Of prunes, Jaja and Dutchmen

"I don't think I could become French," Sylvia said thoughtfully, all blonde hair and smiling round face. She hesitated. "Not yet, anyway. I'm not ready for it. I don't speak the language well enough and I don't feel French enough. Maybe one day."

Sylvia and her husband, Rik, run a naturist camp site on the edge of woods east of Montclar-de-Quercy. I passed it once

Sylvia and Rik joined another couple to buy this camp site not far from Toulouse. It's in the heart of Real France but Sylvia feels too Dutch to become French.

coming the other way and got such a welcome when I called in for a few moments that I always resolved to go back.

It didn't make much sense to go south-east if I wanted to end up north-west, that was true. But it didn't much matter: I didn't care where I went and if it turned out a winding route through nowhere in particular, that was fine by me. In fact that was the aim.

I had started in the fertile Garonne valley, just a part of the 600km that starts as a rivulet in the mountains of Spain and ends as a waterway for ocean shipping in Bordeaux. On the way it passes through Toulouse, the pink city. On the north-western edge of Toulouse are the assembly sheds of Airbus, makers of the whopping A380. It used to be a regular sight, the largest passenger airliner in the world, as it flew gently over the Garonne on its test outings. The parts come from all over and some, like huge sections of fuselage, are floated into Bordeaux. There they're loaded on trailers which move with majestic slowness on their cross-country route to Blagnac, the suburb of Toulouse where they're nailed to the wings and wheels.

If the canal beside the Garonne had been designed in modern times, it would have bridges high enough and locks long enough to take the plane. Instead, roads had to be built and, in ancient villages, obstructions removed so the trailers could pass by night. In places there's said to be only a handspan in clearance. Roads across the region have neon panels warning of the next shipment.

The valley near Agen is France's capital of plum production, nearly all the crop turned into prunes. I belong to a club in Agen and wherever I go in France I'm greeted by "Got any prunes for me?", so strong is identification of city and fruit. At the Semaine Fédérale, with its 15,000 cyclists from all round France, it gets wearing. Everyone thinks he's the first and it's a relief to go out in a more anonymous top.

From Moissac onwards, the plums give way to apples. I rode through back roads to the hilltop village of La Française, surrounded by apple trees, shorn now of their fruit and waiting for their next season. It's somewhere round here that Laurent Jalabert lives. He is France's last great name in world cycling, the nation that invented cycle-racing having fallen so low that it's no longer allowed a full team in the world road championship.

Jalabert, though it doubtless means more to me than him, was the first Frenchman to refer to me by the informal tu. It's a big step in France to move from vous to tu. Cyclists do it faster than most but the moment of change remains a social nightmare. Jaja gets over it by calling everyone tu. He lived in Geneva when work led me to call on him, in a house in Cuckoo Song Lane barely a hundred metres into Switzerland. I suggested his interest was less chocolate and cuckoo clocks than tax, which is a lot lower for high earners than in France. The smile told the answer and, sure enough, months after retirement he came back to southern France where he was born.

Jaja commentates on television these days, runs marathons and triathlons and picks the national road team. What he doesn't pick is apples. Nor sunflowers. Beyond patches of vineyards as the road fell

Smiling flowers that once looked like this...

away from La Française were the sad remains of a glorious field of yellow. Sunflowers have such childish appeal. I defy you to find a child who can't draw and colour one or any adult who wouldn't like that big round face to have a grin, like a natural Smiley perpetually gazing at the sun.

But even Smiley doesn't beam for ever. Sunflowers grow tired of the sun and wilt and their heads droop and they turn tar-like black. That's when farmers take an interest. That's when they mow the fields with a harvester,

...look like this in fall, which is when and how the growers like them. That's when sunflowers are turned into vegetable oil. Sad but a comforting thought in winter that you're eating a bit of last summer's sunshine.

gobbling in the seed-filled heads at knee height and leaving just shorn sticks in sad profusion. In time even they will be ploughed back into the soil. Except that sunflowers are tenacious and next season, in the middle of a field of barley or maize, there poking its head above all around will be a beaming sunflower, alone but happy in its isolation.

As for Sylvia, she has a hut with a big bell marked "Ring this." She also has a bar down in the hollows of the site, beside the swimming pool but not as far as the open-air showers, and there Rik boils coffee, pours drinks and makes croquettes and chips. Sylvia was down there when I tugged on the bell and she spotted me from a distance and, not used to ragged cyclists on loaded bikes, approached with a smile and a kiss of recognition.

Next morning, when I went to collect bread and settle up, she was in her little hut, surrounded by tourist leaflets, working on her computer to the sound of Dutch radio. "That's why I still feel Dutch," she said. She gestured at the source of the sound. "Or maybe that's the sign I'm still Dutch. I still listen to news of traffic jams outside Amsterdam. Maybe I'll take French nationality one day but for the moment this place is a Dutch enclave, because most people who come here are Dutch and the first language you'll hear is Dutch." Indeed the only French people apart from me were a couple from Bordeaux in a big grey bus with a flower painted on its side.

I couldn't decide whether Sylvia was pleased or displeased to have left one country for a second only to be surrounded by reminders of the first. Maybe neither. Maybe it was just how it was. And anyway, I gather a Dutchman only has to take another nationality to be deprived of his Dutchness, and that for Sylvia could be a step too far.

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