Will He read it, I wonder?

He? Taverner? He has already – he liked it.

No – Him.

Why are you thinking about him, Cat? Aren’t your three weeks in France meant to be putting that all-important distance, in time and space, between you and all that?

I’m just wondering. I still miss Him, all right?

Who, Cat, or what? Do you miss the status of what he was – a long-term boyfriend – or do you miss the person he is? If it’s the former, that’s understandable; if it’s the latter, it’s unacceptable.

I know. It’s just the world seems a very spacious place without Him.

And your world was an unhappy one with him. Let him go. Let go. Here you are – just look where you are. You’re going to be fine.

Am I?

See her sitting up in bed. She is wearing a Tour de France T-shirt and a Team Saeco-Cannondale baseball cap. All the journalists are bribed with branded clothing and yet none are wearing them in public. Cat is disappointed. How can so many seem blasé when she herself is brimming with excitement? Cat has noted how it appears to be cool to wear branded items from previous Tours, but no one wears the current gifts as if somehow that would be too obsequious. Next year, though, no doubt they’ll be an enviable commodity and worn with pride and panache.

Cat, anyway, is wearing hers in bed, scanning L’Equipe and pleased that she can understand most of what she reads. She hauls her laptop from chair to bed and reads through her article. She pulls the neck of the T-shirt up and over her nose, inhaling deeply and knowing that, whenever she smells this T-shirt again, it will say to her ‘Tour de France, eve of the Prologue, Hôtel Splendide, Delaunay Le Beau. Room 50. Jimenez above, Lipari below. Alex Fletcher and Josh Piper in the bar. I was there.’ Cat pulls her cap down over her brow and reads.

COPY FOR P. TAVERNER @ GUARDIAN SPORTS DESK FROM CA TRIONA McCABE IN DELA UNA Y LE BEAU

The Tour de France is the most prestigious bike race in the world. It is also the most extravagantly staged event, not just in cycling but in sport in general.

La Grande Boucle does indeed trace a vast if misshapen 3,800 km loop across France. An entourage of 3,500 people, the Garde Républicaine motorcycle squad, 13,000 gendarmes, 1,500 vehicles and a fleet of helicopters escort the peloton whilst 15 million roadside spectators salute its progress as it snakes its way through France with speed, skill and tenacity in a gloriously garish rainbow splash of lycra.

The Tour de France is the race that every young European boy fantasizes about riding just as soon as the stabilizers are removed from his first bicycle. It is the race that is the inspiration for an amateur to turn professional, that every professional road-race cyclist desires to ride. It is the pursuit of a holy grail: to wear the yellow jersey, to win a Stage, to ride in a breakaway, or just to finish last in Paris albeit having lost three and a half hours to the yellow jersey over the three weeks.