My travelling companion, Chris, with whom I had been working on a construction site in W1, and I met at Dover Priory station. He had been staying with his father, who emigrated to Kent from South-east London a few years back. I rode down to Victoria and took the train from there. Not before I was spotted on the platform by a friend, Mick, while I was smoking my last cigarette before the train pulled out. He was doubly surprised: at both my imminent departure, {I had mentioned the intention of this trip the previous summer,} and at my newly acquired death-camp haircut.

The Channel crossing was uneventful and we docked about 3pm. I have been to and through Calais many times, even stayed the night there, twice, but the economics of the EU.mean it never looks the same. So we sort of got lost almost straight away. We didn't manage to establish exactly where we were until about 15km down the road. In fact about the same time, my rear tube valve blew itself out. An old guy was working in his garden and he chatted to us while I swapped the tube. I may have misunderstood what he said about drinking 80 bottles of Champagne on his 80th birthday.

The road more or less following the course of two canals was, naturally, flat until the town of Ardres. From there the route became a little lumpier. It is now time to pause the excitement in order to deal with the matter of fitness and equipment.

As mentioned above, I don't take easily to the training ride, so of course I hadn't done any. I had however been racing the clock 7 miles each way to work every day for about six weeks. So I had some speed and some strength in my legs, if not much in the way of stamina to deal with uphill and down dale. Chris is a naturally fit man. He regularly runs and has completed two marathons and several half-marathons. [Funnily enough, not something I've ever considered myself]. He hadn't done too much cycling for some time. Not counting the trip from Hackney to Clapham South on his newly borrowed bike. He has taken a mountain bike to Pakistan and ridden up and around the Karakoram highway but that was too long ago to count, unfortunately.

As for bikes, Chris borrowed a Dawes Galaxy touring bike from a friend. I stuck some mudguards and a 36 tooth chainring on a 12 year-old F.W. Evans road bike. We were not camping.

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So here we were now in the Pas de Calais dragging luggage up not very taxing hills. It felt like hard going. We tried to find a place to stay in Lumbres the first ville fleurie of the trip, boasting a lycée named for Albert Camus, but were directed to the village of Wisques, near St. Omer, the Hotel La Sapinière. We were knackered and hungry. The redirection from Lumbres involved a lengthy climb out of the valley we had just dropped into. No problem in finding a room, but the proprietor had a not unfriendly moan about people not booking in advance for dinner. I said it's no fun if you know exactly where you're going.

The food was very good. I had to give the local grey snails a miss though. I hadn't known they bred them that far north. We drank with and chatted to some of the other guests. Two couples of a certain age from Norfolk on an anniversary trip, a Swedish guy, caddying for his son in a pro-golf tournament in St. Omer, and a former Canadian army sergeant, whose father had been a tank driver during the Normandy landings, doing some

war tourism with her second husband, all quite entertaining in one way or another.