Bumps in the Road

20 Apr 2026

I have a new little thingie that makes the holiday horn blow for me, to add to the frisson I get when I see a good pharmacy sign. Driving on a French motorway last weekend, Finn and I noticed and celebrated the little buzzy “schwhverb” noise that the white lines make when your tyres go over them. Like a little alarm when you change lanes or if you were to drift to the edge of the carriageway.

I haven’t got out and looked at them but they seem to be made of little pimples. I suspect one reason I’ve never noticed them in the UK is that we don’t bother: the sound of driving on a UK motorway is somewhere in between a building site and a heavy metal gig what with the potholes, the pebbledash and the half-bodged repairs. The A16, direction Dunkerque is like a freshly-ironed sheet in comparison. It seems that France has extra-smooth roads, in general, because when we went to Ypres we noticed the road surface got worse right after the otherwise-invisible border.

I say “in general” because the funny thing is, we’d gone to this part of France specifically because of some bumpy roads. There are even keyrings, trophies and chocolates celebrating these particular cobbled lanes. We were joining thousands of fans to watch The Hell of The North, The Queen of the Classics. It turned out to be a very dusty triumph for Wout van Aert on the day. The spectator experience at this event can best be described as manic, boring, convivial and outright madness. To avoid riding on this…

…riders race along the edge of the road instead. Even if it means practically going over the corner of the picnic blankets or the toes of the fans.

The end of the race was another thought-provoking and crazy fun experience. Obviously with spread-out events like races, the people who turn up to watch from the roadside have to rely on broadcast information to obtain the final result, because it happens miles away. This necessarily introduces delays. Some fans had radios, presumably some digital and some analogue, and other fans' news was being delivered by the internet. And so the phenomenon of pseudo-live sport came into play, with patches of fans in different places learning the result at quite different times. Here the solution to “deliberate ignorance” was seemingly just to ignore the problem.

Absolute scenes.

…and a little aside on pharmacy signs. It’s not just me.

Tags: sport, cycling, france