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Wet wipes. They hide a multitude of bike-oil-based sins.

Trains or not, it’s still a daunting prospect as I gaze at the little map, stuck with flags like a ham studded with cloves. Yet just the names involved make my heart leap, bringing back happy memories of summers past and journeys taken, squashed sandwiches scoffed on ski lifts and arguments in the hot, sticky back seat of a Vauxhall Cavalier.

These places might sound familiar, but I know they’ll look different from a bike. A cyclist’s pace is swift enough to make satisfying progress, yet slow enough to enjoy it, to notice the landscape changing before and, of course, under the tyres – it’s hard to get a sense of the terrain when it’s flashing past you in the car, or on the train, but when you’re forced to really feel it in your legs, it’s hard to ignore. Places seem to stamp themselves on your consciousness with startling firmness, as Graham Robb writes in his book The Discovery of France, which is to be my only constant companion, despite his admission that it’s ‘too large to justify its inclusion in the panniers’ (yep, thanks, Graham, I noticed): ‘A bicycle unrolls a 360-degree panorama of the land, allows the rider to register its gradual changes in gear ratios and muscle tension, and makes it hard to miss a single inch of it, from the tyre-lacerating suburbs of Paris to the Mistral-blasted plains of Provence.’