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It’s a solemn moment. I start every day with a mug of English Breakfast, the colour of damp – but not wet, not even soggy – sand, made with boiling water and fresh milk, which definitely rules out anything from the train catering trolley, let alone any prettily tinted tisanes the French might serve under the name of thé. This will be my last cuppa until July, and let me tell you, it’s emotional. Though to be honest, that could also be the exhaustion setting in.

Pushing past Eddy waiting patiently in the hall, I go to meet a friend and her baby who’ve come to wave me off – and, listening to the gory details of the birth, feel relieved to be able to spend a few minutes revelling in someone else’s suffering instead of my own. I’d planned to have a symbolic full English, but in the end, thinking of what’s to come, I wimp out and go for avocado on toast with a feral-tasting kombucha on the side as a final taste of Islington.

Back home, while Hen changes Gabriel on the sitting-room floor (there’s about as much dignity in being a baby as a long-distance cyclist, it seems), I change my own clothes from those appropriate for breakfast with a friend to those needed to ride a Grand Tour – or at least the 4.73km I’ll be covering on the way to Waterloo. To their credit, neither of them laugh when I emerge.