I mentioned I was still angry after the night’s crossing, not helped by the way I felt after an hour’s sleep. Aaargh, the lost opportunity – of visiting France and not interviewing its chefs?! It’s a blinking travesty…
I wait for the announcement, but most of the other cyclists - there are around 30 bicycles on my crossing - have snuck down to the car deck by the time I realise it’s the moment to go, and as I reach the cycle storage room they are already streaming off. I get that slightly panicked sensation of being last… How can this feeling remain so many years after leaving school and the university rugby club, the guilt of letting the group down by lagging behind? I decide, hey, it’s the least of my problems, and roll off the ramp among the banging of the cars as they transfer from the ferry, into France.
I slide across the tarmac to the gentle ticking of my derailleur, and pass Immigration with a wave. There are no Customs. Not so as in Lawrence’s case, in 1906:
‘There was a fearful crush; I should think there were 120 bicycles. The Customs people were chalking all the baggages as fast as they appeared.’
I have been wondering what else could go wrong on this trip and then, with looming horror, it strikes me: the gps…! Of course, my whole plan will unravel in a technical meltdown… I switch on the gps*, expecting a tragi-comic issue of bleeps and squeaks, the digital equivalent of a terminal sigh... but… no… the thing actually works. My course lies mapped out right there, clearly and perfectly. Better get on with it, then.
I set off, east, towards the sunrise, as the massive clangs and screeches of the ferry fade behind me, echoing gently among the light industrial streets, warehouses abandoned at this time of the morning, or just abandoned, full stop, looking at the state of them, and emerge onto a concrete artery, four lanes and pavements, a cycle path and a railway. After a purposeful couple of miles, thing get confused, paths splitting like an electrical cable; the cycle path veers off the main route via some mini-diversions, losing itself in a tangle of shared pedestrian bridges. In frustration I heft the bike over a crash barrier to get back on the gps track.
And then at Harfleur, past a billboard heralding a housing development dedicated to Rimbaud (an energetic 19th Century poet who presumably would be horrified at his name being given to an edge of town housing estate), I climb a tree-capped rise and descend, and find myself in a village. Le Havre has evaporated behind me. Across a field stands a small chateau, around which single-storey homes have clustered like phages on a bacterium.
And then the streets disappear entirely. I enter the countryside, a tight valley poking through fields of pasture that lie at angles. The sun is climbing over the hedges, reaching into the dew-soaked corners and teasing out the chill air. Grass, luxuriant as a head of hair, appears dark and shining in turn, depending on my angle of view. A fox’s trail trots black through silver, heading for the cover of a hedge.
With all this wet, rich verdancy, France feels unexpectedly fertile. Not so different from southern England. As I move forward, the valley walls sigh and settle into a broader scape, sectioned by copses and hedges. I wonder how this happens, what is the base-rock here, for water to carve a gentle path like this? I know that Caen is all about building stone. Does the limestone skeleton of the land stretch this far east?
Imperceptibly I am climbing, just a few feet per hundred metres; eventually the valley disappears entirely and I find myself on open ground, with a view that stretches for miles over cultivation, punctuated here and there by a water tower or a church spire. It is a Saturday morning, and occasional cyclists, singles and small groups, scoot into view, passing with a wave.
At Saint Romain de Colbosc, at nine, I decide on coffee and make for the main square, where I stumble into a Saturday morning market. I watch from outside the café. The square is everything you’d want of rural France: a mairie surveying the square, a patisserie, a fruit shop, florist, a chemist and a notaire. And in the middle there’s all the human activity, the stalls and their coloured awnings, sausages and farm meats for sale, eggs and cheese, fruit and artisanal craftwork.
As I depart I buy cherries in a brown paper bag. There is no room in my handlebar bag, so I sit them on top, holding them in place with the heel of my hand. Which works fine until I need to turn left; then bag simply goes with my indicating hand. To any passing French road-user, I am a man on a remote country road, proffering cherries for no apparent reason,
Fields slide by, oil seed rape and pasture in outrageous yellow and rich green, and now expanses of corn, matt yellow, dotted scarlet with poppies. The landscape is heart-rendingly pretty. Here horses look up, there a cow tends to her calf.
And then something causes me to stop. I look back at the rage of a few hours before and I surprise myself. Now, at 10 am, with just 40 kilometres of air through the helmet, I can feel a renewed, completely different point to the world. I no longer care about the lost organisation and opportunities. Something will sort itself out. And who cares about the money?** This is an adventure; its essence is entirely other, as though it has folded out of a different dimension of the mind, one that defies domestic concerns, convention and habit.
And I realise: this is what travel is for.
*I have a tragi-comic relationship with tech, and gps is nothing different. If you’ve ever been in doubt that machines can have a sense of humour, then rest assured. Later I will refer to ‘GPS logic, aw bless’.
**I should probably acknowledge that extending this carefree attitude to money is not entirely a good policy. It took till nearly Christmas to get my finances back on an even keel. But hey, adventure offers something around which financial concerns warp into senselessness.