Somewhere in a field, France: Sex by the compost heap

June 15, 2015

I love old graveyards. There's often a tap for refilling bottles and then the curious stones. This one, from the first world war, says André Authiat died in 1914 and, "mortally wounded, he fell crying 'Keep going, my friends, we'll get 'em!'"

I DON'T know where I am. It doesn't matter. It rained again all day, which wasn't too bad because I started, after a late hotel breakfast, convinced I wouldn't manage eight kilometres. Instead, I've ridden 80 in what optimists call showers but realists describe as "it bucketed down nearly all the day."

When I'd had enough, I found a field with neither cows nor other campers and pitched in an uncultivated triangle at the top of a hill and in front of a square of ragged trees. I walked back to the road a hundred metres away and looked back at where I'd put the tent and decided that, sure, you could see it but the chances that anyone would care enough to come out on a wet afternoon was finite to say the least.

In fact, someone did come, but not for me, I think. Instead, a small van with side windows parked on an earth patch beside a heap of rotting grass and weeds and stayed there with the engine running. I opened the tent enough to peer out like a soldier in a machine-gun post. There seemed no interest, in me or the compost. I didn't time how long the van was there but my guess is that it was just long enough to have improvised sex. Which would explain why they didn't see me.

Where am I now, other than in a field of rampant sex addicts?

Well, up near Limoges. I know that not only because the signposts have been pointing left in that direction but also because I am in the distinctive low hills of dark green grass that show how much it rains here. And because the fields are populated by cows of a milk-chocolate brown that don't seem to exist anywhere else.

Bussière-Galant: always wise to fence in your telephone box

I stopped, just before finding my camp spot, to ask a woman for water. She was out in the rain in a plastic jacket printed with fussy, small flowers. She wore dainty wellingtons and showed a well-rounded bottom when she bent forward. What I saw once described as a "Women's Institute bottom".

"I have to do this now," she said, pointing at flowers she had just planted, "because friends gave me them and the roots go dry if you don't plant them."

Not that there was much chance of dry roots today. By now the fields were sodden, which was why I had pitched the tent so high even at the risk of being seen, and water was bubbling down the road to seek an escape in the grass.

It was my second attempt at getting water. Around noon I stopped in a rundown village held together by cobwebs. I looked in a barn that had a Citroën Deux Chevaux that hadn't moved for a long time, a handful of straw bales and much of the clutter acquired and lovingly abandoned by farmers the world over. There wasn't likely to be a tap in there but it was out of the rain and there was just a chance. Added to which, prodding about in other people's barns can sometimes bring those other people out to see what's going on, which means a chance to offer bottles for refilling.

Today, though, everybody was wisely indoors. I knocked on the low, wooden door of a cottage that time and maintenance men had forgotten. The air suggested generations of cats. There was a bootscraper by the door, and a wiry doormat worn thin in the middle, and a handful of empty plastic water bottles.

In time, the door opened. A toothless woman who could have been a body double for the witches of Macbeth looked at me with no little suspicion. She spoke through a mouth which had parted company with its teeth.

"Eh, oui ?"

No "bonjour", no "monsieur".

I stated my case and her face showed no reaction.

"Non", she said in the end. "I can't spare you any. The water supply is so bad that I only drink from bottles." She pointed at the empties at my feet. "You'll have to go elsewhere." And with that, she closed the door.

Well, the rainy-day gardener was more obliging and led me into a large garage and workshop a good deal tidier than the farmer's barn. There she filled my camping bottle and asked about the ride and marvelled at its length and that I was prepared to ride "even when it rains".

She'd have been even more impressed if she knew that within an hour I'd be camping with people having sex by a compost heap.

The French are known throughout the world for their good taste

Today's ride: 79 km (49 miles)
Total: 344 km (214 miles)

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