I haven’t ridden since the Gargrave ride over two weeks ago, because I inadvertently went on what turned out to be the Worst Holiday Ever, and then I caught a stinking cold. Even my feeble attempts to tame the hideous bike-strewn bomb-site that is my garage (see above) have been cut short by painful bouts of coughing and feeling a bit wobbly. There will not be much cycling going on around here until my immune system has got its act together and I have regained full control of my upper respiratory tract.

Still, it could be worse: two of my friends and fellow holidaymakers are still stuck in France, one of them quite seriously ill in hospital – but that’s another story entirely, and not one that I can tell yet, as it isn’t over. I can say that the holiday wasn’t entirely bad from the start, it was more that things kept going wrong and kept getting worse until the situation got very bad indeed for one of us. But there were some silver linings in amongst all the clouds.