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WE were sitting outside Euston station in central London. It's where trains leave for the English Midlands and we had ridden there from Victoria, which is where they arrive from the English south-east.

It used to be that riding across London was feasible, but that was when boys had short trousers and men wore raincoats. The place has grown since then and it's also become busier. The positive side is that there are bike routes and sometimes bike paths and that traffic in the city centre is restricted by having to pay a toll to get there.

But there's still no pleasure in it and so we caught the train and then tackled repeated red lights, stopped buses and diversions past Trafalgar Square, Parliament Square and Theatreland. All the time practised youths on light bikes zipped by us while we, on wide and heavy bikes, had neither the leanness nor the acceleration to weave through the traffic.

Anyway, we were sitting outside Euston station with a coffee and a sandwich when a well-spoken, grey-haired man in his late 30s spotted my Rohloff. It polished his dream, he said, of riding along the Danube.

"I've got the wheels and I'm looking forward to building up the rest of the bike, but for the moment I can't afford it because I paid so much for a violin." He carried it in a black case on his back.

"I'm principally a singer but I also play bassoon," he said with the nerves of a smoker in a fireworks factory. Highly strung isn't an exaggeration. Right then he was on the way to the BBC to rehearse for the Promenade concerts.

He used to live in London, he said, but he'd been educated at Oundle and that had given him the urge to get out of the city. He had friends in Milton Keynes and so he had just made our journey in the opposite direction.

We talked a while of Rohloffs and bikes and cycling generally. He dreamed of the Danube as he recovered from an illness, which he didn't describe.

A writer friend years ago thought cyclists ought to wear something or have some other way to show other cyclists that they too were of the persuasion. Besides wearing cycling clothes or pushing a bike, that is. And it's true that we must all cross with other cyclists all the time but, in mufti and hurrying to jobs we don't want to do, we never know.

Karen has been riding in Spain and this morning she flew into Heathrow. Putting her bike back together took less time than she thought and she arrived at Milton Keynes station on the train after ours.

We're here to see the decoding centre in the old manor house beside the next station back down the line, at Bletchley. You'll remember that Milton Keynes was built as a new town from the 1970s onwards and that, while Bletchley has kept its identity, it's now in reality a suburb on the edge of the city. New city, old suburb.

Tonight, and again tomorrow night, we're staying at a hostel just north of the station. And tomorrow we are going to the code-breaking centre that shortened the war by many years.