Et alors, au'voir les gars!

Farewell day was cold and grey. Nobody was more used to it than the British.

All this could end with the last turn of the wheels, the packing of the tent, a sad ride off into anticlimax. Happily, it's not that way.

The last day is still the last day, of course, but it's followed by the Big Parade. Having pestered the people of the town all week by clogging up their streets, the time has come to do it in still bigger and more convincing fashion with the farewell ride.

You have, from the start, to decide to be a wheeler or a watcher. There are merits to both. If you ride in the procession, you get all the fun, you get to wave to the crowds, to be waved to back, and to dress up and make people laugh. If you watch, you'll be in a continuous line of folk sometimes three or four deep and you'll see the whole show - if you ride, you see only those around you - but you're a watcher, not a doer.

What happens?

Well, right from the start the organisers will have picked somewhere like a sports stadium. There will be speeches and the organiser of this year's event will, like the man behind each Olympics, hand over the flame to the next incumbent. Except there is no flame. What gets handed over is a large wooden spade, The Spade of Misery. On it are the names of the towns that have hosted the Sem Fed and the message is "Get digging, brother... the worst is still to come."

Thousands go to the farewell. It's quite emotional. Long before you get there, stewards will have divided the field into areas, one for each of the regions of France, one for each of the different nationalities. The largest contingent is always the British; one of the smallest, to the point of being frequently absent, is that of the USA. A shame... Americans don't know what they're missing.

The name of the region or country is on a placard carried at the front of the group. Each group is separated from the one ahead and behind it, giving the crowd just long enough to get excited about whom they'll see next.

"Ah, les anglais!" They shout. Or "Au'voir, les Bretons!"

Now, you'd think that was all there was to it. But riding isn't enough. The fun of the ride is to dress up, perhaps in something symbolic of your region, perhaps just for the fun of dressing up. Every year there are several priests in habits, a large wooden cross and a bucket of water with which to bless anyone within sprinkling range. There are comic bikes, bikes that play music, bikes garlanded in flowers and bikes towing bath-tubs. This year, even a bike with a drinks dispenser on the handlebars to pour an apéritif to anyone in need - a cycling equivalent of the St Bernard dog and its brandy barrel.

The Dordogne is known for its caves, going back to prehistory. Defying the cold, a contingent dressed as Cro-Magnon cavemen and branded themselves "cyclo-sapiens".

Cyclo-sapiens, up from the caves of the Dordogne

The largest French group is always from Brittany, in the north-west. Brittany's colours are black and white and you see the Breton flag everywhere. Meeting a Breton is like coming across a Texan or a Yorkshireman: you hear in no time where he's from.

The Bretons rode singing patriotic songs, which in their case meant songs insisting that Brittany was best. That's what they were doing the first time I saw them. Half an hour later things had changed and the leader was playing a toreador riff, like the policeman at that bike-jam a few days earlier, and the black-and-white brigade shouted back "Olé".

When that novelty failed, the leader merely shouted "Café!"

To which the followers yelled back "Au lait!"

Well, that's the farewell ride. I get choked quite easily and I find it moving every year to see so many people who've so clearly had such a good time, who want to thank those along the route, who want to shout "Merci! Au'voir!" to the people of the town who've put up with them for a week.

"Don't go!" two waitresses shouted. "Stay here with us!"

And often the responses are touching too. Outside a café, two waitresses waited for their favourites and called "Don't go! Stay here with us!"

And then, finally, it's over. The route maps, soiled and creased, are still in our bags. I don't like to throw them away but I know I will. I bring home the details for next year that I collected from the organisers in the village. I keep my medallion and I add it to all the others round the neck of the cardboard skeleton hanging within reach of where I'm sitting now. And the little plastic frame-plate, the one that has hung all week beneath my top tube as though I were a rider in the Tour de France, that gets hung by one of its fixing holes to a nail in the wall.

For another year, it's over. Every year the novelty gets a little less, of course. But equally, every year we meet new friends, some of whom we'll see other summers, some of whom we won't but who'll come up in "I wonder what happened to..." conversations.

Next year, the Sem Fed is in St-Omer, in the north-west. Where the week is held depends on who is prepared to take on the four years it takes to organise it. St-Omer isn't a region to make the heart leap, but over and over we've been told by those who live there: "You'll be surprised! You'll be surprised!"

And every year we are.

So farewell, Saumur... we're back on the road to home.

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