Update: Wed 10:20

Just a note to say that I've booked myself on the 12:35 P&O ferry from Calais to Dover on Thursday (tomorrow - GBP18) which brings a certain finality to proceedings.

I'm telling you this partly as it is relevant to the trip (closure? -- a rather overloaded word these days, I don't think I need any emotional certitude at the end of my trip) but mostly because it is still heavy drizzle outside and I really can't face going outside to pack the bike let alone have it blasted in my face at 90kph for the five or six hours it'll take to get within an hour or so's ride of Calais -- assuming I don't get lost. I can't help but feel I've been witlessly racing a cold front all the way across Europe managing to get just ahead of it most days only to let it catch up again overnight.

Not much to do after that. I think I need to pop into Banbury to retrieve a front tyre -- and give Dr Hopkins' Bespoke Tyre Bearing Apparatus a final hurrah! Looking at it, after its 90,000km of travel I'm not convinced it will manage a hurrah, indeed I'd be surprised to get a death rattle but that's not to complain, it's done me and the good Dr proud.

Getting the tyre from the storage place won't be so easy. They're cunningly packed right at the back of a full lock up. 120-odd square feet packed to the rafters. Not in a ho ho ho, packed to the rafters sort of sense but actually touching the roof for all but a tiny proportion of the area. I don't know where I've managed to pick up so much stuff although it is fair to point out that large parts of it aren't technically mine, I'm acting as a caretaker. It could be a multi-hour job to extract enough stuff to be able to climb up and over the rest to reach the tyres.

Of course travelling in the UK is totally illegal. I have no MOT for the bike (since September) and so no insurance. The paperwork refers to an address I no longer live at. I don't have an MOT booked so can't possibly be travelling directly to it. And the tax disc fell off the bike last year sometime. But these are the sorts of trivial matters that excite policemen who haven't caught enough crims too make up their quotas. Moral: try not to hit or be hit by anything.