The North of France holds a special place for me. There’s a sense of freedom in its rolling expanse, in the hay and barley that dance slowly in the breeze to the steady staccato of crickets. There’s a quietness too, a slow pace to life there that makes you reach for the brakes yourself. Perhaps it’s a sense of nostalgia for we came here, to the vast sandy beaches, postcard friendly villages and provincial campsites for long holidays in our childhood. Given my parents worked with schools, their summer holidays also stretched out for as long as ours. At the end of July for as long as I remember till the age our hormones began to upset the tranquility we would drive south early in the evening, not stopping till the white cliffs were firmly at our backs at some bleary-eyed time the next morning.

They would pack up the boot, roof box, bike rack and every available inch of space around their kids with the necessary and unnecessary paraphernalia needed to keep two young kids active and entertained. Given my brother and I were a fair few rungs into the ADHD spectrum and Peppa Pig was yet to grace thin, portable screens, this meant a rather large amount of toy soldiers, sticker books and bucket loads of parental patience.

This rose-tinted lens of nostalgia makes those summers now feel like the whimsical filler paragraphs in an Enid Blyton narrative; full of well stocked wicker baskets and picnic blankets, adventures fuelled by the innocence of uninhibited imagination, scraped knees and muddy faces. In essence, freedom.

Working in London years later before Brexit and Covid tarnished ideals of spontaneous border crossings I was always amazed how quick and easy it was to get across the channel on a cheap red-eye ferry. Again, these weekends spent following a route I’d plotted and day dreamed of as escapism from the adult task I should have been doing, brought back those true and unrivalled feelings of freedom I craved. Even as the wind whipped at my morale and my legs screamed on the last push to the Transcontinental finish I still couldn’t keep the impish, childlike grin off my face as I battled through northern France. For me, it’s always been my chosen place for soothing the soul. Easy enough to get to whilst different enough to spark the kindling of adventure and curiosity that settles an overactive mind. 

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When my mother in-law sadly passed away in the summer of 2020 I knew it was the place to take her daughter for some much needed and well overdue R+R, to give her the space to grieve away from the hectic and modern world we’d made for ourselves in the ‘Big Smoke’. Shortly after the funeral I did, as my parents had done years before and filled a rental car to the brim with an excessive decathlon shopping spree. Tents, tables, folding chairs, cooler boxes and wind breakers were packed around our bikes and we set out on the North Circular towards the south coast. There were no plans for the holiday apart from a vague list of town names, places and camping sites that I’d patched together in a Michelin road guide from the jumbled and faded childhood memories of those early summers.

I knew after the first few days of cycling for croissants through golden fields to the red brick and flint boulangerie’s of sleepy rural villages that we had made a good decision.

The peaceful soft embrace of Normandy and Picardy has, at times, a mournful tone. There’s an eeriness in its low lying morning mist that gently kisses the grass and a sorrowful yawn in the long shadows cast from stone spires late in the day. The poppies that spring from the loose gravel of dusty lay-bys and amongst the shrubbery of agricultural perimeters, a gentle reminder of the battles won and lost and those buried beneath its earth. There’s a haunting silence in the region’s softly rolling terrain, it’s large skies of towering cloud and in the regiments of white, limestone graves that file endlessly on. Agincourt is not far, neither too the tributaries feeding the Somme nor the beaches of Dieppe and Dunkirk. Everywhere we cycled was the architecture of loss and symbolic statues to remembrance. Riding through these fields however, where young men fixed bayonets for king and country and thousands fell for the nations and states of history books, the air was not thick as you’d expect with the morbid atmosphere of grief. Instead, a thoughtful silence – the peaceful rustle of breeze through cypress trees and the warmth of the sun at our backs as we pedaled circles made us think instead on hope and optimism, of love, romance and life’s well lived. We cycled with little exertion or intention to complete any set route and with no goals of distance, destination or saddle time save the next village’s café, our minds were allowed to drift, to reflect and reminisce. Slowly over the course of the week, pedal by pedal, thought by thought, day by day Kelsy’s grief hardened to resolve and the lens through which she mourned slowly turned its gaze towards the future, of new plans, goals, and ambition.

Looking back with fondness that holiday was all I’d hoped for and most of what Kelsy needed; we chatted late into the glowing dusk, there were candles in bottle tops propped in long grass, 3-euro wine and carrefour banquets, baguette vans and early cockerel calls and we got into our sleeping bags each evening, to the restless hooves and breath of cows close by, a little more content. Most of all there was time, quiet and enough cycling to occupy Kelsy’s restless mind. With hindsight we can say that it was these long days in our own little world’s, pedalling through the lanes of Northern France that provided the space to start a process of healing and acceptance that drew a faint pencil line under a long period of sorrow.