I STOPPED today to send postcards to friends on death row. I think especially of the one in the Polunsky Unit in Texas. I don't feel the need to forgive or condone, nor has he suggested I should. What I regret is that a man sentenced to death should, before it happens, have to suffer one decade, perhaps two, in solitary confinement. It's like pulling legs off a spider. I worked out that his cell is barely larger than our bathroom. And there he stays 23 hours a day, no human contact other than the warden or when he's allowed to the prison shop. In the hour he's allowed to stretch his legs, it's in an indoor metal cage, out of sight of other prisoners.

Letters from outside, as you imagine, are a treasure.

Well, today I heard a touching story. Another member of Lifelines had written to her prisoner friend for a decade, always receiving a prompt reply. And then the correspondence ended. Knowing how shattering it can be for a prisoner to lose a friend on the outside, she carried on writing every month. Years passed, still without an answer.

Then her letter was returned. Her friend had died in his cell, age taking him before the executioner. When they went through his belongings, they found all the letters she had ever written, folded and filed and treasured. And then the sad story emerged.

Her friend had never learned to read or write. It had always been another prisoner who read the letters and then wrote a reply as he dictated it. The friend had died and from then on there was no one left to read or write for him. He had never mentioned his illiteracy because, to him, it was a greater shame than being on death row.

Can't the world be a sad place?

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There were two Moroccans at the chambre d'hôtes last night. I met them as they cooked in the communal kitchen and listened to Moroccan music on a little player that didn't render its subtlety as best it might.

"We are from Agadir," the shorter and more outgoing one said. He had that lovely, smiling wish to be friends that's common in Arab and generally in Muslim circles. I told him I knew Agadir, that we spent our honeymoon there and that I'd ridden through it only a few years ago. He was delighted.

"It's warmer there than it is here," he said, suddenly gloomy. His taller companion nodded his long, lean head. He never spoke.

"So why are you here?"

He explained that he was in the car-parts business, that he came to France every year to visit car scrap yards and to buy whatever parts he could salvage.

"But you could do that in Spain. It's warmer there."

He shrugged.

"No, it has to be France. French cars are very popular in Morocco and, here, we can fill a whole trailer and ship it all home. But it's very expensive for us here. Morocco is cheap."

This morning the woman who ran the chambres d'hôtes told me how delightful she found them.

"He's always saying 'Come to Morocco! I have a house for you.'"

"So why don't you go?"

"Because we don't travel anywhere."

She pointed to her husband, a retired farmer still going through advertisements for machinery he would never need. I got the impression that it was his fault, although also the firm idea that she didn't want to go anywhere either. They had met at a village dance 40 years earlier and they had never moved from the house where he was born.

"We don't go to the world," she said, a Mrs Tiggywinkle character in her apron, "because the world comes to us. I thought maybe you were riding the Compostelle because we get a lot of Dutch and Belgian cyclists doing it. But early in the season yet, though, I suppose. You’d have been our first."

I asked the old farmer if agriculture was difficult in the Beauce. I suspected I knew the answer and he confirmed it – stick it in the ground and it'll grow.

"You just need a lot of machinery to make it happen."

Oh, and the Moroccans weren't there for breakfast.

"They're just too cold. It's probably 35 degrees in Morocco. They won't get up until they know they won't freeze!"

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Today I rode through pretty villages, crossing women in cars talking to invisible infants, waving to men in tractors, men in blue-grey overalls topped by a peaked cap carrying the name of some agricultural supplier.

There's still not a lot to say about the countryside, except that there are now some ups and some downs. But I can't fault the care they take of villages, all well-tended with swept stone squares and trimmed grass, like widows putting on make-up that no one will see.

I watched hurrying trains of people with computer buds in their ears, and then forgotten villages of grime-stained windows looking sad and half-blind in the traffic that spattered dirty water every day it rained. Tonight, I am camping up a hillside, well above the village and its road. The wind will blow up here but only the most energetic are going to stagger up the muddy slope to see what I'm up to.