French Revolutions Read online

  With barely less difficulty I fitted Richard Hallett’s recommended sit-upon – a no-mercy buttock-cleaver that recalled the old Yellow Pages ad where a young lad pedals off into a Yorkshire dawn on his birthday present while dad, peering out of the net curtains, mutters indulgently to himself, ‘I were right about that saddle.’ There had been much debate about the saddle. Some had advised me to go for a podgy, gel-filled number; Hallett, his complicated psyche awash with infected testicles and Stakhanovite toil, insisted that such a saddle would do me no favours in the long run. ‘You’ll be comfortable for three days, but then the sores will start,’ he’d said, illustrating this theme with the parable of Holland’s Joop Zoetemelk, who had silenced a press conference during the 1976 Tour by rolling up his shorts to reveal an intimate boil the size of an egg.

  I’d been warned to expect trouble with the pedals, or more particularly the ski-type binding mechanism that is nowadays employed to attach them to the shoes. I’d never even ridden with toe clips, which had lashed every Tour rider’s feet to his pedals from 1903 until the mid-Eighties. As someone who never feels truly at ease on a bicycle unless I can put both feet flat on the floor when waiting at traffic lights, the idea of being strapped tightly to the pedals was unsettling to say the least. But at least you could see toe clips, big stainless-steel bands round the top of the shoe. And when you had seen them, all you had to do to free the foot was to pull it back. The essential trouble with the newer system was that the cleat (a word whose leg-iron, penal twang would come to haunt me) which slotted into the pedal was on the sole of the shoe, utterly out of sight. And so utterly out of mind.

  Having wobbled gingerly along the pavement to Kew Bridge on my debut ride (in cleated shoes but not the jersey and shorts, which I didn’t yet feel qualified to wear), I was deeply disturbed by the head-down, humpbacked riding position, which as well as being instantly uncomfortable was also dangerous: to look where you were going rather than where you’d just been required an unnatural – and additionally uncomfortable – craning of the neck. None of this was assisted by the drop handlebars: so narrow and rigid that every slight hump or lump made my whole frame vibrate like a tuning fork; so featherweight and fickle that riding off a kerb was like barrelling out of some rodeo pen on an unbroken steer. Experimenting with the surfeit of gears I clanked and clunked down into gear twenty-seven: my feet spun manically, a dozen resistance-free rotations for a couple of car lengths’ progress. Monstrous as this seemed, a small part of my brain acknowledged that there would be times when I’d be pressing down with the full weight of my breaking body to get gear twenty-seven creaking agonisingly round, times when twenty-seven wouldn’t be enough, not nearly enough.

  Seconds later, however, none of this seemed to matter. Clicking back into gear fifteen or so I was astonished by ZR3000’s effortless straight-line performance: on other bicycles I have owned, the drawn-out, rising span of Kew Bridge has always been an out-of-the-saddle lung-burster. I swept majestically past two schoolgirls on mountain bikes and immediately began to feel rather successful.

  What is it pride comes before? Ah, yes. Cresting the bridge at a canter, and speeding down the other side, I was suddenly confronted with a long queue of stationary traffic; caught off-guard by the abrupt efficiency of the brakes, I inevitably forgot to perform the viciously pigeon-toed ankle twist required to liberate shoe from pedal. The good news was that I had come to a halt at a bus stop and by embracing the eponymous concrete post was able to avoid keeling gently over into four lanes of rush-hour traffic. The bad news was that there were a good two dozen people in the queue, and that the vaudevillian première of Mister Drunkpedal offered unexpected but welcome entertainment to every one of them, except perhaps the schoolboy who had been leaning against the bus stop.

  As inauspicious starts go, this was right up there with Captain Scott peering out of his tent across the tundra and saying, ‘Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but this isn’t anything like how I imagined South Poland.’ There were less than a hundred hours to go and the more people I talked to, the more disheartened I became. Martin Warren went very quiet when I phoned him to ask how often you were supposed to oil the brake pads, and my friend Matthew was clearly appalled by the grandiose scale of my ignorance and incompetence during a hands-on tutorial on removing the rear wheel. A call to another friend, Simon O’Brien, who will thank me for mentioning his Liverpool bike-shop/café, The Hub, but probably won’t for referring to his distant notoriety in the role of Brookside’s Damon Grant, was regularly interrupted by prolonged gales of incredulous laughter.

  During the small gaps in between these, Simon did at least impart what seemed like useful advice. Don’t try to average more than about 80 kilometres (50 miles) a day; pre-book yourself into a nice hotel every ten days or so to give you a target to aim at and a reward for meeting it; shovel in carbohydrates. ‘You cannot eat too much,’ he stressed, which are just the words you want to hear when you’re about to set off for a month in France, assuming you don’t hang around for Simon’s next sentence. ‘Especially prunes and bananas.’

  However saddening is the thought of filling a dry mouth with warm brown fruit, this prospect was at least preferable to the nutritional options suggested when I searched the Internet discussion forums. ‘For a 200k ride, I usually pack four Power Bars and twelve Fig Newtons,’ wrote one Canadian endurance enthusiast. I tried to imagine what a Power Bar might look like, and tried not to imagine what a Fig Newton might taste like. Fig Newton. It sounded like a result in that old game of deriving a porn-star alter ego from adding the name of your first pet to the street you lived in as a child.

  The stuff was starting to accumulate. My Ortlieb panniers were soon complemented by a neat little bag that clipped to the handlebars and would eventually become my best friend, and having fitted all these, a process which probably needn’t have involved quite so many hours, or indeed hissing at pieces of dismantled bicycle like a cornered stoat, I filled them.

  Looking now at the list I compiled then, I can see the word ‘shaver’ crossed out, rewritten and crossed out again. I’d been agonising for weeks in advance about methods of saving weight, ever since reading Mr Boardman’s assertion that even a couple of kilos could make the difference between whistling up the Giant of Provence and floundering grimly in the Valley of Death. My faithful Braun electric (175 grams) had assumed a crucial symbolic significance: by substituting it for a featherlight but wretched Bic disposable razor (7 grams), I would prove I was taking this thing seriously. I even pondered not shaving, before reaching the conclusion that after a month of harsh sun and prunes I’d be looking enough like Robinson Crusoe as it was.

  Only when I made a heap of the essentials did I accept the hopelessness of it all. Maps, spares, tools, lock, all-weather clothing and, however often I tried to hide it beneath the multivitamins and toothbrush, a huge, leering tube of Savlon: with all that shoved into the panniers, ZR3000, once such a flighty will-o’-the-wisp that you could pick it up with two fingers, now required two people to perform the same task.

  Oh, what was the point. In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought – or, more accurately, in for a pound, in for ten stone. I’d restricted my après-cycling evening wardrobe to one T-shirt, a pair of pants, thin cotton trousers and the selfsame footwear I would have been cleated into all day, but now threw in three additional shirts and the same of pants, baggy beach shorts, a load of socks and a pair of espadrilles. A couple of hefty guidebooks were promoted from the standby list, along with half a dozen back copies of procycling Matthew had lent me. The Braun joined them, though as a token gesture I didn’t take the plastic head cover or the funny little cleaning brush. I also cut my nails down to the quick, took off my signet ring and had a very severe haircut. Then I sat down and watched a video.

  Tour de France 1903–1985 did exactly what it said on the box, until the end. After a studiously forthright appraisal of the Tour’s great riders, the badly dubbed, nasally British voiceover cl
icked clumsily off to be replaced by a rousing, if slightly approximate burst of Onedin Line-style orchestration. Then, over a visual backdrop of grainy Sixties Tour footage, a man who sounded a lot like Charles Aznavour trying to do Orson Welles began to speak in a voice charged with portent.

  ‘Like one of Napoleon’s soldiers, a racer in the Tour de France need only say, “I was there,” to provoke the respect and admiration given to one who is ranked among exceptional human beings, part of an élite who seeks to excel through effort and suffering, and like Guillaumet, mechanic to the aviator Mermoz, he can say, “I have done what no animal can do.” ’

  There was a short pause here, presumably while the narrator imagined two sheep standing flummoxed before an aeronautical tool kit. Then the epic soundtrack blared waywardly again and the commentary recommenced.

  ‘In an apparent paradox, the racer achieves transcendence of himself, and his sense of the absolute, by reaching deep into himself and dreaming himself, as animals do when the survival instinct orders them to walk, to run, to fight. The racer in the Tour has his place somewhere between the animals and the gods, sometimes one, sometimes the other, often both, always oscillating between these two opposite poles of his destiny.’

  Well, that was something to look forward to. Perhaps I’d got it all wrong. Instead of building up muscle bulk, or anyway making feebly half-hearted efforts at doing so, I should instead have been fine-tuning my sense of the absolute. A good, hard session on the transcendental treadmill and I’d be destiny-oscillating with the best of them.

  Regrettably, my one extended training run – to Harrow and back, perhaps a 20-mile round trip – suggested that my place would be rather closer to the animals than the gods, and indeed within that former category rather closer to the invertebrates than the mammals. Bucking along the North Circular Road’s bike-path pavement past Gunnersbury Park, I had to brake sharply, and therefore painfully, to avoid contact with a large cyclist emerging at speed through the park gates alongside. Mercifully uncleated, I had come to a lopsided halt with our wheels barely an inch apart. Feeling as if I had mistaken Deep Heat for Savlon, I looked up to see that the large cyclist was the type of middle-aged, Harrington-jacketed skinhead that everyone apart from newspaper cartoonists assumed had long since moonstomped off our high streets.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said, but the eager sneer snagging his thin, cold-sored lips suggested there would be strings attached to this apology. It was no particular surprise, having cycled wordlessly on my way, to hear the loud shout of ‘PRICK!’ ringing out from behind.

  Later, I marvelled at the wretched chemistry apparently created by combining me and a bicycle with Gunnersbury Park. Almost thirty years on, here I was again, being curtly abused by an ugly, bored male. Now that I consider the two events, it is in fact easily possible that both involved not just the same stage but the same actors.

  The brain makes rapid calculations in moments like this, and as I trumped his insult in terms of both volume and profanity I was barely aware of having established that my enemy’s bulk and inferior machinery made a successful pursuit unlikely. Certainly this calculation took no account of my own fitness, nor the fact that my sudden stop had left me in an appropriately high gear. If there is one thing more debilitating than running away, it is doing so while pretending not to. Striving to find a balance between life-saving flight and face-saving nonchalance, I ground in private agony up the North Circular Road, not daring to look round until I topped Hanger Hill two miles up the road.

  This effort, coupled perhaps with an unwisely piquant supper that had paid extravagant homage to a lifelong fondness for Tabasco, malt vinegar and grapefruit juice, so disturbed my body’s pH balance that freewheeling down towards the Hanger Lane Gyratory System I began to feel very unwell. It started as a stitch, I suppose, but the little man with the needle soon got carried away. Wincing, I dismounted alongside a huddle of pavement smokers outside a large office building, with the sensation of being internally tattooed. During my many subsequent distress stops, I established that temporary relief could be procured by bending double and stoutly pushing the left side of my stomach in with both hands. This was not a pose one would choose to sustain by the side of a public highway, and I would guess that my resultant impersonation of a man attempting to remove his own spleen attracted some interest among the rush-hour commuters of northwest London.

  I arrived at the Harrovian residence of my friend Paul Rose looking like Stephen Roche at la Plagne and sounding like Stephen Hawking at la Scala. Helping me over his threshold, he set about my rehabilitation. This process incorporated three beers, six Rennies and several dozen viewings of a crafts-channel cable TV video clip wherein an erstwhile innocuous sculptor expresses abrupt and radical disgust for his half-finished feline creation by decapitating it with a single, lusty uppercut. It had taken me two hours to get there; the return leg required a quarter of this time.

  Even so, it had not been an encouraging maiden voyage. In fact, if I had been planning to cycle to, say, Oxford or Brighton, I’d probably have called it off. In a strange way, only the sheer scale of my itinerary stopped me from losing heart: that daftly inflated figure of 3,630 kilometres was difficult to take seriously.

  The night before leaving, very slightly drunk, I’d wandered down my road to the river. It was balmy; a group of girls sat around a cheerily crackling bonfire on the foreshore; before I’d even left, the elements and environment were in cahoots to engender homesickness. Almost inevitably there was a little crowd of French students on and around a towpath bench, and almost inevitably they were talking with some excitement about the Tour de France. Though I only got the odd noun – ‘Armstrong’, ‘Virenque’, ‘EPO’ (the notorious haemoglobin-boosting drug) – the relish was unavoidable. The race was still over a month off and already the expatriate youth of Gaul were on amber alert.

  ZR3000 was propped by the front door, and on the way back in I squeezed round it, wondering how I felt about my bicycle now and how those feelings would have changed after 2,256 miles. Bowed down with baggage, the machine’s lean, hungry look was gone: it was like putting a roof-rack on a Lotus. My children had fulsomely decorated the saddle’s diminutive surface area with Cinderella stickers (you shall go to the balls, Cinders); there were already long scratches and an ugly dent where my trailing cleat had failed to clear the crossbar when I repeatedly dismounted in clumsy agony en route to Harrow.

  Was I really going to cock my leg over that crossbar and not uncock it for a month and a bit? As a perennially shiftless slacker I had been urged more than once to get on my bike. To think that it should come to this.

  Two

  Cycling is the national sport of France, so I’m slightly annoyed with myself for failing to predict that it is consequently impossible to take bicycles on French trains. Or, even more appropriately, that it is possible, but only on randomly selected local services, and then on condition that the bicycle is dismantled, boxed, put on a freight train scheduled to show up seventy-two hours after your own before being thrown into the canal by a mob of opticians protesting about biscuit subsidies.

  Newly acquainted with this reality brief hours before departure at least gave me something else to think about as my family pushed me out through the door into a glorious morning. Seven stages began some distance from where the previous one had ended; I’d hoped to take trains between these points. More immediately – in fact in, um, six hours’ time – I’d hoped to be on a train from Calais to Futuroscope, the technological theme park near Poitiers where the Tour was to start.

  Organisation is not my strongest suit. When I look down from aeroplane windows at the complex urban landscapes below it is in slack-jawed admiration for the people who create and maintain them, with a parallel gut-punching terror at the thought of the cack-handed, jerry-built anarchy that would reign if I myself had been involved at anything approaching an executive level. It had been an overwhelming enough task just to gather together the equipment for my tour (I�
��d give that a capital T at the same time as I felt I’d earned the right to wear the shorts and jersey); here I was, loaded up like a camel, and the news about the French trains was the straw that broke my back.

  My sons’ classmates were being taken to school, and as I cycled laboriously by, trying to haul all those panniers up to some sort of cruising speed, a couple of mothers recognised me and waved in a manic, give-’em-hell sort of way. I wasn’t about to lift any part of my hand from the unsteady bars to return the greeting, and in any case lacked the spiritual wherewithal.

  Fussing fretfulness about the transport situation, compounded by Birna’s failed last-minute attempts to drum up a volunteer force to accompany me, had left me vulnerable to more elemental fears: I was beginning to feel like a blithe young conscript being sent off for a brutal, filthy death at the front; a butterfly to be broken upon two wheels. Even people who knew nothing about cycling, nothing about sport, seemed to be aware that the Tour de France was a grim and vicious ordeal. The reality had been postponed and ignored for as long as possible, but now there it was, staring in spiteful digits from the little multi-function odometer at the front of the crossbar. 0.97 … 0.98 … are my shoulder blades supposed to be feeling like this already? … 0.99 … Jesus, that van just missed my elbow with its wing mirror … 1.0. Pain and danger in one kilometre. Three thousand six hundred and twenty-nine to go.

  Battered and clattered about in the otherwise empty guard’s van – a proper old one lined with planks and many generations of fag-jaundiced gloss paint – ZR3000 and I made our irregular progress to Dover. Someone had left behind a copy of the Daily Telegraph; I got to the sports section as we rattled across the green belt and there, staring out across some bleak-looking mudflats with his elbows resting on the lofted saddle of a muddy-wheeled mountain bike, was a man I recognised as Mr Christopher Boardman. Even in Britain the Tour hype had started already. Mr Boardman, not a man given to hyperbole, described the forthcoming challenge as ‘physically very unpleasant’; to drum up something more appropriately dramatic, the writer had introduced the interview with a quote from Greg LeMond, an American who in 1990 won the last of his three Tours. ‘At the end of the first stage your lungs are on fire, your legs feel as though they have been plunged into molten tar, your arms burn, your chest, your shoulders, your back, are aflame. Even your eyelashes ache. And ahead of you …’ We whooshed into a tunnel and I stood there in the deafening dark, doing a couple of half-hearted back stretches and picturing Greg wincing over his Fig Newtons as the Savlon kicked in. We whooshed out again and the italics juddered before my eyes. ‘And ahead of you lie another three weeks of Tour de France.’