Philip Nolan

Simultaneously a good thing and not a good thing to be reading when planning a programme of fundamental research.

Leigh Bowery! at the Tate Modern. Artist, fashion designer, performer, provocateur. The full retrospective really makes you stop, think, reflect. Triptych of Bowery in “looks”; portrait by Lucien Freud; still from Charles Atlas’s “Hail the New Puritan” featuring Bowery, with music by The Fall.

Two-bar electric heater…the grille on the front gives it away. Short seminar to follow on these twentieth-century icons, the horrific accidents they caused, and the fact that our electrical outlets are rated at 13 amps because of them!

Bucket list (and proud to be Irish) day at the start of Stage 14 in Pau. @cyclingireland.bsky.social @efprocycling.com

Absolutely buzzing seeing Ben Healy in yellow, and enjoying it so much. @cyclingireland.bsky.social @ciarancannon.bsky.social @efprocycling.com

And I’m finished. It’s time to let Daniel out of the lions’ den.

Only 20km to go now, and the Pyrenees grow more vivid, until, through a break in the trees, I see Oloron-Sainte-Marie.

And moments later, the walls of Navarrenx

The ancient road from Orthez to Navarrenx, trees planted generations ago to give shade to the traveller.

This is the land of the Wars of Religion, and of Montaigne and Montesquieu. The placenames are a reminder of those wars: I pass through Labastide-Villefranche to Sauveterre-de-Bearn. Bastide: small fortified town. Sauveterre: safe ground. The view from Sauveterre-de-Bearn toward my destination.

Backtracked along the south bank of the Adour to the confluence with the Bidouze, and followed the latter through Bidache, where the Chateau de Gramont commands a turn in the river, to Came, where I left the riverbank.

Given that his writing had kept me company all the way, and on other journeys, it would have been rude not to climb the hill to the cemetery at Urt and pay tribute.

France 2025 Day 10 last day: 140km from Dax to Oloron-Sainte-Maire. A day of riverside riding, from Dax along the north bank of the Adour to the bridge at Urt, the Pyrenees coming into view.

…rolling towards Dax in the early evening.

…followed by many hot hours through Les Landes…

…on past Les Grands Lacs…

…with views over the ocean, and inland over a stark sandy landscape to La Forêt de Gascogne…

France 2025 Day 9: 148km from Arcachon to Dax. Out, along the southern shore of Le Bassin d’Arcachon, and a short climb past the Dune du Pilat, the highest sand dune in Europe…

It resonates in particular with the current pervasiveness of generative AI, large language models feeding us the weighted average of what we have already written or mechanically reproduced, slowly driving giant graphite rods into the fissile energy of our creative core.

“faced with this world of faithful and complicated objects, the child can only identify himself as owner, as user, never as creator; he does not invent the world, he uses it; there are, prepared for him, actions without adventure, without wonder, without joy”

He sees the modern plastic toy as merely “reduced copies of human objects” not designed to stimulate invention or creativity, but to mean and model the norms of the adult world, and so..

When cycling through France, I always bring one book to be with in the evening; this year it’s Roland Barthes’ “Mythologies”. The essay “Toys” is so resonant; though published almost 70 years ago, it is disturbingly timely.

The renowned Dublin physician Dominic Corrigan (1802-1880) - every medical student learns of ‘Corrigan’s pulse’ in aortic regurgitation - so espoused the beauty of Archachon and rhe health benefits of its climate that it stimulated tourism, and there remains here an Allée Dominic Corrigan

After that, I just turned the cranks to Arcachon

There’s always something unexpected on a long trip. Just after Lacanau the greenway was blocked by trees that had fallen in the violent thunderstorms of 25 June. The middle of nowhere with no escape route, so I had to get the bike around, over or under each fallen tree, about 30 in total over 4km.

A fork in the greenway just after Lacanau. The left takes you to the very centre of Bordeaux, right onto Les Quais; it it’s the right for me, to Lège, and on to Arcachon

The Medoc greenways are fabulous, but they are unrelenting straight runs through the sandy pine forest, and when it’s hot, it’s hot like a desert.

Soulac-sur-Mer. The isolated tip of the Medoc was the last part of France to be liberated at the end of WW2.

France 2025 Day 8: 158km from Royan to Arcachon. The e day began with a ferry crossing from Royan to Le Verdon-sur-Mer, and down the western side of the Medoc on greenways, from the old rail lines that crossed the region.

I left the greenway at Dompierre-sur-Mer and cut across Aunis and the Saintoigne, on quiet roads, crossing the Charente on the EV1 near Tonnay-Charente, and then on the back roads to Royan