Claire Davies
The Mid•Point with Gabby Logan
The Midpoint
4.3 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 29 October 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
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Summary
For this episode of The Midpoint, Gabby is joined by Claire Davies — a former speechwriter and British diplomat whose career has taken her from East Anglia to London, Singapore, Madrid and Cairo. These days, Claire has swapped diplomatic briefings for bike routes, and now calls Hampshire home.
Since leaving the Foreign Office in 2022, she’s been dividing her time between writing and cycling — and often combining the two by blogging about her incredible solo cycle tours. Claire is currently on a mission to ride across everyEuropean country from end to end. Since 2023, she’s already pedalled the length of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, Ireland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland — mostly on her own!
Her book, Braver Than You Think: Cycling to Self-Discovery, from Land’s End to John O’Groats, tells the story of the ride that started it all — a journey she began with little preparation, no support crew, and one big question: Are you braver than you think?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the midpoint. My guest today is a remarkable woman. You might never have heard of her, but when I learned what she's done and intends to do over the next few years, I felt her story might resonate with a few of you who might have itchy feet, those needing some inspiration or just a sign it's time to do something a bit |
| 0:22.1 | different. Clay Davis' adventure has been documented in her book called Braver than you think, |
| 0:27.6 | cycling from Lansend to John O'Groth's. But she hasn't just done that as you'll learn. |
| 0:32.5 | So how did a former speech writer and diplomat end up jacking it all in to cycle the length of the country |
| 0:38.6 | and then hopefully the length of every country in Europe. And what has she learnt that might |
| 0:43.6 | help all of us? Let's find out. |
| 0:52.9 | Claire Davis, welcome to the midpoint. |
| 0:55.1 | Thank you so much for having me. |
| 0:56.3 | So my interest in you was peaked when I realised the scale of the kind of swing, if you like, |
| 1:04.4 | from a life in the diplomatic core and being around that world and speech writing |
| 1:10.4 | to just drop it and then |
| 1:12.0 | decide to pretty much cycle the world, started off cycling Great Britain. I thought, well, |
| 1:15.7 | there's got to be some kind of story here, what happened there. But obviously, the period of life |
| 1:20.6 | that you're in is very much the midpoint and the changes that were going on in your life that |
| 1:26.0 | led to that. For for other people it might not |
| 1:28.0 | be such a dramatic move they might be interested to know you know how you get the bravery I suppose |
| 1:33.7 | to make that change but take us back to to the kind of moment when you saw enough yeah I mean it was |
| 1:40.6 | a midlife moment I think um I'd I really loved my job and I had, as you say, I've been in the foreign office for a long time, although I'd had a period of unpaid leave in the middle. So it wasn't a sort of uninterrupted 30 year career. But I'd really enjoyed it, but it just suddenly something changed in my early 50s. |
| 2:01.3 | And I think, you know, looking back, it was clearly the menopause, |
| 2:06.8 | but I didn't realize at the time that anxiety was a symptom of the menopause. |
| 2:11.6 | So how many years ago were we talking here? |
| 2:14.1 | This is four years ago. |
... |
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