Maybe it would just be better if I had no interest in cycling at all.

Cat experiences lurches of homesickness when the white cliffs start to shrink. Wafts of the panicky emotion gust through her more strongly than the buffets of sea air which, she kids herself, are the sole cause for her smarting eyes. Having enjoyed umpteen imaginary conversations with real or fictitious characters in the months leading up to this day of departure, Cat suddenly realizes she has no idea where she’ll find the confidence to approach such people in the flesh.

I haven’t the balls. Quite literally. They’ll take the piss, surely. Me – British and female – amongst all of them.

Furthermore, she’s had her hair cut yesterday and, though merely a variation on her common theme of shoulder length plus fringe, she doesn’t like it and feels self-conscious. The blasts from the sea breeze seem alternately to blow and suck her hair into configurations she cannot see but is convinced are queer and most certainly unattractive. She gazes at the white cliffs for as long as she knows she can really see them, trying very hard to ignore the fact that she now feels seasick as well as homesick, attempting to focus instead on France France Tour de Bloody France and all it is going to do for her sanity, her career and her future.

When does the English Channel become La Manche? Soon? Already?

Only a good few moments after Dover has unarguably disappeared can Cat finally turn her attention from inward and England, forward to France and, for the time being, her immediate surroundings. She turns her back on all she is leaving and faces the direction of travel, France, forwards, ever onwards. She glances around the deck, simultaneously keen for someone to recognize her yet desperate that no one will.

It’s strange. I suppose I presumed the entire ferry would be peopled by those going to the Tour – that we’d all be recognizable as a club of sorts and, of course, that there would be this wonderful familial feeling amongst everyone. And yet now I’m here, I have no idea who is who. Most of the passengers look like standard holidaymakers. But what specifically distinguishes cycling followers? I don’t even see any of the stalwart, anoraked, club cycling crowd that spend their Sundays traipsing the Trough of Bowland or struggling in Snowdonia. I mean, there’s a small group over there in tracksuit bottoms who look young and sporty – but they’re just as likely to have hired a villa in Brittany.

Though Cat half wants to be recognized – as a cycling aficionado of the non-anorak genus if not as the sports journalist she is hoping to become – the other half of her is quite content to be invisible. She ventures inside the ferry and queues for rubber sandwiches and plastic coffee, trying not to scan the tables too obviously for that elusive quiet spot, a hiding place. She spies one that might suffice and heads for it, looking at no one and trying to look nonchalant herself despite her bulky rucksack and wobbling tray.