Convoy! Revisited

It had the unreal quality of a dream. That strange hyper-cleanliness, the intensity of colour, the haunting feeling of being suspended in time and motion: sitting there with the speedo reading beyond 160mph and two more gold Lamborghinis drifting along ahead.

Not even those surreal driving scenes from Claude Lelouch’s film A Man and a Woman were like this: the pale ribbon of motorway stretching on until it disappeared into the sharp, clear blue of an early Sunday morning in France, mid-autumn, and those strange, dramatic shapes eating it up.

What a sight from the slower cars as that trio whizzed by. What a sight from the overpasses; watchers there would have seen the speed. So too would the police, those same gendarmes who parked their Renaults and motorbikes and stood there and at the roadside to drink it in, seeming to savour it as an occasion rather than intercepting us.