"I 'ave a tyre lever up ze bottom"

Rion-des-Landes (40), Lesgor, Lalugue, Buglose, Candresse, Hinx, Dax, Mées, Maglesq, Léon, Vielle, Arnaoutchoc (40)

I forget how old he was. Eighty-two, I think. I'd asked the man at the hotel what to do with the bike and he'd asked if it was dirty. "It's cleaner than I am," I said, gesturing a smell beneath my arms and wrinkling my nose. "I'm the one who needs the wash."

"Put it in the dining room, then," he said. "Dinner will be in the bar tonight."

The bar, just a few tables, a couple of locals and what looked like travelling repair crews, the clientèle that rural hotels depend on, was on the other side of the corridor. There was no reception deck: everything was conducted at the bar.

That was where the old chap had been. He was a little, stocky man with wild but short white hair, bright eyes and that look of enthusiasm that reminds you of a dog hoping for a stick. It wasn't he who mentioned his age. He took good health and vitality for granted, for one of life's prizes, not something to be admired.

"I do a lot of that," he said, pointing at my bike as I pulled one carrier bag after another from its innards, leaving the panniers attached

to their frames. "Not with all that touring stuff, I've never done that, but cycling, yes!"

He said his cycling was more sporty. Never racing. "I just like riding my bike."

"Were you at the Semaine Fédérale?", he asked, referring to the huge annual rally held in a different area of France every summer. I said I was. So was he. With so many there, we were neither surprised to have missed the other.

"Going next year? Verdun, isn't it? I will be."

I said I doubted I would, that I had other projects in mind, that I'd miss Verdun, my first absence in eight years.

"Not going to miss one now," the little silver-haired chap said. I could almost see the wet nose, wagging tail and dancing paws. "Every one for the last 20 years, I've done," he said. "Not going to miss one now. Still, maybe we'll see each other the year after that!"

People like that remind me it's good to be alive, good to wake and say "Hey, the sun's come up again!" Eight decades of seeing the good, the bad and the mundane and there he was, still sharing a drink with his pals, still aching to meet strangers, still keen to live life.

I ate that night in that little bar. The TV was on, because the TV is always on in bars even if the volume isn't turned up. I watched the evening news at a curious angle, so that the usually blond (and authentically named) Laurence Ferrari had turned brown and her hair green. Such is the wonder of diodes. Towards the end we learned that nobody knows the height of Mont Blanc. It is "the roof of Europe", as Laurence put it, the highest mountain in the continent, but either it gets higher and lower or scientists are having trouble measuring it. The last time, it was 2mm higher. Before that it was all of 5mm lower. It is good to know other people are paid to worry about these things.

As for the ride, I took a detour south on small roads because I was running early. I have a cousin, Sheila, whom I have seen only twice in 25 years and not much more before then and yet whom I would call one of my few close relatives. He and her husband have bought a place in a condominium, a rarity in France, in a village called Hinx. Sheila, Hinx and I have never coincided but, for the pleasure of sending her a picture marked "Wish you were here", I set off that way.

Since the joy of cycling is not only the independence and the landscape but the people met, I rarely turn down chance encounters. And so it was with the man who puffed up beside me as I rode with the breeze on a route to skirt the little town of Dax.

"I'm just out for a gentle ride," he said, a dewdrop of exertion hanging to the end of his nose. He looked like a leaky Mr Punch. I teased him about it but he said "No, really, I'm only trying a little bit. I'm just out to keep a bit of form."

I wonder if the north is full of southerners. The south seems full of Ch'tis, the name that northerners give themselves. Why? Because it's a contraction of Mon cher petit ami, "my dear little friend", once a common greeting up near the Belgian border. That's where this man came from, from Amiens. As a city, it's not had luck. It was

I'd just crossed the railway at Buglose and turned right when I spotted this doorway...

I loved the image above the door. I wanted to know more but nobody was at home.

occupied by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war which preceded world war one: it was shelled to bits in the first world war itself; and it hadn't completed restoring all its beautiful buildings, factories and homes when it got flattened all over again in the second war.

Mr Punch spoke in the flat, slightly precious accent of Picardy. It's tighter than southern French, almost Belgian, like a dictation test. A friend called it a pince-fesses accent - clinch-bottomed, all "I 'ave a tyre lever up ze bottom." Punch was pale-skinned and fair-haired, more at home in the rain of the north than the sun of the Midi.

"I know," he said, "I can't spend much time out in it. My daughter lives here, I'm visiting her. It's a lovely region."

I asked what he liked most.

"Good food," he said thoughtfully, "and good fish." That is how one Frenchman rates another Frenchman's home - by its food. Kids of 12 can tell you what each town in the Republic is known for producing. You see them analysing their dinners.

There wasn't a lot to Hinx apart from a small bullring opposite Sheila's new home, a crossroads, a few shops and perhaps a feeling of relief that it wasn't Dax. Dax is what goes for

Hinx's modest bull-ring. Dax has a far more glorious one as well as an annual Week of the Bulls. I'm pretty sure, although I don't know, that the bull isn't killed in the French version. Just tormented a bit.

a large town round here, although even on a bike you're across it in a few minutes. It was once part of England, a jewel in the English crown. I may be French but my accent betrays my birthplace. Whenever local people mention how many anglais live in an area, I crack my usual joke about its being "worse than the Hundred Years War."

A century - actually a little more - was how long it took to get the first lot of English out again. A French queen called Aliénor, known in English as Eleanor, divorced her husband and took up instead with Henry II of England. Henry wanted more than just a bit of French totty on his arm and so she agreed to a dowry. Nothing too modest, you understand: just the whole of south-west France. Since England already had almost all the north, that didn't leave a lot for the French.

The French were dispirited because the English won all the battles. Then along came a peasant girl called Jeanne d'Arc (d'Arc was her surname, not a place) who said God insisted she could give the English a whopping if the troops would fall in behind her. In the absence of anyone else, the soldiers agreed and Joan of Arc (a mistranslation) rode a white horse ahead of them and the English retreated.

She came to a sticky end, though. The "English" of the Hundred Years War were actually French. Remember the man whose ancestors ended up in the SS because of boundary changes? Well these French had been born under British rule and liked it. Others thought less fondly, so there was a civil war going on, and then there were those in French France who joined in on their own account or stayed out of it and learned what little they knew from travelling minstrels.

One lot of French sold Joan to another load of French and they burned her in the middle of Rouen. A stone pillar marks the spot. I got my mother-in-law to stand beneath it in the hope that history would repeat itself, but of course it never does.

Now, of course, the English have returned. Like my cousin Sheila, they come not with swords but shekels.

"You conquer us with cheque books," the man from Amiens said, returning my tease. "It is far more civilised."

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