For the next two summers, doors opened for me and access-all-areas passes were mine on the Tour de France itself. In fact, I set up quite a lucrative barter, trading cameo appearances in my novel for rides in team cars, being able to sit in on physio and massage, chats on team buses and a boogie at the end of Tour parties. Cat was the first of my novels which warranted an acknowledgments section at the back. Rereading it sparks vivid memories for me.

It was a very peculiar instance of life imitating art. I felt as if I was following in Cat’s footsteps rather than paving the way for her. I managed to secure commissions and felt just like Cat, sending copy back to the Sunday Times, the Guardian, Woman’s Hour and a couple of cycling mags too. I’ll never forget interviewing Magnus Backstedt for BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour – he generously sat with me in the village départ before the day’s stage began and we chatted for 15 minutes. Cheers, I said. You’d better get on your bike, I said. Have a good ride, I said. I didn’t, however, tell him I’d forgotten to switch on my Dictaphone.

Back then, prior to the Lance Armstrong years, the Salle de Presse was 1000 journalists, with very few English speakers and only 8 women. I was travelling with British journalist and writer Jeremy Whittle. We shared the driving and saved each other places in the press tent, we replenished coffees, grabbed the best on offer at the press buffets and gatecrashed Mario Cipollini’s toga party. I’m vegetarian – a concept the French resolutely refuse to embrace – so I ate a lot of baguette and a lot of omelette and a lot of Coeur de Lion cheese (one of the Tour sponsors). We stayed in some pretty grim motels – including one on the Belgian border where the rooms hadn’t been changed since the last guests checked out (some weeks previously, apparently). Planet Tour can be claustrophobic and surreal so I kept sane by running (many of the press take bikes with them and ride in the early mornings and evenings). I have an appalling sense of direction so I’d simply run in one direction for half an hour, stop, turn and run back.

It was boiling in Bordeaux and freezing in the Alps, it was raining in Pau and sun-drenched in Paris. Marco Pantani won that notorious 1998 Tour when the sport was blown apart by drugs scandals. Although he never tested positive, he was expelled from the Giro in 1999 because of irregular blood values. He became depressed and died from drug abuse in 2004.

Did I fall out of love with my sport while the doping scandals raged? Yes, I did a little. But I also know of the silent sighs of relief from other professional sportspeople that cycling had become the scapegoat. Cycling has the toughest doping controls of all sports – even an extra cup of coffee or spoonful of cough mixture can have a rider disqualified. But the more sophisticated the doping, the more frightening and depressing the consequences – not just for fair sport but for the health and lives of the riders too. I still watch the Tour avidly every year. I keep in touch with many of the people I met over a decade ago. But alongside marvelling at the peleton as it hoovers up the miles, scales extraordinary mountains and hurtles along trailing a blaze of colour and energy through France and school kids’ dreams, I do worry about those boys on bikes too. Vive le Tour.