French Revolutions Read online

  Lowering my face to the rim of a double espresso for an aromatic facial sauna, I thought how typically ridiculous the organisers were to twin the mountain with Lourdes, which lay 33 kilometres up the valley. It was a geographical pairing to embarrass the most devious estate agent. ‘Lourdes–Hautacam’ – read like that, it now sounded like a choice. Take your pick. And so I did. Was I going to do Hautacam?

  One of the most unfortunate things about being an unfit Englishman cycling long distances in France is the number of signs that yell ‘PAIN’ down every high street, and directing my acid-impaired gaze out of the window I saw a strident red neon example swaying ominously above a distant boulangerie in the cold wind. It wouldn’t have taken much to convince me, and in the geo-spiritual circumstances this counted as divine intervention. No, I was not going to do Hautacam. The way I felt it might take a miracle to get me to Lourdes, but I didn’t have a prayer of making a sermon on the mount.

  Feeling the same sense of sordid elation I felt when getting off to push up the Marie-Blanque, I pedalled up the valley a different man. This was like walking out halfway through an impossible exam; soon, I knew, would come the long, slow mudslide into guilt and failure, but for now I was feeding off an instant rush of ecstasy. I glided serene and alone up the misty road to Lourdes, Christ on a bike.

  The heavens opened as I rolled through Lourdes, but only metaphorically. A thousand neon souvenir shops selling plastic jerry cans of holy water and glow-in-the-dark Last Suppers; a million Pac-a-Mac pilgrims queuing outside McDonald’s or nodding vacantly along to the unholy muzak hissing out of every bizarre bazaar – Lourdes is the Blackpool of Christianity, the world capital of kitsch. It has more hotels than any French city except Paris, and may be the only town on the planet that sees no problem in selling alabaster saints alongside postcards of splayed female hindquarters emblazoned with the slogan ‘Ahh – don’t you love the smell of nature?’ And who could not marvel at the effrontery of calling your nodding-saint naffmart Au Sacré Coeur de Jésus, or your package-holiday outfit St Peter’s Tours? Madonna knew just what she was doing when she named her daughter after this triumph of two-faced tack.

  The 1,000k came up as I was halfway to Bagnères-de-Bigorre, the old spa town 22 kilometres east of Lourdes where stage eleven was to kick off. I developed a detailed hatred for these dead miles, the off-the-route transfer bits the riders would do in buses and team cars, but wincing at my Hautacam surrender I gritted my teeth into the wind-driven rain and ground on in a spirit of self-flagellatory penance. And thinking about it now there was something slightly unreal, slightly apparitional, about the black-jerseyed granddad who slid gently past me in a shotblasting downpour with a beatific ‘Bonjour’. Nose to the handlebars and rain-reddened thighs furiously pushing the pedals, I could never reel him in. The harder I pressed, the further away he seemed, a relaxed, almost jaunty silhouette freewheeling nonchalantly across an iron-skied horizon. I topped 60 k.p.h. downhill, sending impressive curtains of spray up over the hedgerows and aquaplaning terrifyingly up to a rush-hour intersection, but it was hopeless.

  Another ville d’étape, another knackered spa town. Deep in introspective decline, Bagnères-de-Bigorre displayed no discernible character and was clearly hoping the Tour would leave some of its charisma behind when it rushed off. Comprehensively rain marinaded, I wheeled ZR into a hotel and instantly found myself being addressed by a proprietress whose fondness for one-sided discourse far outweighed her dislike for mopping up brown water. For maybe fifteen minutes I stood there, shivering first internally and then with all the convulsive abandon of a cartoon character, trying to smile and nod as the road filth slowly sluiced down my body and puddled muddily around my ankles. The hotel trade, her son in Clapham, Ryanair – all were debated at length, along with an extended lecture on her experiences of the ‘derme’, which I hoped at the time was a skin complaint but have just realised referred to the Dome. In all this time my only contribution was ‘Stansted Airport?’, and when that emerged unsteadily through my vibrating teeth, she looked at me as if I’d just pointed out she was wearing too much make-up and snapped, ‘Non, Luton.’

  A miner’s face greeted me in the mirror above the basin – white helmet-strap lines down otherwise black cheeks, eyes like Polos on a chocolate muffin. This, I noted with tired pride, was the most road-warrior-like I had looked yet, the closest approximation to another iconic picture in my procycling Merckx special, of Eddy during the 1972 Paris–Roubaix. Held on an invariably cold, wet day in April on a route specially selected to include as many cobbled streets as possible, Paris-Roubaix is known as the Hell of the North – the definitive race for super-hard men. And there was Eddy, leaning into an arc of wet cobbles at a speed sufficient to blur the Ford Capri parked in the background, gaze fixed calmly to the road in front, fingertips artistically poised on the bars, and the filth: running from the corners of his eyes and soggy-Allbran sideburns in sweaty black rivulets, goateed around his mouth and chin, caked so completely over both legs that where his shorts have ridden temporarily up his left thigh is a cheeky little band of pink that separates black mud from black cotton like a garter belt (well, you know – after ten days alone on the road I was getting my kicks where I could).

  Why couldn’t I align myself with a plucky but doomed underdog, a Chris Boardman or a Paul Kimmage? Or Raymond Poulidor, perennial Tour runner-up in the Sixties and Seventies, still coming second at the age of 40? (And if that wasn’t dispiriting enough, the French public nicknamed him Poupou.) It has always been my misfortune to lionise winners. When everyone was moaning about the loathsome behaviour of ‘Superbrat’ McEnroe, I was fondly indulgent – here was a man who just really wanted to win. Bernard Hinault might have been barking mad, but having started on his autobiography I was beginning to feel a strange awe for that monstrous ego. ‘It’s said that a great victory doesn’t really sink in until afterwards,’ he writes on winning the world championship in 1980. ‘Not in my case! I knew straight away what I’d done. I had conquered everybody.’

  Today’s Tours are often won by small margins, with the overall winner maybe only taking one stage victory during the race, sometimes none. Not in Eddy’s case! In 1970 he won eight stages, and hogged the King of the Mountains prize for himself. His contemporaries were outraged – the tradition then and now was to share these things out, let others have a slice. The Cannibal’s response was a phrase he learned to say in five languages (I heard the Italian version on my 1973 Tour of Italy video): ‘I am completely indifferent.’ Not a great one as catchphrases go, but imbued with a cold arrogance that I could only admire. And he was Belgian, for heaven’s sake. How could a Belgian be so brutally determined, so merciless, so … successful.

  Velcro had played an important role in my life for the last two months: with those little prickly pads affixing gloves, shoes, rain jacket and any number of baggage items, any careless exuberance while dressing led to the sort of Gordian limb entanglements you might expect during the latter stages of a one-man game of Twister. Undressing wasn’t much better. Pulling off the Velcro strips on my gloves unleashed drying-dog mud sprays all over the scalloped nylon bedspread, and after I discovered that the insect repellent had leaked into my plastic bag of washing powder I decided that the best thing all round was simply to go fully dressed into the shower (a plastic booth in the corner of the room) and soap down my clothes. This worked a treat, at least until I started stripping them off for a kickabout rinse in the shower tray, grape-crusher style.

  The temperature control was one of those safecracker jobs: tiny clockwise adjustment – JesusChrist-ow-bloodybollocks-owowow-I’m-on-fire; minute anticlockwise compensation – Hooooooly-Mother-of-Merckx-who-turned-on-the-hail. I had just pulled off shorts and one sock when some body part made inadvertent but sturdy clockwise contact, and the extravagant flailing that ensued cruelly exposed the cubicle’s inherent design flaw, namely its lack of roof. But we all make mistakes, and another one of mine was not locking the bedroom door
.

  Attracted perhaps by my attempt to encapsulate the works of Hieronymous Bosch in a single sound, and perhaps by her leaking ceiling, the proprietress had seen fit to enter my room at a moment which coincided unhappily with my wild, humid egress from the cubicle. The lesser of the two issues here was that her furnishings had been liberally hosed down; later I had to remake the entire bed with the rank reserve blankets in the wardrobe, and the lampshades were still steaming the next morning. But of greater immediate concern to both of us was my troubling presentation. One bare, sultana-toed foot alongside a wet beige sock, then nothing but flesh and water until the soap-frothed waistband of my jersey. I didn’t know whether to be glad or sad when I looked down while grabbing for a towel and saw that the elemental rigours of the day had apparently inspired my genitals to eat themselves. On the plus side, the appalled mumble that trickled from her lips as she backed out of the room was the last sound she addressed to me.

  The Pyrenees were over and I was aware that I had not acquitted myself very well. Unwilling to tackle at this stage the painful core issues of gumption and vigour, I looked for a less abstract solution. One of my principal encouragements on setting off from England had been that there was no knack to cycling, no skill I would have to master, but waking up in my damp bed with merciful sunlight spearing the perforations in the shutters to polka-dot the room I found myself wishing there was. Thinking about Eddy’s delicate pianist’s touch on the bars had me wondering if the key was relaxing my own brutal, desperate grasp; then again, maybe if I could somehow dump my panniers I’d be able to stand up in the saddle and so fly up the climbs. Another guest had propped his noble, unburdened road bike against mine in the stairwell, and giving it a tentative, light-fingered hoist as I saddled up was a potent reminder of how much extra weight I was carrying. At least I was now remembering to do Chris Boardman’s stretches last thing at night and first in the morning, even if – as that day – doing so strained all my leg muscles to the point where they felt about to snap and whiplash up like roller blinds.

  Bagnères-de-Bigorre looked a lot better in the sun. The tall mahogany doors of the restaurant where I’d eaten snails the night before (what was it with me and arthropods?) gleamed venerably, and the hills beyond – oh dear – looked laundered and crisp. A little group of farmers were protesting benignly in the square: ‘The sheep is the lowest form of farm animal’ read the banner, though I think on balance theirs was probably a pro- rather than an anti-sheep demonstration.

  It never seemed right or fair to be bathed in the sweat of hard manual labour before 9.15 a.m., but from now on this would always be the way. Stage eleven was supposed to be a flat one, a day off for the riders after their Pyrenean rigours, but as the D938 curved up through the fields of hairy-eared barley I was soon in trouble. So much so that I somehow contrived to get lost, blundering straight on when the D938 turned left, then careering down a hill so enormous that by the time I eased up to the unfamiliar town of Tournay at its foot a quick look at map and itinerary confirmed I had just earned myself an 18-kilometre detour. No ordinary kilometres these, though: as with all detours these were special ‘shag-battered bollock sodding’ kilometres, which may only be tackled in a temper so foul that it is common to find oneself insulting adjacent livestock.

  The Tournay Misjudgement sullied an exquisite morning: large birds soaring on thermals; a castle-studded horizon; crops shimmering like fibreglass filaments; cowbells and crickets; everything growing almost audibly. The same sort of hillsides that had been speckled with unidentifiably tiny green shoots only a week before near Limoges were now lushly striped with burgeoning fronds of maize. Soon, I knew, the first hairy sweet-corns would swell and grow in the heart of each shoot, rising up, ripening in the hot French sun, until the day came in late summer when the crop was ripe and ready to be harvested by me and my dad legging it over the fence on the way home from a family motoring holiday. We always arrived in Calais with a plundered bootful. I once had a nightmare that the Jolly Green Giant chased us all the way home.

  And though cycling might be the national sport of France, from what I saw that day strimming runs it a close second. Every garden and field buzzed with Canutean attempts to hold back the green tide, to keep the undergrowth from overgrowing. I even saw a couple of leather-faced fellers with scythes, which was pleasingly traditional. Death must be dreading the day when they upgrade him with a strimmer.

  I finally rejoined the route at Mauvezin, a hilltop town with a huge panorama of wooded hills. Descending the first of these, swishing through troughs of hot air and layers of tree-shaded chilled mist, I hit trouble at 55 k.p.h. – a huge cloud of fat midges. It was like the USS Enterprise going through an asteroid belt. With my face, neck and helmet being painfully paintballed I could only concentrate on keeping my mouth shut, having already discovered to my cost that the hawking expulsion of throat-lodged animal matter is an unwise procedure at speed. The necessary parting of the lips allows further objects a way in, and the ejection process inevitably results in decorating one’s cheeks, chin and clothing with phlegm-embalmed corpses.

  It was interesting how I had learned to assess a settlement’s altitude from its name alone. Somewhere-sur-Something and Blah-du-Blah were always good news for the slothful cyclist, both implying a riverside location and consequently benign gradients; but well before I got to Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges I knew it would consist of a big old monastery surrounded by narrow alleys atop a small, brown mountain.

  A bit of creative orienteering convinced me that the route actually skirted round this picturesque but irksome obstacle, and in bullying sun I dined at its foot. Most establishments were keen to process my dining requests in double-quick time and dispatch me with evident relish; it was my misfortune that day to find myself patronising the exception to this rule. Sitting at the most prominent outside table was normally a winner – the staff would rush towards me with nervous, uncertain expressions that suggested a whispered kitchen debate on whether they should hand over a menu or offer me a small cash sum to leave – but that didn’t work, and nor did thoughtfully peeling off my flash-fried ear-flesh. I suppose the complete absence of rival or potential diners to nauseate didn’t help my case. I filled my bidons from a gurgling stone hydrant across the dusty dead-end street; I picked up a hot brochure from a neighbouring table and found it dedicated solely to the cult of the strimmer, or débroussailleuse as I saw it was more properly known to native defoliation enthusiasts. I’d got as far as the hard-core end-section where men in welder’s helmets set about a rainforest with rotary-bladed beasts harnessed round their waists before a large waitress of disagreeable appearance reluctantly emerged.

  A craven consumerist pigmy after the anchois incident, I didn’t dare complain, and it was two long, hot hours after our introduction that I finally said goodbye to Saint-Bertrand. On a day when the riders were averaging 43 k.p.h. that meant a lot of lost ‘k’s, which on this particular day meant that I was going to be late. The town of Mane was 40 kilometres away, and I had only an hour to get there. I had an appointment, you see. In Mane, with a man.

  I put the hammer down but it bounced back and smacked me in the teeth; a headwind and some bastard little climbs ensured I arrived in Mane half an hour late. There, sitting as promised outside the Café du Pont, was a man who looked a little like a synthesis of all the actors who have played Dr Who, with a blonde toddler on his knee.

  ‘Tim?’

  ‘Nick?’

  With ZR lashed to his Citroën and 2-year-old Jane installed perilously between the back-seat pannier mountains we set off up a gently rising gorge, the occasional black snake swishing sinuously across the road. I’d been put on to Nick Flanagan by Simon O’Brien, a regular visitor to Pyrenean Pursuits, the cycling guesthouse Nick runs with his wife Jan. I couldn’t quite get my head round the concept of a cycling guesthouse, and nor, in a charming way, could Nick. His clientele, as I understood it, were a blend of pros looking for a training base and cyclo-tourists l
ooking for a drinking base; on arriving at his establishment, a cosy three-floor chalet outside the village of Biert, there was to be found no identifying sign other than a gate cleverly crafted from two old bikes. ‘We’re not really bothered with passing trade,’ said Nick in Scouse tones mellowed by nine years in the Pyrenees. ‘It’s more a word-of-mouth thing.’

  Nick hadn’t come to the area known as the Ariège for the money. He’d arrived in 1991 with his new wife and an early-retirement pay-off; both keen cyclists, the guesthouse concept had seemed the ideal business/pleasure marriage, with the latter wearing the trousers in the partnership. ‘You don’t need much when you’ve got this,’ he said, seating me on his patio with a beer and passing a careless hand across a backdrop of towering green peaks. An orchard, a field over the road running down to the excitable River Arac, additional acreage up the mountain: ‘I haven’t found half the land we own yet,’ said Nick indulgently. As he talked of skiing in the winter and horse-riding in the summer, the lifestyle seemed blissfully enviable (at least to people who don’t find such activities both scary and ridiculous), and though I’d have predicted dark glances at the school gates and conspiratorial muttering in the supermarché, the locals had apparently been cheerfully welcoming. ‘The Ariège isn’t like the rest of the south of France: it’s a poor area, kind of remote, off the tourist track, and the locals respect anyone with the courage to come here and try and make a fist of things.’

  Introductions were effected to Jan, their 6-year-old son Dominic and a sympathetically maternal one-eyed dog slobbering over a very tolerant cat and her brood of kittens, followed by another beer, followed by a quick tour round an extensive collection of cycling memorabilia that included a photograph of the peloton sweeping past their front door in 1997 and a warm personal message from Chris Boardman. Finally Nick sighed in an enough-of-me way and said, ‘So – the Aubisque, eh?’