There are few better ways to clear your head than to drive the route Napoléon.  This was my second time.  It demands a lot of focus and concentration on the present.  Hairpin bends with sheer drops down the side of a mountain demand all your attention.  On a July morning as the sun moves from horizon to apex, the sights, sounds and smells of this provincial French road unfurl like a multi-sensational scratch-and-sniff tapestry.

Having taken the beautifully efficient but utterly boring autoroutes from Calais to Lyon (where a thousand bugs Jackson Pollock splattered on my bonnet and windscreen), I spent the night in the Domaine Lyon Saint Joseph, built in the 1920’s in a grand park by the archdiocese of Lyon for students of philosophy seeking a tranquil environment.

Starting early the next day, I retraced Napoléon’s 1815 journey from Cannes to Grenoble, only in reverse and in a Porsche 964 rather than on a horse.  The road is in better condition than the one he would have taken, but his impedimenta would not have included caravans, road humps in villages, cyclists, speed cameras and any meaningful oncoming traffic.

On the way to Gap, the roads hedged with plane trees, their bark peeling to reveal the lighter wood beneath.  Straight, straight roads that stretch out for kilometres, their edges and hedges unencumbered by the consumer society detritus of the Anglo-Saxon motorway.

The fields on either side of the road were freshly harvested and round bales of hay dotted shallow slopes up to forested hills.  Some fields were mid-harvest and tractors billowed vast clouds of dust across the road.  Hold your breath, accelerate and you are through it.  Hectares of sunflowers, some with heads drooped as the sun began to describe its daily arc, others with their Van Gogh faces defiantly skyward.

Combine harvesters and tractors around corners, most dangerous when they were heading in the same direction, insouciantly trailing frustration in their wake as they shuffled from one field to the next. Villages where side-walls of houses bear fading paint advertising for brands from before the second world war.  Jambon Olida; liqueurs Chartreuse, grand vin brut.  Villages where you do not see a soul, windows all boarded up.  Roofs slipping down to the ground.  Dried, splintering timbers.  Desertification. 

The increasingly loud noise of cicadas as the road wound further south, noticed only when stopping at a village traffic light.

Mountain tunnels where I childishly dropped a gear and roof down, revelled in the roar.

Prepaying for petrol at the pump (no cheating drive aways here) and heading straight off, functional-petrol-station-thank-you.  No impulse purchases here.

The relief of the occasional dual carriage way in the mountains, 6000 rpm and the Dutch mobile home shrinking in the rear-view mirror.  Motorbike fellow travellers just – and only just – behind or just ahead, going through the gears and after the gap of free road of a couple of kilometres created by the first Dutchman, bearing down on his ineluctable countryman. 

Reading the edge of the road to perfection with the steering wheel on the wrong side. 

Not taking any overtaking chances with the steering wheel on the wrong side.

Taking lunch on a boulangerie terrace in Sisteron with the repellent yet strangely alluring smell of Monte Cristo cigarillo smoke from a neighbouring table wafting across the terrace, evoking old tobacco memories.  Young boys stopping, staring and pointing at the car.

A narrow-gauge railway either side of Chabrières, running for kilometres hard by the road from a quarry to who-knows-where, several level crossings along the way.

The smells and physical sensation of a storm that has broken; damp and fresh, the wet grass air.  Driving further on to the clinging shirt stickiness of the pre-storm, the weather as in reverse as my route.

Nearing the end of the road at Grasse, the down-at-heel perfume town with its gateway a hulking prison, rectilinear walls, barbed wire and anti-drone nets, the end of the open road for me and its inhabitants. The showiness of Cannes, a different world.  Nothing worth describing.  A smile and exhilaration.