French Revolutions Read online

  It was an unedifying contest, particularly given my reluctance to share the work at the front. In Tour argot, I was wheel-sucking: toiling in his slipstream, letting a man on a rusty sit-up-and-beg do the sitting up while I took care of the begging. Winding it up round the cork-walled Gorge de Châteaudouble, he never looked round once, not even as he rumbled off down a side track, jabbed a forefinger at the road ahead and shouted out a rut-juddered ‘Bonne chance!’

  The road narrowed, carving into the sheer gorge walls, writhing round corners of sufficiently exaggerated radius to ease oncoming tourist coaches right into my path. Stage thirteen had finished in Draguignan and I’d continued seamlessly into stage fourteen, which by common consent was the most appalling, the sort of ludicrous itinerary that made substance abuse almost inevitable: 250k northwards into the cold heart of Alps, with two first-category climbs that were statistically more awful than some of the HCs, topped off with the notorious col d’Izoard whose poisoned, Martian summit stood over 1,000 feet above Ventoux.

  Oh, and the second-category Côte de Canjuers which Knees-Out had presumably been indicating, an attritional, never-ending ascent of hot, red earth and unabundant scrub. The sun was still high and so, as far as I could tell on the rare occasions when I angled my gaze up from the softening tarmac, were the haze-topped peaks ahead. If those were the Alps, then these, I supposed, were their foothills. It should not have come as a surprise to discover that the Alps had very large feet.

  This was a tourist route, all big gay Germans on big gay motorbikes and roof-racked British estate cars with painstakingly yellow-painted headlights. At least the Brits noticed me. Every other nationality has been brought up in a culture where pedalling some poxy bike up a cliff for no good reason is considered almost humdrum behaviour, but the looks I got from the occupants of right-hand-drive vehicles were very different: a sort of intrigued horror that had me running a hand over the top of my helmet to check for snagged roadkill.

  Up through the wizened weeds I went, into an empty world of crumbled rock, one with ample disincentives to settlement even without the enormous military firing range the road now gingerly traversed. After inching pained but ecstatic over a crest, I freewheeled round the next corner to be confronted with the full horror of the term ‘false summit’. This was an awful moment. Come friendly bombs and fall on me.

  As a weary nod to Chris Boardman’s training diktats, I’d been scribbling occasional contributions to a ‘performance feedback’ diary. His sample entries were along the lines ‘a hard day, but never pushed into red’ and ‘sore, no stress’. Deciphering the diseased scrawl I penned at Comps-sur-Artuby, where my attempts at refuelling were once again confounded, this time by a restaurant sign stridently recommending ‘Tripes et Daubes’, I can just make out the words ‘v. bilious/feeble’.

  It’s difficult to imagine that the one-man Fanta festival I held at Comps ameliorated this state of affairs, as evidenced by the shaming scenes enacted in a lay-by just beyond it. I’d somehow grovelled through 100 kilometres, but there were still 28 to go before the arranged rendezvous with my – hollow laugh – support vehicle. If the road had not immediately lowered itself into a mammoth descent that obviated pedalling for 16 of these I cannot imagine I would have made it.

  Freewheeling past hill-topping castles, almost Arabian in their ochred bulk, I eased into the Grand Canyon du Verdon, an excitable river squeezed between granite flanks. The canyon is by common consent the most spectacular in Europe, but the incredible truth is that it wasn’t discovered until 1905. It still amazed me that the caves of Lascaux had remained hidden for so long, but overlooking a 12-mile-long, half-mile-wide hole in the heart of the world’s most densely populated continent is in a different league of geographical apathy. And less than fifty years later it was almost flooded for a hydroelectric scheme, one only abandoned when the money ran out: you can still see, and I did, the side tunnels they bored out in preparation. Then I saw a sign welcoming me to Castellane, and just beyond it a parked maroon Espace, and after 128 very different kilometres from those I’d breezed through the day before I had somehow made it.

  Castellane was compact and noisy and overlooked by a tiny chapel stuck terrifyingly atop a towering rock: not so much standing guard over the town as hoping someone would catch it when it fell. The other point about Castellane was that it was full, complet, no vacancy, keine zimmer. ‘Ascension Day,’ said Birna, though at the time neither of us appreciated the hilarious incline-related irony. I lacked the wherewithal to participate in the so-you-think-you’ve-had-a-bad-day post mortem, nodding limply through the support crew’s breathless catalogue of in-car vomit and vertigo. ‘I wheel-sucked a mechanic,’ was all I could whisper in reply.

  I was all over the shop, but the Tour pros would just be setting their stalls out. There was a sprint scheduled at Castellane – a sprint. And then another 200 kilometres of mountains, with a combined tariff equivalent to cycling up and down the Empire State Building. Eleven times. I hated myself for dwelling on the looming awfulnesses, but at the same time couldn’t help it. Tour riders at the end of the day don’t really want to stop talking Tour – can’t, in fact. They live and breathe the event more literally than competitors in any other sporting contest, and at the end of a day all they want to talk about is tomorrow.

  I had a splendid photographic history of the Tour, and of the many hotel-room après-cycle snaps only two depicted what might be described as R and R (though each was a perfect cameo of national traits: the Italian Felice Gimondi autographing a blonde’s thigh; Belgium’s Eddy Merckx looking no less exhilarated as he turns over the four of clubs in a game of patience). The rest were all either winding down – a pin-pupilled Anquetil being forcefully massaged; Ottavio Bottecchia letting off a soda siphon into his aviator-goggled face; two Frenchmen being interviewed in the bath; Coppi with his feet in the bidet – or psyching up: Gino Bartali poring over tomorrow’s maps; three Spaniards squinting myopically at the sports pages. No time or energy for the sort of endlessly inventive after-hours horseplay practised by Switzerland’s Oscar Plattner: had the 1955 world sprint champion been a Tour rider, procycling might never have been able to reminisce on an endowment so extravagant that ‘in the right circumstances he could accommodate seven budgerigars, provided the last stood on one leg’.

  The only bed in town was within a cardboard-walled chalet at a campsite, which was fine with me but less of a hit with Birna. Apparently intrigued by our dual-format holiday transport, the crisply-shirted Portuguese proprietor drove over in his little golf buggy for a chat as we corralled the children up to our plywood veranda. I’d long since given up on impressing a Frenchman with my endeavours, but because Portugal has no real cycling tradition, and also because his English was accomplished enough to decode my feverish ramblings, he was soon engrossed. ‘You do the whole, entire race?’ he asked, knitting his well-developed eyebrows in justifiable concern. I nodded gauntly, then indicating my fetid kit asked where I could get a laundrette token. ‘No, no,’ he said, and raising both hands by way of reproach insisted on laundering it all in his own machine. On any day this would have been a kindness, but I only appreciated its especial selflessness on that particular day just after he hummed away in his buggy. I’m so very sorry, sir.

  I’d hardly describe it as my strongest suit in any circumstances, but in a campsite suffering in silence is never an option for the unwell. Our wobbling walls offered minimal sonic resistance to the traditional canvas lullaby of Teutonic snores, but I still cringe at the catastrophic voidances I shared with my fellow campers throughout that night. I could have suffered no greater shame if I’d strolled between the tents in broad daylight asking for a hand with my seventh budgie.

  You may gather that I am not a good patient. Half my childhood was spent crawling round my mother’s feet dismally moaning ‘I think it’s my spleen’, and I made such a fuss about a teenage tummy ache that they took my appendix out to shut me up. (Mind you, the investigatory probings we
re by any standards rigorous. I’d like to meet the man who doesn’t scream the glass out of the surgery windows when a greased-up doctor is in him up to his elbow. Actually, perhaps I wouldn’t.) As dawn prodded at the curtains I was still writhing and groaning like an ankle-tapped Italian footballer, and with the roused children already holding a rowdy bedside vigil Birna blearily yawned that holiday tummy didn’t normally last more than a day.

  ‘Holiday tummy?’ I creaked, trying to muster up some shrillness. ‘This is a serious digestive disorder. I think …’ and here I was momentarily drowned out by an extended fizzing wheeze from somewhere within my knotted innards, ‘I think it might be dysentery.’ Kristjan looked at me with innocent concern; I placed a moist hand on his shoulder and rasped, ‘Daddy has The Bloody Flux.’

  I went through the motions, so to speak, tottering half-heartedly about with maps and gloves waiting for Birna to stop me. It didn’t take her long. ‘Don’t tell me you’re getting on that bike today.’

  ‘Oh, OK then,’ I said, slightly too quickly, staring at my flaking, hollow features in the mirror above the little kitchen sink. From Castellane the stage profile peaked and troughed like a frightened rodent’s heartbeat, and there I was, French-fried, sundried, thin ’n’ crispy. Swilling my bidons out I noticed that even my ears looked ill.

  Birna watched this negligent operation with interest. ‘Aren’t you going to wash them up properly?’

  ‘No point if I’m not cycling today.’

  ‘What do you normally use?’

  After the washing powder’s insecticidal contamination, there had been only one all-purpose emulsifying surfactant in my life, used for laundering shorts, socks and jersey, cleansing bidons and – applied directly to a pilfered hotel flannel – to bring an occasional shine to ZR’s filthy flanks. ‘Wash ’n’ Go,’ I said.

  ‘That isn’t very good,’ she replied, and it wasn’t. Apart from anything else, whatever I poured into the bidons now came out tasting of perfumed paint. ‘And when did you last boil them?’

  When did I last … If this moment had been filmed, the camera would have careered towards me on rails as I slapped palms to cheeks in a wide-eyed, round-mouthed epiphany of painfully abrupt realisation. Nick and Jan had asked me that same question; had in fact offered to do it for me. ‘Whenever we get a big party here, we always boil all the bidons once when they arrive and once before they leave.’

  I just thought they were being … well, British. You know: fussy. Driven by a mindlessly slavish adherence to routine. You were supposed to pump your tyres and wipe your chain and brush the crap off your dérailleurs every night, but my progress didn’t seem to have been adversely affected by not doing any of these things even once. In my book – and what a smelly little pamphlet that is – bidon-boiling was on a par with the checklists headed ‘Preparing for a long journey’ that they always put in car manuals, which you flick through while you’re on a double-yellow waiting for your wife and kids to come back from Clark’s, and then think, Jesus, I’m sitting here in a Volvo estate reading the owner’s handbook while my children are having the width of their feet measured, which may mean that I am already one of Europe’s dullest men, and if anyone thinks I’m now going to start inspecting wiper-blades and hosing loose chippings out of my wheel-arches every time we breach the M25 they’ve got another think coming.

  But Birna is not British. Birna is, in fact, the answer to the riddle of what you get if you cross an Icelandic virologist with an Icelandic immunologist. The agenda of her life was forthright: the global eradication of filth. Tough on grime, tough on the causes of grime. Adopting a tone and rationale normally employed against children who don’t wash their hands after going to the loo, she railed, ‘You’ve been putting fruit juice and God knows what in those bottles, and they’ve been fermenting away in the sun all day mixed up with your saliva and …’ Appalled at this toxicological scenario, the rant tailed off into a little quiver of revulsion.

  I had imagined that my condition was stress-related, not so much mental as the physical strain of Herculean effort: I had made myself ill by trying too hard, pushing myself beyond the limit. ‘He destroyed himself – he had the ability to do that.’ Now I saw that it was none of these things. I was sick because I was dirty. I was a dirty boy.

  I sent Kristjan into the campsite office to retrieve my laundered kit and with ZR dismantled in the boot we drove into the centre of Castellane. A day of campsite convalescence had been on the cards before I calculated that Birna and the family had to be back in five days, and that on current form the Alps would be occupying me for at least that length of time. A reluctance to attract public attention to my modest rate of progress had inspired me to spurn the support vehicle the day before, but in the ghostly light of the ensuing travails I wanted to see out the mountains with a back-up crew in close contact. A lost day was off the agenda, and cheating was back on it.

  Before leaving Castellane, however, there was something I had to do. Birna pulled up outside a pharmacy, I clambered wanly out and hobbled in. Water purification tablets were what I wanted, though as I saw the silver-haired chemist listening in some alarm to my request for ‘pills to sterilise myself’ I clumsily effected additional explanations to ensure I didn’t end up with a very different sort of medication. Henceforth, the content of my bidons would have all the zesty refreshment of a lusty swig from the municipal paddling pool, but at least I wouldn’t die. It was awful to think that up Ventoux and the Alpine foothills – and, who knows, all through the Pyrenees – my bottles had been nurturing contagion, that with every parched sip I’d been slowly poisoning myself.

  There’d been a chastening broom-wagon finality about stowing the bike in the boot. Today I’d be the one making rueful faces at cyclists from behind a windscreen, trying to gauge gradients, empathise with their labours and offer encouragement, but knowing that, whatever I did, to them I’d be just another gloating wanker in a car. We looped round the Lac de Castillon, its almost chemically turquoise surface dotted with pedalos, the surrounding hills all cedars and smooth granite, more Mediterranean than Alpine. The col d’Allos was the first proper Alp, a sprawl of off-season, shingle-roofed ski hotels at its base, the hairpins stacked up those Heidi-sided cowbell pastures. As the road twisted and rose we squeezed past the occasional cyclist, all pained, some traumatised, and one – a really very old man on a panniered tourer – engaged in such a rotary frenzy he looked as though he might spontaneously combust.

  We’d just left him thrashing about in our wake when Birna stalled the car, yanked at the handbrake and in a voice destabilised with brittle fear formally renounced tenure of the driver’s seat. ‘That – there,’ she quavered, waving an explanatory finger at the view as she roughly parted my knees and hunkered awkwardly into the passenger footwell. An altitude-related spiritual collapse had always been on the cards for Birna, and following her finger down to the distant valley floor I remembered that at 2,250 metres, this was the highest point of the Tour to date.

  Perhaps due to medical jealousy, I must confess to a propensity for contracting sympathetic phobias from those around me. I was never troubled by spiders before that first infantile experience of my father’s distinctive arachnid-encountering shriek, and now I can’t go into the garden shed alone. Slasher movies were routinely dismissed with hilarity until a girlfriend dug her nails into my arm once too often during Friday the 13th; that night I ended up having to sleep on the floor next to my parents’ bed, which is no place for any 20-year-old. And another unfortunate truth is that after years of intimate contact with Birna’s vertigo, I have inevitably been infected with the disease. A milder form, perhaps, although you might not have said that if you’d seen the pair of us inching across Clifton Suspension Bridge on our hands and knees.

  Plunging off mountain sides is a regularly indulged Tour pastime, but without the Pavlovian stimulus of Birna’s keening wails I hadn’t yet got the old height-fright on the bike. Now, positioning myself behind the wheel, I rea
lised only a supreme effort would stop the hysteria spreading to the rear seat with wretched consequences for all, most particularly the old bloke who was wobbling back past us into a position where any get-me-outta-here flung-open nearside doors would neatly dispatch him to eternity.

  A throat-stripping nursery-rhyme session drowned out the incoherent death preparations ululating up from the footwell and so carried us to the top, but the descent was worse, a lonely cliff-clinger with regular ominous gaps in the rusty railings. Birna finally raised her head above the dashboard at Barcelonette, one of those gravelly, moraine-slopped mountain-plateau towns that cry out for a covering of snow. Here we waited an eternity for the shopkeepers to arise wearily from a well-earned three-hour lunch nap, then devoured most of their wares by the frothing mud of a swollen glacial river up the road. This allowed plenty of scope for juvenile tomfoolery of the near-fatal variety, and not wanting to be left out I forgot to close the boot when we drove off, causing tennis balls, flip-flops and other loose pieces of holiday to bounce excitingly into the path of following traffic. The number of drivers returning to their native Italy – I realised later that the border was just a couple of miles to the right – ensured an expressive reception to the incident-packed retrieval of these items.

  I felt better physically – the unwieldy baguette assemblage I wedged painfully down my gullet represented my first meaningful calories for twenty-four hours – but at the same time there was a bleak sadness. This peaked as we drove through the cheerily named village of La Condamine, where we gawped solemnly at haphazard ranks of what could only be prison cells hewn perilously high into the granite cliffs behind. Why is the French penal system so melodramatic? They were still sending people to Devil’s Island after the war. And what could you possibly do to deserve being locked up in a mountain? I’d recently been struck by the related histrionics of their language, how you can never be sorry, only ‘desolated’, never bothered, only ‘deranged’. We might think of ‘yours sincerely’ as archly pedantic, but how would you fancy signing off to your bank manager with ‘I beg you to accept the expression of my distinguished sentiments’? I suppose it’s all part of the overwrought romanticism that so endears the Tour to the nation’s destiny-oscillators. (Actually, I found out later that they weren’t prison cells at all, but old gun emplacements. But that’s OK: this is known as the exception that proves the rule.)