75% of the carbon a surfer creates is through travel. We aim to reduce that to a bare minimum: a few ferries, electricity to charge the bikes and getting home, so it really won’t be a carbon belching strike mission. It’s about slow, thoughtful travel for its own sake. It isn’t about breaking records or even getting it done.

In a week’s time it will be one calendar month until we set off on our epic cycle to Sagres from Bude. Our plan is in place and there’s nothing left to do but train, fret over packing, sort out our trailers and go for bike rides. Oh yes, and get married. That’s on the 5th May.

Our plan is to leave Plymouth for Roscoff on the 23rd May. We arrive in the morning of the 24th, which is when the clock starts ticking. From then on we have 90 days to get to Sagres and then back to Santander.

I was hooked by skateboarding videos in the 1980s because they, more often than not, contained sections on surfing, which had gone underground. It was still the original, golden sport I had seen in Bantham ten years earlier, but now I could also see it had a difficult streak and had spawned its bastard offspring, skateboarding. Together they kicked and screamed. I loved that. Surfing, I saw, could give me a niche that was beyond reproach or criticism. Bollocks to you and your middle class values. Surfing would give me a smokescreen to obfuscate those who didn’t or couldn’t get me.

The painful, unforgiving reality of chugging up mountains is a price that’s too high to pay for the whizzing downhill afterwards. I am not afraid to say that I lack the moral fortitude to push one pedal after another, for hours on end, up epic passes. I know this because I have done it.

We decided to stage an intervention. We couldn’t have left Paul at the bar, where he was living a miserable existence as if doing time. His uncle was an alcoholic and the bar was, at best, rustic. It had an earth floor, inches of dust on the bar top, ancient horsehair mattresses in the rooms above and a horrifying, traditional squat toilet. The patrons arrived in tiny unlicenced French cars, bumping into the wall when they arrived and almost crashing into traffic as they left.

In the summer of 1985, straight after the last of my A level exams, a group of us rented a house in the South Hams. It was a short drive from Bantham. Still convinced that surfing would save me from mediocrity and cement my status as a maverick and glorious dreamer, I phoned all the surf shops in Devon to find a board I could learn on (and afford). One of them, Windjammer in Braunton, had a six foot single fin popout with a pink spray job for £150. I drove to Braunton to buy it and stuck it on my credit card (and then spent the next 5 years paying it off).

Despite growing up landlocked, surfing hit me like a board in the face when I first saw it in real life. Simply watching someone wobble along a wave and then fall off moved me in such a way that I gave up my holiday money in one go – therefore forsaking a week’s worth of Smashers, Fabs, Zooms and Hawaiian Delights – to join the divine order of golden dreamers, watermen and outcasts. At that moment, like most moments while surfing, nothing else held any importance for me. No amount of 99s could give me the same buzz that riding my cheap polystyrene surfboard could, despite the cold water, the cut feet, the wrinkled fingers and the sunburned shoulders.

I was a surfer now. Everything else in my life – sensible shoes, uniforms, Zooms - could fuck off.