No race now, just a pavement. A loose selection of shops and scrubby spots for dogs to find their mark and shit.

People drift dispassionately along the lines that define the bunch that held the hunched up drama of a day long since settled over by time.

Even the sky is blank.

It's clouds. Just clouds.

Not chopped with rotor blades and crackling bright static roar the rising racket of choreograph chaos beneath, which was the race.

After the passage, the silent parade of the unexceptional resumes its place in the slow-beating breast of the world. No race now, just a pavement.

Right, you last saw me when.

I saw you leaving the mate's own studios and with Pete and I were there, Pete was a little bit melancholic because he wanted to hang with you and go and have a beer and sign it all off.

But you just packed some of this in your bag and rode off into the night.

And that was how it ended.

It was just about night, wasn't it, because it was obviously an evening finish in Paris.

We'd done our commentary, we'd done the commentation over the podiums live.

And then Pete and Chris and Gary had worked on the highlights show and only then had we recorded our last ITV podcast.

So by that time, I reckon it must have been dawn eight o'clock and it was certainly dark.

It was exactly eight o'clock actually about because I remember we called a pizza place, Pete and I.

Yeah, well, I'm going to come onto the whole, I'm going to come onto the whole CSI aspect of this because there was some interesting interpretive videos posted on our WhatsApp group that we'll hear, that we'll hear shortly.

Which were uncannily accurate, actually, I have to say.

So I rode off, David, and I, we kind of forgot, I think all of us collectively having commuted to turn from the studios.

We forgot that it was September and not July and we forgot that over the course of three weeks because of the way that the earth is tilted on its XY axis and the way it rotates around the sun and the seasonality of the world.

We forgot that ultimately dusk would come forward and eventually there was a possibility that we would be riding back in the dark.

I wasn't entirely unprepared for this, so I'd taken from my family member, I'd given my best bike lights away to other family members who very often university and bits and pieces like that.

But I had rummaged around and found the most feeble bike lights of all, which is one of those ones that doesn't have...

...