French Revolutions Read online

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, apologising for my appearance as well as for the fact that I hadn’t decided what I was about to say, ‘but I noticed your legs there and I just need to know what you’re doing.’

  As conversational icebreakers go this was rather a Titanic, but it is a tribute to the overlooked good manners of England’s youth, or at least its hearty, active Home Counties subset, that the pair looked up with eager, open faces rather than the wary, sod-off glowers demanded by the situation.

  ‘Yuh – well, we’re just doing a bit of a tour,’ began the male, who I have no choice but to describe as a boy. ‘Ten days. We flew into Geneva last night and just got down here. It’s great – you can take your bikes for free on BA. What about you?’

  ‘Well – you could call it a bit of a tour. The Tour. The Tour de France.’

  ‘Cool,’ said the girl in neutral tones, scratching a shoulder blade through her grey fleece top. Minimal departures in the bump department aside, she could quite easily have passed for her boyfriend. ‘It’s a shame the weather’s so awful – the scenery’s supposed to be amazing. Dad used to come skiing here in his bachelor days.’

  ‘I suppose that would have been in the Seventies,’ I said with a small, wry snort she clearly missed.

  ‘… Er, yuh, well, he met Mum in ’79 so … yuh. Seventies.’

  Oh, children, children. A solemn and ruminative silence fell over us, and to break it the boy said, ‘Yuh – we’re off to Morzine next.’

  ‘Mmmm? Oh. Yeah. Me too. How you getting there?’

  ‘Only the one way, I think. The Joux-Plane.’

  ‘Well, there we go. That’s my route. Because it’s part of the Tour de France, which I’m doing. All of.’

  ‘Cool. Well, in that case maybe we could all …’ and here he exchanged very quick but very eloquent glances with his girlfriend, ‘Well … good luck. Pretty grim up there, by the looks of it.’

  Almost immediately they clattered out into the wet wooden street with brisk waves, postcards half-written and hot chocolates half-drunk. I could understand their reluctance to accompany me up the Joux-Plane, or rather I couldn’t, the heartless little bastards. Did I really look that grisly? I suppose they just wanted to ride up hand-in-hand and have a celebratory wholesome snog at the top. Ten minutes later, feeling very, very tired, I was zipping up my rain top and remounting without enthusiasm.

  As befitted what was, after all, the steepest climb in the 2000 Tour – 8.4 per cent for 12 kilometres – the road out of Samoëns thinned and rose almost immediately. Soon I was out of the saddle and into the mist. Farms as messy and hopeless as hillbilly homesteads were left behind and now there was nothing but fir trees and pot-holes and my breath piping seamlessly into the fog. The non-functioning speedometer had been getting on my tit end all day, but now that blank, unaccusing display was a solitary source of comfort.

  ‘Hey!’

  Almost asleep in the saddle, I clumsily uncleated a foot and looked up in bleary alarm. It was the two cyclists.

  ‘Hey!’ Having been descending towards me at speed, they brought their matching green tourers to a squeaky, unsteady halt alongside. ‘It’s closed. The pass. “Route barrée”.’

  I looked at them like a kindly old country parson being informed by heavenly messengers that God despises him, and always has done. ‘Closed? But … closed why? Why closed?’

  ‘No idea. Big gates across the road with a no-entry sign. Closed. Route barrée.’

  I tried to come to terms with the situation, but immediately knew that in the absence of opiate drugs such an endeavour was doomed. ‘Closed,’ I said, in a blank and broken whisper.

  ‘Yuh – bad news. It’s at least a 40k detour back to the D road up the gorge.’

  I peered into the unhelpful mist above. It was cold – actually, very cold now that I had stopped pedalling – but surely there couldn’t be enough snow up there to block a road. And if there was, couldn’t I just shoulder the bike over it? I didn’t have to think very long about those additional 40 kilometres to know that even quite a sizeable risk of lonely death was worth taking to avoid them.

  ‘I’m going to give it a go.’

  ‘Yuh? It’s got to be another 6k to the top and …’ Levering his forearm at a radical angle to denote the forthcoming gradient, the boy appraised my age and condition in a glimpse that damned and sympathised in almost equal proportions.

  ‘And it’s absolutely bitter,’ said the girl, rubbing her thermal gloves. Why didn’t I have thermal gloves?

  ‘I don’t have any choice,’ I said with off-hand bravado. ‘It’s on the route – the Tour route.’

  ‘Cool,’ said the boy, consulting a ridiculous chronometer the size of a cartoon alarm clock. ‘OK, well, uh, best of luck again. Maybe see you in Morzine for a hot toddy.’

  I had listened politely to details of the girlfriend’s father’s premarital holiday habits and they hadn’t even had the common decency to recognise the ongoing enormity of my achievement. Twice I’d tolerated this, excusing it as a conversational oversight. The third time I did not.

  ‘I doubt it, actually, because I’ll be there before you and I’m going straight on to Evian,’ I said briskly, pulling my chinstrap tight and preparing to leave. ‘Anyway, I’m sure you can think of plenty of other ways of warming each other up.’

  I was quietly pleased with this parting shot for the thirty seconds of histrionic puffing it took me to reach the next bend, at which point I realised that it wasn’t her father’s holidays, but their father’s. They were not boy and girl but brother and sister.

  Though few made themselves apparent at the time, there were several beneficent side effects to this regrettable riposte. One was that for valuable minutes I had preoccupations beyond the rigours of the climb; another was an increased determination to overcome whatever hazard had closed the road and so make good my escape from sibling outrage. A rather sketchier third was that my veiled accusation might indeed have forestalled an incestuous atrocity: they wore the same clothes, after all, and rode the same bikes – and, let’s face it, there’s no smoke without fire.

  Cows were now wandering about the foggy road, inciting an injection of speed as efficiently as any injection of speed, and straining up through a dense fir copse I was almost unsaddled by a police car descending out of the mist at idiotic velocity. As the driver completed an extravagant evasive manoeuvre, his passenger just had time to frown at me, shake his head and cross raised forearms in unequivocal mimicry of the looming blockade.

  I pressed on into the cloud. Although my dramatic ‘mine not to reason why’ avowal to the siblings had, I now understood, been that of a pompous nob-end, it was true to say that I did feel a moral and spiritual obligation to conquer the final mountain. To bunk off would be to cast a depressing symmetry upon my climbing career; by defeating the Joux-Plane I could look back on an almost unbroken rising arc of achievement.

  The obstacle that had repelled the illicit lovers was hardly as fortified as they’d made out, just a single crowd-control barrier flung half-heartedly across the road: ‘Route barrée’ in word, maybe, but hardly in deed. A bit further on were a couple of exclamation-mark triangles, and an additional no-entry sign with a dented yellow ‘CHAUSSÉE DEFORMÉE’ propped beneath it. Negotiating an unimpressive landslide round the next – small bits of Christmas tree and a few buckets of mud slopped over the road, the tarmac nibbled daintily away at one side – I felt enormously smug. Up, round, back, up: half a dozen twists and fifteen minutes later I was leaning my bike up against a signpost with a tin Savoy flag riveted to it, willing self-timer flash to overcome fog so that future generations would not be spared the inspiring image of their intrepid ancestor standing haughtily by his machine before the enamelled legend ‘Col de Joux-Plane (Altitude 1700 m.)’.

  I couldn’t see much but then it didn’t seem there was much to see: wet tussocks; mud; the occasional mothballed ski-lift creaking eerily overhead, lost in the clouds. An anticlimax in a way: I’d
been thinking all day of the weary jubilation as the Tour riders eased over the Joux-Plane, possibly bloody, certainly bowed, but not beaten. For perhaps half a dozen of them the race would still be on in earnest; for the other 120-odd survivors, this might as well have been the finish line, the remaining stages to Paris just a procession, maybe the chance to sneak a cheeky stage win but no more. If you survive the mountains you survive the Tour, and if you survive the Tour you are a Giant of the Road.

  Of the seven HC climbs, I’d pushed up half of the first, bunked off the second and been chauffeured along the last stretch of the third in a drugged-up coma. But the remaining four had all been conquered in a fashion that by my standards at least was very possibly heroic. Giant of the Road might be stretching it a bit, but wheeling along the flat crest of my final Alp I was King of the Hill. A short and inglorious reign, however, because then I went round a corner and discovered, as I attempted to follow it, that the road had fallen down the mountain.

  I suppose I might have died. Had the visibility been more than two bike lengths I’d certainly have been going a lot faster, and in this manner would have plunged majestically into the gaping, mist-shrouded chasm rather than keeling gently over into its muddy but benign upper reaches: done a Thelma and Louise, in other words, rather than a Laurel and Hardy.

  Hauling ZR back on to the tarmac and palming filth off my legs, I understood that this might have been what all the barriers were about. The Alps, once taller than the Himalayas, were shrinking every year; in a demonstration of the puniness of man’s efforts to shore up the mountains, the rain had sluiced away a large piece of Joux-Plane, taking a load of road as it did so. The chaussée hadn’t been deformed so much as amputated. For fifty feet, the remaining usable section of tarmac was a ragged ribbon stitched haphazardly to the mountainside, never wider than a mantelpiece and sometimes considerably narrower. With one foot on the muddy slope and the other on what was left of the road, I hoisted ZR in red, numbed hands and carried her to safety like the hero in an adventure film, albeit one scripted by Fishwife Productions.

  I was shaken, and soon I was shivering. During some of the more exciting descents I had become acquainted with the phenomenon known as ‘brake fade’, the point at which the hardened rubber pads, overheated by continuous application, would begin to judder and hiss before abruptly adopting the speed-retarding qualities of buttered fish scales. Such an unlikely physical transformation always struck me as impressive as anything in the Old Testament, or the tiger who ran so fast round a bush that he turned into ghee.

  That a bicycle constructed from materials which not many years ago would have been described as ‘space-age’ should suffer from this alarmingly fundamental malaise still strikes me as more than a little crap, but at least I had learned how to remedy it. By alternately pressing the front and rear levers, the pads were given a chance to cool down: milking the brakes, I called it.

  When the road plunged eagerly back through the tree line I began to milk – left, right, left, right – but it was freezing, and you can’t freeze milk, and as the cold fog rushed over my wet, red fingertips at 65 k.p.h. I was quickly stripped of all digital mobility. The brakes could be on, or they could be off, but switching between these two was no longer an available option. My knuckles had become locked in that mystical extremity where fire and ice merged, the split second after you brush your toe painfully against a bath tap and can’t tell whether it was the blue one or the red. It was all I could do to scream my way through the next few bends until the gradient temporarily flattened and I was able to judder to an agonising halt.

  Descending a snowbound peak in the 1989 Giro, Paul Kimmage had to stop by the road and pee on his hands to get some heat back in them. I would have if I could. For a moment I just stood there in the fog, fists in opposite armpits, ears in shoulder blades, an armless, neckless freak howling unlikely scenarios involving most of the Christian religion’s big names. Then, abruptly inspired, I crouched and clasped the friction-heated wheel-rims, enjoying up to two seconds of relief before the surprisingly enormous temperatures started to melt my fingerprints off.

  I hopped and stamped and slapped myself like a bereaved Iranian, but it didn’t help. My rouged wrists were still festively dew-dropped, my feet pulsed with hot pain like recently de-toed stumps, and had Crystal Gayle not wanted a worldwide hit she could have done a lot worse than recording the touching homage ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Knees Blue’. I forced myself to take a swig from the bidon and when the contents hit my teeth I thought they’d all fall out. It distantly occurred to me that, as the road was closed, third-party assistance would only be available when it opened, and then in the form of a desultory search for my clenched corpse.

  The blasphemy had gone, replaced by less mentally demanding wet-throated, guttural bull noises, when I remembered what lay at the bottom of the bar-bag, beneath pills and pump and plastic spoon. Our friend Emma had given it to me, at least partly as a joke, and I had just got the punchline. I very much doubt that anyone, except perhaps an unusually jaded sexual pervert, has ever unscrewed the cap of a tube of Deep Heat with such a graphic display of lurid glee. In one clumsy splurt I liberated the entire contents, then smeared all exposed flesh and gasped in masochistic ecstasy as the fiery white cream penetrated my brittle carapace.

  It didn’t last long, but then it didn’t need to. Four bends later, again beginning to clamp my shrieking fists around the liniment-lubricated levers with all the dextrous precision of a wino at dawn, I came upon a huge mound of smouldering hay piled up in a layby. Untroubled by the scant respect this smoking apparition paid to both logic and meteorology, I sat on it and, upon discovering that to do so was lovely, stayed sitting on it for perhaps fifteen minutes. Then I remounted, and moments later found myself swishing out of the fog, around the facing set of Route Barrée gates and into the predictably architectured ski town of Morzine. The first human I’d encountered since the gesticulating gendarme, an Alpine executive digging his ornamental log pile out of a landslide, surveyed me with excusable wariness: pit ponies, surely, weren’t meant to cycle, particularly not fatally neglected specimens slathered in shaving foam. And why was this one smiling?

  Down the wide main street I cruised, able at last to stoke up the inner fires with frenzied pedalling. Leaving the pine cladding and treble glazing to absorb a looming night of incestuous outrage, I whisked down the valley to Lake Geneva.

  Rolling into Evian I saw a primary-school teacher up a ladder in her classroom, struggling to affix some jolly mural, and then I realised it was gone seven o’clock, and that this must mean that the people of Evian were good people. It was exactly what I wanted, undemanding and comfortable, with a ponced-up, casino-cluttered promenade along the lake that could wait until tomorrow. We’d booked a hotel in advance, and the family had already checked in. ‘Good God,’ said Birna, exiting the lift and seeing the receptionist grinning desperately at The Amphibian Formerly Known as Tim. She wouldn’t let the children see me until I’d been hosed down in the bath, but when after two changes of water they all rather sweetly filed in with offerings of chocolate and lollipops I felt like one of those black-and-white Tour legends being interviewed in the tub. It was beginning to look as if I might be becoming rather great.

  Fourteen

  The Tour de France invariably makes a foray into neighbouring countries, usually for commercial purposes or the less rational motivation referred to earlier, the one that says: ‘Hey: look at all these sexy guys on bikes and stuff! Don’t you wish you were French?’ The Tour has even been to Britain a couple of times, most entertainingly in 1974, when for six hours the riders pedalled disconsolately up and down an unopened bypass outside Plymouth in a stage intended to promote the export potential of French artichokes. The Tour director forgot his passport and was shadowed by undercover Customs officers all day; hardly anyone else turned up and the following morning’s Daily Mirror rhetorically enquired: ‘Tour de France: can 40 million Frenchmen be wrong?’


  Anyway, the 2000 Tour had embraced the raw artichoke of cross-border co-operation more fondly than any of its predecessors. On this basis it was a slight shame for my friend Paul Ruddle, who had abruptly arranged with Birna just before she left to meet up with us in Evian and cycle with me for three days, that his Tour de France would take place almost exclusively in Switzerland.

  Not that this or much else seemed to be troubling him when he arrived with Birna from the airport. He’d been up until 3 a.m. crating his bike to British Airways’ exacting standards, but you’d never have guessed it from the greedy eagerness with which he surveyed the hills on Lake Geneva’s eastern flank as we set off to the multi-storey to unload and assemble his bicycle, a hybrid mountain bike/tourer.

  I wouldn’t wish to embarrass Paul by mentioning his scarily successful career as a City high-flyer, but there we go: I just have. A man who had made his name with flawless judgement and an associated reluctance to suffer fools gladly was an unlikely volunteer for my tour; as he had also just completed his first marathon in three hours, and was still running up to a hundred miles a week, it was difficult to see what Paul hoped to achieve in my company. It really was astonishingly kind of him to sacrifice what for a City man is probably an entire decade’s holiday allowance, but having thanked him in these terms I began to see that my worst fears were being trumped. As well as being the physical apotheosis of the adjective ‘toned’, he also knew what he was doing.