July 14th – 575,891.

This morning started off grey and even a little misty, so we thought we were in for a cooler day. Unfortunately, that has proven not to be the case and we’ve had bright sunshine since mid-morning. Admittedly the heat hasn’t been quite as overpowering as yesterday but it’s still been hot with not a breath of breeze to allow you to cool down.

Still, I did manage to get 3,385 words written before heat exhaustion stepped in and I just spent a couple of hours watching real dedication to sport – a group of very fit men riding their bikes up the side of a very tall mountain in the Tour de France. When I was approaching my teens I wanted to be a road race cyclist and I spent the next five summers living on my bike, but I had a big problem – these guys ride up huge inclines at a speed ordinary mortals can’t match – and I’m talking about the also-rans, not the winners who are even faster. I, however, was brought up in the Fens of Cambridgeshire – and there the land is perfectly flat. If you’re going to ride up a mountain on a bike, you need to learn how to do that at a very young age, and I clearly had no chance of doing that. Apart from that, the mountains these guys climb are 3 times higher than any mountain in Britain, so no chance. Guess I’ll stick to writing then.