One More Croissant for the Road. Felicity Cloake

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      The indefinite article is important. I’m no Geraint Thomas, but I’ve always ridden a bike, pootling round town on a beautiful but big-boned Pashley, often with a similarly built dog ensconced in its capacious wicker basket. To my own surprise, in recent years I’ve fallen in love with cycling for its own sake too, mostly, but certainly not only, because of the amount you can get away with eating under the flimsy pretext of refuelling.

      It all started when I joined a group of friends on a trip from Calais to Brussels in 2014, simply because I’d just been dumped, and it seemed like a good time to do stupid things. Until then, with the exception of the odd flash of elation while careering down Highgate Hill after a glass of wine, I had never really realised that cycling could be fun. Efficient, yes; cheap, certainly! – but enjoyable? In London, a city of mad bus drivers and careless cabbies, where every second pedestrian is FaceTiming their mum in Melbourne rather than looking at the road, and the Boris Bikers are the worst of the lot? No.

That trip, however, was quite different. No one had told me of the quiet satisfaction of pumping your way up a hill, weaving over the saddle like Lance Armstrong on a blood bender, knowing you have just enough left in the tank to make it over the brow, or the eye-watering thrill of the open road on a fast bike with the wind behind you. No one mentioned how sometimes it feels like the bike is part of you, an extension of your limbs, and sometimes, when the sodding chain pops off for the fourth time it feels like you’re locked in noble mortal combat. And most of all, no one told me about the giddy camaraderie of the peloton … even when your only goal is getting somewhere in time for lunch.

      From the frankly dreadful fry-up on the ferry, feeling like bold adventurers among the dull hordes of motorists, to the commemorative cream cakes we ate on the steps of a bakery after our first, modest ascent (who knew they had hills in Flanders?), it was a joy from start to greedy finish, and not just because of the ready supply of hot crispy frites.

Two-wheeled travel offered other pleasures, too. Coming up close and personal with big-eyed cows, and stopping to gaze at hot-air balloons as they drifted across the vast Belgian skies. Rounding a corner to find an immaculately tended Great War graveyard, the endless rows of neat white gravestones causing us to fall silent for the next few kilometres and feel glad to discover, mooching around a market the next morning, that life in Ypres hadn’t stopped in 1918. Scoffing cider and cake in an orchard outside Bruges, and making friends with an enormous slavering Bernese mountain dog as the owner lectured us on the folly of the British attitude to Europe (yes, even in 2014, that pot was already coming to the boil). Racing each other through the flat, gravelled trails of the Ardennes forest, and wandering, slightly bow-legged, through a misty Ghent at dusk, high on life after getting my tyres trapped in some tram tracks. Posing for photos by the sign to Asse, pointing saucily at our padded bottoms like Benny Hill’s backing band, as a couple of bemused locals clicked the shutter. And falling asleep in full gear on the Eurostar home with a tiny bottle of wine and a lingering sadness that it was over – and suddenly, I was a Cyclist.

      Like all new cyclists, I celebrated by buying loads of kit – stupid clicky shoes that made me walk like a duck, and technical fleece-lined leggings entirely de trop for expeditions around Home Counties pubs, or the trip to Brighton where I made the mistake of eating fish and chips just before tackling Ditchling Beacon. I did a couple of 100-mile sportives, fuelled almost entirely by malt loaf, a glorious four days eating crêpes and drinking cider from teapots in Brittany – and then, summer 2017, came that ride down to the Mediterranean, the biggest and greediest yet, when I finally realised my destiny lay in pedalling round France, eating stuff.