‘The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.’
                                                                                 Marcus Aurelius
The time has come to say goodbye to naturism and hello to clothes and convention. It’s ten o’clock in the morning, and I’m standing at the gate leading from La Jenny to the familiar painted green cycle path of La Velodysée. My faithful steed is loaded up, trailer and all, and champing at the bit, more so than me I fear. I’ve got used to the comforts of home whilst I’ve been with the Lotus Eaters, and whilst I look forward to the ride, I don’t feel the same about sleeping in a tent again. And after so long our of the world, I feel rather overdressed in shorts and a t-shirt, but when in Rome…
Bordeaux with its international airport would be the quickest route home. It is just sixty-five kilometres due east. It would take me around three and half hours to cycle to the airport non-stop and if Michel were to make the journey with me, roughly the same time on horseback. By coincidence, the same distance due east of Bordeaux would have me knocking on the door of Michel’s chateau. Though the main house was rebuilt after a fire in 1885, his library where he wrote the essays remains almost as he left it, bar the fact that the books are gone and the desk that sits theatrically in the middle of the room facing the circular walls, is more likely set dressing by the hand of diligent tourism officers.
Still, the inscriptions that have been restored on the beams overhead are his choices, and the view from the window that I would guess looks out on a landscape the great would recognise instantly, makes the place hugely significant, to me, anyway, and to many other Michel afficianados. I’ve never really gone in for hero worship, but for Michel, I seem to have made an exception.
I know all this because I visited the chateau, oh, I don’t know, maybe ten or twelve years ago, whilst on driving holiday through France with an ex-partner I haven’t seen for a long time. I remember the day like it was yesterday. Michel would something to say about the time slip of memory.
Having decided it’s time to go home, I could have made it to the airport today and packed up the bike for a flight home from Bordeaux. But that felt like an over-reaction, and when I checked, it turned out to be expensive too.
Nor is making a dash for the north coast of France and the ferry back to the UK an option. I had always intended to go slowly, but my current rate of progress would have meant at least another four weeks on the road if I wanted to reach Roscoff on the north coast of Brittany. With campsites closing around me, there will only be fewer options as I head north and the weather grows colder. There’s no fun in that, but the grand gesture of pushing myself to finish for reasons of pride feels like something of an idée fixe too. I have my own way of dealing with being stuck in a groove, something I’m happy to share, though I stole it from a tutor in screenwriting. He said that if you get blocked writing a scene, ask yourself, ‘What’s the opposite of that?’ It frees up your thinking and can result in a sudden lifting of the weight of feeling you ‘should’ or you ‘must’.
Still, I’m ready to go home, and I’ve come up with a sensible compromise between dashing back and carrying on to the bitter end. If I push myself today, I would be only a short hop from Soulac-sur-Mer, and the twenty-five minute ferry ride across the estuary of the Gironde river, and that would put me in the Charente, another entirely new département, and the best staging post to strike out for the UK.
I will take the car ferry across the Gironde and ride on to île d’Oleron, from where I can get a small ferry direct to La Rochelle and from there a train...