Felicity Cloake - One More Croissant for the Road

Mudlark

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First published by Mudlark 2019

FIRST EDITION

Text © Felicity Cloake 2019

Illustrations and cover illustration © Sara Mulvanny/Agency Rush 2019

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2019

Felicity Cloake asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008304935

Ebook Edition: June 2019 ISBN: 9780008304942

Version: 2020-03-02

For my sausage-scoffing, plonk-sinking peloton – with whom the glass was always half full

1 Cover

2 Title Page

3 Copyright

4 Dedication

5 Contents

6 Prologue

7 STAGE 1: The Grand Départ, London to Cherbourg

8 STAGE 2: Cherbourg to Avranches

9 STAGE 3: Avranches to Dol-de-Bretagne

10 STAGE 4: Dol-de-Bretagne to Saint-Malo

11 STAGE 5: Saint-Malo to Redon

12 STAGE 6: A Stage in Two Parts: Redon to Tours, Paris to Lamotte-Beuvron

13 STAGE 7: Limoges (Circuit)

14 STAGE 8: Limoges to Bayonne

15 STAGE 9: Bayonne to Pau

16 STAGE 10: Pau to Carcassonne

17 STAGE 11: Marseille

18 STAGE 12: Marseille to Nice

19 STAGE 13: The Col de Joux Plane

20 STAGE 14: Lyon

21 STAGE 15: Chalon-sur-Saône to Dijon

22 STAGE 16: Strasbourg to Meistratzheim

23 STAGE 17: Meistratzheim to Nancy

24 STAGE 18: Toul to Bar-le-Duc

25 STAGE 19: Bar-le-Duc to Reims

26 STAGE 20: Reims to Bondy

27 STAGE 21: Bondy to Paris

28 Vital Statistics

29 Acknowledgements

30 Praise for One More Croissant for the Road

31 About the Publisher

Landmarks CoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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A green bike drunkenly weaves its way up a cratered hill in the late-morning sun, the gears grinding painfully, like a pepper mill running on empty. The rider crouched on top in a rictus of pain has slowed to a gravity-defying crawl when, from somewhere nearby, the whine of a nasal engine breaks through her ragged breathing.

A battered van appears behind her, the customary cigarette dangling from its driver’s-side window, and shakily she rears out of the saddle, grubby legs pumping in a surprising turn of speed. As he passes, she casually reaches down for some water, smiling broadly in the manner of someone having almost too much fun. ‘No sweat,’ she says jauntily to his retreating exhaust pipe. ‘ Pas de problème, monsieur. ’

The van disappears round the next hairpin. Abruptly our heroine dismounts, allowing the heavily laden bike to crash into a pile of brambles, describing an arc of chain grease across her bruised shins en route. Grumpily slapping away a thirsty horsefly, she reaches into the handlebar bag and pulls out a half-eaten croissant.

After peeling off a baby slug and flicking it expertly onto her own shoes, she sinks her teeth into the desiccated pastry, and squints at the map on her phone. Only another 40km to go before lunch.

In the distance, there’s a rumble of thunder.

It’s not like I wasn’t warned. I’d witnessed the danger of turning a hobby into a job first-hand at a magazine publisher I’d once worked for, who regularly offered a bonus for anyone willing to give up their weekend to help with photoshoots for some of their more niche titles. No one ever did it twice.

As the new IT manager wearily switched my computer off and then on again one Monday morning, I asked him how his first gig for Mega Boobs had gone – he’d been so excited about it on Friday. He shook his head: ‘Believe me, Felicity,’ he said in a small, sad voice, ‘you really can have too much of a good thing.’

Poor Hamid. Almost a decade later, I can still see the betrayal in his eyes – but those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and, hard as I tried, I just couldn’t shake the urge to eat my way around France. (I’ll be honest, I didn’t try that hard.)

The absurd notion of doing it on two wheels came later, in the summer of 2017, when I rode from the Channel coast to the Mediterranean with a friend who’d recently quit her job in London to move to Provence. In the interests of wringing maximum drama from her departure, Caroline decided to make the journey by bike. I went along on a whim and realised, somewhere around La Rochelle, that I’d never had so much fun in my life.

France, I found, is a place built for cycling and, happily, for eating, too – a country large enough to give any journey an epic quality, but with a bakery on every corner. Here, it seemed to me as I rode through shady forests and sun-baked vineyards, you could go from beach to mountain, Atlantic to Mediterranean, polder to Pyrenees, and taste the difference every time you stopped for lunch.

Three weeks away from a computer gives you a lot of time to think, and as our little peloton pedalled south, a book began to take shape, a Grand Tour of French gastronomy, visiting dishes in their terroir, picking up tips, putting on wisdom as well as weight. The idea marinated for the next 697km, becoming increasingly less ludicrous with every pichet of local wine we swallowed.

When I got home, I told everyone I was going to do a Tour de France.

The indefinite article is important. I’m no Geraint Thomas, but I’ve always ridden a bike, pootling round town on a beautiful but big-boned Pashley, often with a similarly built dog ensconced in its capacious wicker basket. To my own surprise, in recent years I’ve fallen in love with cycling for its own sake too, mostly, but certainly not only, because of the amount you can get away with eating under the flimsy pretext of refuelling.