This year Spring has taken a long time to arrive. I was so glad that finally by the middle of May I was able to start wearing my lighter clothes and feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. I had to rush through my walk for Amnesty in the City of London so that I could meet up with Asmat who had so generously offered to take me in his taxi down to Newhaven as the trains were not running normally after two strike days. The walk turned out to be a happy occasion – more of a family and friends affair rather than a formal fundraiser but it still worked well and we raised nearly £300. The strangest moment came when I was smacked on the bum by my mischievous great-nephews Max and Conrad whilst trying to explain to my audience the intricacies of Mithraic worship outside the temple of Mithras in Walbrook.

Even in the comfort of Asmat’s taxi it took ages to escape through the endless suburbs of South London and it wasn’t really until you reach the last few miles under the South Downs that you feel away from the clutch of the great wen. Newhaven’s primary function has always been as a channel port has seen much better days. The ferry now only crosses once or twice daily during the summer so nothing much seems to move in the town.

I was the first cyclist to arrive in the morning and waited with my book for over an hour until boarding. Soon there was a quite a horde of other riders embarking on other intrepid journeys across France. It was a joy to get on board and finally to leave these shores for my first venture into continental Europe for several years.

It took a long time for the gleaming chalk cliffs of the Downs to disappear into the haze. The Norman coast, when it eventually appears is less dramatic, just a hazy blueish line gradually coming into closer focus as we neared Dieppe. I felt a sense of liberation riding out into the old town carefully remembering to ride on the right side of the road and finding my way onto the Avenue Verte.

It is formed from an old railway track that cuts through the deep green countryside. The surface is smooth and the distances are all helpfully indicated. The gradients are gentle and the landscape is fresh and serene in the evening light. As soon as you get out of the orbit of Dieppe the villages are idyllic with massive barnlike churches and ancient farmsteads at irregular intervals. This is a true cyclist’s heaven in these ideal conditions. It did not take long to cover the 35 km to Neufchatel en Bray even at my stately pace and I was delighted to settle into my hotel there.

Neufchatel is a market town known for producing heart shaped soft cheeses. It was said that these were offered by French maidens as a token of their affection for English soldiers back in the time when the Hundred Years War raged across these lands. The traders come in with their goods once a week to set up their stalls but I had hit the right night of the week when the restaurant was in full swing. I was able to indulge myself with a truly fabulous French meal consisting of sweetbreads with chanterelles and then magret de canard with a millefeuille de celeri.

The next day dawned with brilliant deep blue skies and well rested I set off further down the long Avenue Verte towards my next destination. It was a hallucinatorily lovely morning and I felt completely joyful cycling through the gentle green pastures and grassy fields of the Bray countryside.

I had a brief pitstop for further patisserie in the spa town of Forges les Eaux. The main bar/tabac in town was full of seniors having their morning coffee and reading the sports news. Then I proceeded onwards through a more undulating landscape towards Gournay en Bray stopping off for drinks in the delightful tiny village of Dampierre.

Where I stopped for a drink in a café which turned out to be run by a Glaswegian so we chatted happily. He’s been running the place for a few years and was full of praise for how quickly local government gets things done in the area. The market in Gournay en Bray was just shutting up as I arrive so I take a very acceptable lunch of a sandwich of jambon cru & an eclair in a patisserie.

The countryside for the next 40 km stage towards Beauvais becomes gradually more thickly wooded but the going was still smooth and gentle and the route uncluttered. I continued happily until from about 10 kilometres out I got a glimpse of the vast height of the cathedral at Beauvais towering above the woods. It is an awesome sight.

Beauvais can trace its story back to Gallo-Roman times when it was called Caesaromagus. The core of the city is enclosed by strong Roman walls. The cathedral is breathtaking and I am struck with incomprehension that such an extraordinary structure could have been imagined and then built 800 years ago. One wonders too at how the complex engineering of the massive weight of the masonry was mastered. It is a marvel to think of the wealth that was spent and the labour that was devoted to create this soaring and yet delicate building as a glorification of the god and a marker of the civic pride of this small community. It has the highest nave of any Gothic cathedral in the world and a glorious mass of delicate buttresses holding the lofty structure together. How the people must have wondered at the soaring columns and the golden light coming through the stained glass.

And then this is just one of several other glorious Gothic cathedrals across Picardy which all date from the same century and are all within about 50 miles of each other in Amiens, Laon, St Quentin, Senlis and Soissons.

The Hotel de Ville is a severely classical Republican structure in stark contrast to the Gothic fantasia of the cathedral. Beauvais is a really pleasant town to explore with many surviving ancient medieval timber framed town houses and an elegant grande place for coffee.

The next day I took a morning train in to Paris. At first the train stopped at tiny country halts but soon the pull of the metropolis could be felt as more and more commuters piled in as we passed the banlieues. Before long I was glimpsing the ivory dome of Sacre Coeur on top of Montmartre as we approached the Gare du Nord.

It didn’t take long to navigate down the Boulevard de Magenta and across the great expanse of Place de la Republique, the great rallying point of French protest. Evading the skateboarders I found my little hotel off Boulevard Voltaire.

I spent the afternoon wandering the streets, first along the great Baron Haussmann boulevards and past the enormous grands magasins to the vast halls of Gare St Lazare to procure my ticket back to Dieppe and then later down past Bastille and across the Ile St Louis to look at the work being carried out at Notre Dame. Finally that evening I passed several hours standing outside the very busy Bear Den in Rue des Lombards with Simon who has chosen Paris for his self-imposed exile. This was a party night at this flourishing bear bar seething with mostly larger, hirsute men of a certain age and a certain girth. He introduced me to some of his friends but barely registered my presence and hardly even asked me how I was. I was greeted with true insouciance by him but managed to talk to some of his friends. This is his world now and he is certainly caught up in it proclaiming his love of France and all things French and yet apparently indifferent to its history, culture and language.

I wandered back stopping off to eat in an Auvergnat restaurant where I had an enormous sausage with a good mustard sauce which was accompanied by a mixture of mashed potato, cheese and garlic called aligot which tasted and felt like wallpaper paste. In spite of this poor culinary choice I was happy as I wandered back through the dark streets of the Marais looking at old hotels particuliers and the harmonious Place des Vosges.

The next morning was glorious, fresh and cool. I took the metro to the west of Paris and walked through the Bois de Boulogne. It is vast and, once you have crossed over the Peripherique channeling multiple streams of traffic hurtling around the perimeter of the city, the bois is quite wild and desert. I managed to find the serene Chateau de Bagatelle, built for Marie Antoinette and once occupied by the Marquesses of Hertford who gathered together the treasures that are now on display at the Wallace Collection in London. It is surrounded by gorgeous gardens including an exquisite rose garden. Peacocks promiscuously display their brilliant plumage and erotic sphinxes guard the gleaming front. The Latin inscription above the main doorway reads “Parva sed Apta”.

Back in town later I had lunch with Simon in the Rue des Petits Champs and then we embark to wander slowly around the gardens of the Palais Royale and the Jardins des Tuileries. By mid-afternoon I definitely needed a siesta to recover my strength for another evening at the Bear Den which was less manically packed this time enabling conversation to flow.

I had a glimpse of the delightful Cirque d’Hiver on my return to the hotel after dark.

The next day was for visiting St Denis to see the basilica and the necropolis of the French monarchy. I love the hagiography of St Denis an early bishop of Paris who, we are told, preached a sermon on repentance whilst he walked several miles after his decapitation holding his head in his hands. The place was ransacked during the iconoclastic years of the Revolution and it was really Louis XVIII’s grand projet to restore the monuments so many date from the brief era of the Bourbon Restoration when a vain effort was made to turn the clock back to the Ancien Regime.

The area surrounding the ancient basilica is now a bled full of the sights, sounds and people of the Maghreb. I took some distant shots of the Stade de France which is to be the centrepiece of the Olympic events next year and the tourist office gave me sheathes of leaflets about the great plans to use the Olympics to regenerate this part of greater Paris – the Stratford effect if you like.

The French Republic’s fine riposte to St Denis was to convert the severely classical Pantheon, originally built in Louis XV’s time and intended as a shrine to St Genevieve, into a secular monument to the great figures of French history. Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo and Zola and countless others are all honoured there. I was unable to enter later that afternoon as it was under siege from a vast crowd of visitors from all over the world.

At least my venture onto the Left Bank was not frustrational as I was able to relax in the shade of the most wonderful Jardins de Luxembourg.

However later my plan to climb the Tour St Jacques near Chatelet to take pictures of the roofscape of Paris was frustrated as tickets to climb the ancient church tower are only available online. This was once one of the departure points for pilgrims on their long walk to Compostella.

The next morning before setting off to catch my train at Gare St Lazare I wandered further down Boulevard Voltaire thinking I might venture into Pere Lachaise to pay my respects to the monument to Oscar Wilde but there wasn’t time. However I was rewarded with a brass concert of playing mariachi music outside the Mairie de XI arrondissement.

I also looked at the moving memorial to the 89 people killed in the brutal and cold-blooded massacre at the Bataclan in 2015.

It was sad to leave this resplendent city after 12 years absence but wonderful to find it as glorious as ever.