Heart

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THERE ARE places so flat you want to scream. This part of Serbia is precisely that. Plus I had just two roads to follow all day. Pedal, pedal, pedal. Look around every so often to see if anything has changed. It hasn't? Still more empty cropped fields? Oh well...

And that would have been the tale of the day had the flatness not made it uninviting to camp. And had I not seen a hotel as I rode out of a village of little more than a crossroads, a few shops and a hundred houses.

I tried the door. It was locked. It was that sort of day. But then a man with a bulging black T-shirt and the look of someone who spends his days hanging around pinball machines looked up from a café table next door and, astonished that anyone would want a room, came and unlocked the door.

I wasn't expecting anything grand and I wasn't disappointed. The carpets were threadbare and the wallpaper peeling, but I've stayed in worse. No, what made the place memorable was that it was stuffed with home-painted erotic art. There were clumsy nudes, largely in red, white and black, all down the corridors, in the bar and on the landings. To the extent that the faces were recognisable, half seemed to be of the same woman. I began looking at drinkers in the bar with more interest, and at the women in the little supermarket up the road. I suspect she is a local - or perhaps was a local, having fled in embarrassment.

She gazed down on me as I lay on my bed. Except that she seemed a lot more concerned with a mosquito bite in a very discreet place, the poor girl...