The new road to Ljubljana ran raised on pillars: the grumbling echoes of cars straining and the thundering of lorries on the surface above echoed off the walls and filled the valley around me. The next thing to fill the road came at the top of the hill – a truly luscious aroma of rising dough, laced with a hint of coffee – magnificent. Luckily bakeries open early; it was still only 7am. I bought a coffee, orange juice and the largest bun I could see,

Slovenia had the neatly tended, luminously green fields of an Alpine valley, which of course it is, eaves stacked with with split logs and pink and scarlet geraniums. Doubtless some will call it twee, but for me it was a delightful Slavic twist on Alpine homeliness.

All these potential injuries - What of my neck? Having ridden in Britain for years looking over my right shoulder, in 45 Southwest I would be riding 4400 kilometres on the other side of the road. Would the other side of my neck suddenly cramp itself into rictus?

Our instructions at checkpoints - to prove to the organiser of 45 South-West that we had visited - were to photograph ourselves, with our bicycle and the Checkpoint building in the background… There was second stage to Checkpoint 1, a marine industrial building at a riverside wharf just outside the town, presumably because organiser Andy Buchs enjoyed the irony in the difference between a Cathedral and such a functional monster in its bucolic river setting. I certainly wouldn’t disagree.

What the (my) brain does occupy itself with, however - again at a pretty low level, I am aware - is songs. I suppose it chooses them to fit the pace at which I am trying to pedal. Unfortunately, on 45-Southwest 2023, my dear old brain chose two songs, both of them really irritating…

There’s a delicious nervousness before any adventure, that mix of apprehension, excitement and the raw expectancy in the body as it waits to get moving

From debilitation to depilation… Putting any fears of propriety to the back of my mind – yes, picture Munch’s Scream, that horrified appeal in the face of an eternal, unknowable, identity-crushing dysphoria – or in my case a fear of showing my bits to a stranger - I girded my loins, so to speak, and strode into Strip, a beauty clinic on Artesian Road in West London.