepers are dancing in the streets. Non-locals are appearing on the slopes. There's some off piste going down.

As a result of the off piste, I’m keeping the board-repair guy’s kids in private education. My record? Sunday morning: "Your board is ready, bien sur."  Sunday afternoon, I'm back in the shop: “Your feet: they have rock magnets, yes? Ha ha!” Well, apparently, yes.

Over a metre of snow falls overnight. It keeps coming, and we’re pretty much stuck in the cabin all day. I could go riding, but visibility’s pretty patchy even down here: up high it’ll be worse. Best to keep my powder dry for tomorrow.

So, things I’ve achieved while snowbound:

Sorted out the non-clickingness of the right-hand shifter on one of the road bikes. Because obviously that really needed doing, now it’s snowing.

Done a rubbish repair on the other snowboard. Fairly sure it’s going to drop out as soon as the board flexes.

Cleared the path down to the road (this is pre-cleared...)

And in the debit column, things I haven’t done while snowbound:

• Any work on my children’s novel

• Any ukulele practice

Console myself with the thought that at least I’m doing better than my companion. Still in her pyjamas at 3.30 p.m. 

In search of the rhythm

“When he was pedalling he had rhythm. I had tempo.” Stephen Roche, on climbing the Col de Joux Plan behind Robert Millar in the 1983 Tour de France. I’m still not sure what it means, but the quote came to mind unbidden this morning.

The route down the valley is a perfect warm-up for a climb. Slightly downhill, your legs spin fast even in a big gear. The cold makes it hard to feel my fingers by the time I reach the turn for Thorame Basse, but my road swings to the left, uphill and into the sun.

Like a lot of climbs in the Alps, the uphill pitch is steady but relentless. The road snakes rather than hairpinning, and at this time of the morning, with the sun low behind the mountain, it weaves in and out of the shade. There’s no traffic: the mountain silence, which has a different quality from other silences, bears in. Some pocket-bound thing in my jersey chinks with every pedal stroke.

I shift to a bigger gear a couple of times, wanting to push harder, but force myself to shift back down. The mountaineer Doug Scott used to say you should never forget that when you got to the top, you were only halfway home. Pretty quickly the road swings left and levels, and the little hamlet of La Colle St Michel appears ahead.

Last time this was the turnaround, but today I need more pain. Through the houses, back onto the big ring, on the drops, two fingers on the brakes. Down we go.

The descent from La Colle St Michel to Le Fugerét is – so far as I know – unremarked. Like a surfer who discovers a new break, I hope it stays that way. I swing down reckless, low over the front of the bike, railing each curve like a hard bottom turn, pushing out of the saddle for speed on every straight section. I notice someone’s laughing like a lunatic. “Haa-hahahaha!” It’s me.

A rude awakening from euphoria at the bottom, as I coast into France’s Least Friendly Village. A bunch of locals sit outside the café in the sun. “Bonjour, Messieurs et Dames.” No response, unless you count blank stares. Scurry in, get a coffee, come out again. A woman pointedly pulls the only spare seat toward her and puts her coat on it. No worries: that wall by the fountain looks plenty comfortable, thanks.

Climbing back on the bike with a scorched throat from too-hot coffee, I risk a photo. The general air of open-hearted friendliness is summed up by the gentleman second left. He lifts his cheek and farts – which I take it is not a local sign of respect. Whoever said it was better to travel than to arrive must have just arrived in Le Fugerét.

As the road leaves the village there’s a sign: La Colle St Michel 14km. Wish I’d bought some food. But my legs feel good – better than they should, considering how little riding I’ve done lately. Find a gear that needs a bit of effort to turn – this is what I backed off for earlier, and I don’t want to twiddle up it in a tiny gear. I want to roar up it like a mountain lion. Yes, an old one, possibly a bit mangy and with a dodgy knee, but a mountain lion nonetheless.

The road kicks here and there; instead of changing down, I concentrate on keeping the same cadence in the same gear. About halfway up, Stephen Roche whispers in my ear. Is this what he meant? Normally I’d shift to an easier ratio when the slope picks up, find a gear that keeps cadence and effort the same. Tempo. This is something else. Rhythm?

On the way home I pull into a little place called Beauvezer, to fill my bidon at the village fountain. There’s a war memorial on the wall nearby, so I wander over and read it. Stand frozen to the spot for several heartbeats. You could throw a stone from one side of this place to the other. A generation, gone.

Winter's Bone

There’s a farmhouse on the road through Villard Haut, tucked into a tight little corner of the road. It’s so far up that it looks down like a royal butler on Seignus, the highest settlement on the other side of the valley. I’m pretty sure it’s the last building on the way up the mountain.

This is one of those broken-down, added-to French mountain buildings where it’s hard to see where the habitable bits begin or end. Corrugated iron roofs, drunken walls with holes in, a large barking dog tied to a rope, incongruous lace curtains in a couple of windows, a snowmobile from about the time Jimmy Carter entered the White House. There are doors everywhere, but it’s not clear which one you’d knock on. First sight, Emma nailed it: Winter’s Bone.

This afternoon I wound my way up through St Brigitte in the van, toward the pull-in where you can park and walk into the mountains. On to Villard Bas, then a second-gear creep into Villard Haute. When I rode up here on a road bike on New Year’s Day, the road was clear enough for narrow tyres. There’s been a little snow since then, but really just windblown flocante.

Round the bend at Winter’s Bone, suddenly there’s thick, packed-down snow on the road. You can usually roll over this, especially with a two-tonne van bearing down on the tyres. Keep the gas pedal steady, and we seem good. Then the tyres start to spin a bit. OK – still moving forward. Then not.

It’s a strange sensation when something that normally does one thing – in this case, pressing on the gas pedal to move forward – apparently begins to produce an opposite effect. Suddenly two tonnes of van doesn’t seem such a great thing. Take a moment to reflect that the thing that was helping me by pressing the tyres down, gravity, is now the enemy. We slide back down what suddenly looks like a very steep, curved road, with a nasty, expensive, and possibly painful bang at the end.

A bit of brake pedal, a bit of handbrake – somehow movement eases, then stops. OK, good, think. Snow chains in the back. Foot off the brake pedal, and the van starts to slide again. Not good.

Sit with my foot back on the brake pedal, paralysed by stupidity and slow-wittedness for a moment. Shift into first gear, turn off the engine – thinking that I’m royally fucked if this doesn’t work, because the brakes are servo and I won’t get started again before we hit terminal velocity – and lift the clutch. Success: the front wheels lock. If you can call being precariously parked on an ice sheet in the middle of a road to nowhere success.

Scared, cold fingers make slow work of the anyway-laborious job of getting the chains on. Every second, I expect the van to skid back over my hand/arm/leg. Obviously the fact that I’m typing this demonstrates that a) it didn’t and b) the road home was successfully driven. “Chill out in the mountains,” they said, “it’s the most relaxing place.” Pah.

As I roll back past Winter’s Bone, a man who could be any age between 45 and 70 waits on a balcony. His sweater has holes in it, the baggy trousers he’s wearing were once some sort of grey colour. He’s trained a couple of strands of lank hair over a bare pate: people do have standards, even up here in the mountains. He’s been watching the whole thing.

I look over; he raises his beer bottle and nods.

New Year's Day

New Year’s Day brings yet more beautiful, warm weather. Too warm: snow’s disappearing from the ski runs faster than the cannons can replace it. Like meltwater, the holiday crowds are also cascading down the valley, a torrent of Citroens and Peugeots and VWs emptying the resorts, the ghost town vibe creeping back behind them.

With the slopes rapidly turning brown, I pull the old road bike off the wall, screw on some pedals, raise the seat height and give the chain a squirt of lubricant. The corkscrew road up to Lac d’Allos has been waiting for me since we arrived, and today’s the day. I won’t make it all the way up – not without a mountain bike and snow tyres – but I’m hoping to get to the lower car park.

Get lost counting hairpins somewhere around number 12; also confused about how tight a bend has to be to be called a hairpin. That's definitely one on the left.

Up into the forested belt, the space for tyres narrows and narrows, and the snow under the trees gets deeper. Soon it's a choice between less snow in the middle, or the pine-needle path at the sides.

Finally, clear tarmac disappears altogether and I'm riding on snow. Don’t brake. Don’t change direction. Don’t put too much into the pedal stroke. Slim chance of that: lungs and throat burn cold, and there’s only enough oxygen coming in for tempo riding. Balance-balance- balance.

End of the line: the road meets a barrier of snow piled across the trail at the lower car park. Even in early December it was icy walking further than this. Climb off, lean the bike up for the obligatory photo, and climb back on before I get cold: I learnt my lesson twatting about at the top of the Col d'Allos last time.

On the way down, those little trickles of water across the road look like ice. They’re not, but it makes for nervous descending. Still manage to overtake a Peugeot coming down Grandma-style, second gear all the way. Elderly lady driver or not, it’s always fun to overtake a car on a pushbike.

At the bottom of the road I decide my legs aren’t kippered yet, and turn left to Colmars. Very pretty, very like walking through a museum, but free water at the fountains. Slog back up the valley to Allos, and I’m done.

Happy New Year.