American villages aren't villages. Not as we know them in Europe, anyway. Or - to satisfy lawyers - villages in these parts aren't as they are at home. Instead of a centre and a feel of community, they are a collection of isolated homes which, because the habit isn't to build fences or grow hedges around them, look as though they've been dropped into a huge and especially well cared-for football field. It is easy to ride through without realising.

It was that that I had on my mind when I rode into Elk Garden yesterday lunchtime. We were to stop there, camping in the grounds of a church which also called itself a Bike Hostel. And I wasn't sure if I'd passed it.

I knocked at the door of an isolated house and was greeted by a slightly stooped man of seemingly advanced age and a great enthusiasm to meet sweaty men in Lycra. Especially lost and foreign ones.

"Jus' you come on in now," he said. "Can I fix yah a drink or en'thing?"

The room was heated to near-sauna proportions and every available surface was covered by china figurines. Girls with parasols, cats, dawgs, that sort of thing.

"Tha's my wife does that," my host explained, adding: "She's an Avon Lady" as if that somehow explained things.

It didn't take long for the conversation to jump on in a series of non-sequiturs until it bumped into the unforgettable line:

"See, I lost my intelligence to cows."

Eh?

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"I used to work on a dairy farm, jus' up there a bit." He waved the way I was going and named the farm's owner and asked if I knew him. I said I didn't. He seemed surprised. "Anyhows, I worked there since I was a boy and I milked them cows an' then one day, 1973 that was, they got a disease." And he named the disease, although he might not have bothered because I wouldn't have known what he meant even if I'd understood the accent, which was as thick as a nun's knickers.

Does "wheat disease" or something like that mean anything to you?

"So the cows got sick and then I breathed their breath and I got sick too. And that took away my intelligence. An' for years I were jus' like a baby. All I spoke was gibberish and nobody understand me. No, sir."

Then little by little his words returned and, in his own assessment: "I unnerstand everything I'm saying to yah right now and that all make sense. I can tell you how to get to your church. But you give me them same directions, an' I understand what you say but the moment you said them, I forgot them. That's why I need this here." And he pointed to paper and pen beside his telephone.

This poor old man looked at me through a lined face that had a big soft lump the size of a generous toadstool above one eye. "Started as a mole an' jus' got bigger. Got another one here, see?" and he showed me the side of his neck.

I said he was doing well for a man of his age. And I asked what that age was. I'd have said 87. "I'm 64," he said. And in the moment that I began thinking of polite words to cover my blunder - he was only five years older than me, after all - he came out with the meeting's second classic line.

"An' I lost my daddy to a bull."

You did?

"Yep, he were working on the same farm. A while back now, an' he was takin' a drink o' summat and this bull charged him an' he were dead on the spot.

"So I lost my daddy to a bull and my intelligence to the cows."