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I DON'T know what the chances are of this but I camped here in Luzeret three years ago... and tonight I'm camping right next to the English couple who were my neighbours then. I didn't remember them but they spotted it the moment I started droning on about my war stories. Or my cycling stories anyway.

They probably think I'm stalking them. And boring them.

They're not cyclists - in fact she is in a wheelchair - but there have been several cyclists today. The first since I set off, I think. I found two of them by the road just before I got here, the man prodding at something on his bike and the woman waiting with a "I hope he's not going to ask me to get involved" expression.

They were short and plump and grey-haired and in their sixties. They didn't look as though they'd been far or wanted to.

"Petit souçi?" I asked.

"Not really," the man replied in English. It turned out he didn't speak French but presumed I hadn't been asking the price of cabbages. "Just something rubbing."

Not many things rub on a bike. And it took just a gentle tug of his mudguard stay to make sure it didn't rub any more. The woman, relieved she hadn't been asked to join in, looked at me as a witch doctor.

The others were more experienced. They were on a short stretch of bike path about 30km back from where I'm camping. They were younger, although still middle-aged, and they wore bright red jerseys with blue panels and white lettering and they were towing a trailer of custard brightness. He was beefy and she was slight, with dark, bobbed hair.

"We're doing a diagonale", the man explained. "We left Paris on Saturday and we've had a headwind every day." It's a tradition of French hardmen to ride from one corner of France to the opposite. Something made easier, at least in the planning, by France's hexagonal nature. It makes for just the right number of corners. There are time limits and checks to be made and diagonals aren't something to be embarked on with just two apples and a bar of chocolate.

They'd started further north than Paris. Dunkirk, by the Belgian border, I think. Few towns are more worth leaving than Dunkirk. They were going to Hendaye, the last town by the Atlantic before France turns into Spain. Their mention of headwinds puzzled me because we were going in opposite directions and I was convinced that I had had headwinds.

I'm glad to be having a day off tomorrow. I left my hillside lair this morning in a dark dawn, the grass heavy with water and the trees weeping in sympathy. There was nobody on the road. It was a secret morning, a confidential one, with hardly anybody on the road. And for once it was dry. Out of the grass it was, anyway, although my shoes were soaked by the time I got down to the den of sin beside the compost heap.

I stopped for a coffee after an hour and a half. I'm not in a hurry and I can keep my speed and my daily distance down to ambling speed. The café was in one of those French towns that come and go, that have grown up around a crossroads which once had a commercial importance and which are now just the keeper of traffic lights.

The world had awoken. People were fussing in the street. Next to the café, the windows had two portly, cross-legged Buddhas frosted into them. In the bar itself, a lean, dark-skinned man of maybe 50, his grey hair pulled back tightly into a ponytail. He looked as though he ought to live behind the Buddha windows but, when he left, he turned in the other direction.

That left just me and the ritzy blonde behind the bar, suspiciously deeply tanned and adorned in glitter. She looked like a prize on a hoopla stand. She was the sort who'd look at herself in the mirror and think: "Well, some men prefer cuddly women."

She didn't see me as a prospect, though, for cuddling or repeat business. I was just passing through and didn't need further attention beyond taking my money. So she wobbled off into a back room rather than make conversation.

It's not been a bad day. The rain held off, the sky began to clear in apologetic half-steps, and my computer clicked off the distance with a liveliness it has hitherto refused to show. It's been a happy day.

See you again after my day off.