Gironimo! Read online

  I was stuck with the universally reviled Thompson bottom bracket, which someone – runaway favourite: scalp-scratching vendor – had hammered brutally and thus permanently into the threaded hole at the frame’s fundament. Thompsons needed constant adjustment and were a cheap and nasty feature of the cottered crank’s end game (sorry, but it isn’t every day I get to hold forth about engineering from a position of authority, so just suck it up). Acceptance of this hateful reality unleashed a torrent of frustrated mechanical violence. Having spent a fortnight trying to gently prise the right-hand crank off the axle, I strode out into the street, wedged this stubbornly conjoined pairing in the slats of a drain cover and beat the living shit out of it with a scaffold pole. The red mist went brown when the drain cover flew up into the air, plopping the crank/axle combo into the liquid badness. Without a thought I effected a plunging bare-arm rescue, replaced the grating and smote noisily on. Success, when it eventually came, was celebrated with a spittled, rutting grunt and a distant Polish snigger.

  The cotter pins got it next. Again tippy-tappy tinkering gave way to lusty metallic punishment. The left-hander was driven into its hole with no more than half a dozen hammer blows; after its distorting ordeal in the drain cover I wasn’t surprised to find the right-hand crank more reluctant to admit its new cylindrical companion. I did my best to force through this introduction, then my scarlet-faced, neighbourhood-desecrating worst. As I battered away, the head of the cotter pin began to bulge and split, like a wooden tent peg after years of mallet abuse. It didn’t go very deep into its hole, but didn’t look like it would be coming out of it any time soon. Too late now to judge the random assemblage of bearing cups and washers I had stuffed into the bottom bracket: this was a point of no return.

  I’d been carefully collating all of Max’s ancient brake bits into a Museum of Deceleration on top of the barbecue, but now snatched anything that looked like parts of a matching pair and clamped it roughly to the bike. Levers on the handlebars, calipers on the front forks and seat stays, all connected with age-old cables sheathed in heavyweight coiled metal.

  My new mood of slapdash recklessness was a poor fit with the task that now presented itself. The tontons had told me that wooden wheels could not be slowed down with traditional blocks: the heat thus generated quickly melted rubber, coating the rim in viscous black gel. The only effective brake-block materials, as used by professionals throughout Calzolari’s era and right up to the widespread adoption of alloy rims in the 1940s, were cork and leather.

  I emailed Ghisallo requesting a stockist for such blocks, and was promptly informed that none existed. Ugo, my contact at the firm, explained politely that customers who put Ghisallo wheels on their vintage bicycles were collectors, largely senior connoisseurs with no intention of ever taking their treasured museum pieces off the display stand and pushing them out onto the road. Further tonton-talk established the ludicrous truth: there was only one solution, and I’d find it wedged in a wine bottle. I went to work at once, hunched over a chopping board on the dining table, Stanley knife in one hand, Rioja stopper in the other. As a measure of how many improbable stupidities my family had recently witnessed me engaged in, my explanation of what I was up to procured no more than an indifferent hum.

  Fresh from this sojourn into squinting precision, the next morning I got back into the brutal, insouciant swing of things. I hammered the funny-angled seat post into the frame, then hammered the aged Brooks saddle into the funny-angled seat post. An intention to restore the very knackered copper-trimmed handlebar grips was dumped in favour of a new-old pair in plain dark wood, acquired at Anjou and now summarily squirted full of Evostik and banged onto the bar ends.

  I snatched a pair of freewheel sprockets from Max’s cog pile – one with slightly more teeth than the other, offering a change of gear at the mere flick of an entire wheel – then rashly bunged them in the white-spirit degreasing bath. When I scooped them out the larger one revealed the hurtful legend ‘FEMINA’ stamped into its surface: sire, you have a woman’s gear. Worse, it had seized solid. I shoved it in the bottom of the oven on a low heat to dry out, then forgot about it for two days, during which it shared many super-Celsius hours with a roast dinner and impregnated a lasagne with the tang of hydrocarbons. Movement, albeit noisy and begrudging, was restored by a forty-eight-hour soak in a tray full of leftover automatic gearbox oil I found in the shed. Better than nothing: onto the flip-flop hub it went, followed by the unpromisingly orange chain.

  Matthew came round and together we stretched and bullied the tubeless tyres onto the rims – a slapstick ordeal, like pulling a fitted rubber sheet over a greased billiard table. The next evening I toiled late into the early August dusk, sensing I was on the home straight and resolved to get it over with. Grab, slap, twist: on went the old bell, the brass pump, four of Max’s elegant but rather malleable axle wing nuts and that shamelessly rubbish handlebar-mounted twin-bidon rack, a frail and flimsy accident waiting to happen.

  Wild of hair and eye, gasping raggedly, I staggered back and beheld the Hirondelle, raised aloft in its work-stand gallows. I had done it, actually done it, I had put together a hundred-year-old bicycle with handlebars that moved the front wheel, with pedals that went round, with a back wheel that rotated via a chain when you did so, and stopped – woo-hoo! – when you squeezed a lever that pulled a cable that pressed a craggy oblong of hand-crafted wine-cork against the wooden rim. With trembling hands I released the Hirondelle from the stand, then carried it through the house and out into the street.

  For the first time I cocked a leg over that ancient crossbar, parked my arse on that ancient saddle, eased a foot down on that ancient pedal. The Hirondelle wobbled forward into the long suburban shadows, feeling unexpectedly light and skittish. My pulse raced and my mind with it. I imagined Number 7’s first ride, the pride of some knickerbockered young Gaul, saved up for at two francs a week. I imagined its last, pedalled creakily into the barn, a clunking, human-powered embarrassment superseded by a moped or a 2CV. I wondered how this combination of aged bike and ageing man would cope with what lay ahead, and soon: the date on my plane ticket to Milan lay just two weeks down the road. Most of all I wished passionately that the Polish painter, who had finished the job that very lunchtime, was here to see this. But then the front brake cable tore right through its housing in the lever, and I was extremely glad he wasn’t.

  The word ‘inauspicious’ might have been invented to describe this inaugural ride and the half-dozen that followed it, along with ‘why’, ‘ow’ and ‘bastard clown-flaps’. The next day I hammered the brake lever back into vaguely functional shape and set off to visit Matthew’s friend Suneil for a masterclass in the care and maintenance of tubular tyres. Two miles covered at walking pace sufficed to dispatch all four of my wine-cork brake blocks into the gutter, along with three of the silly little springs that returned the calipers to their position when the brake lever was released. Suneil helpfully pointed out that I’d installed all the calipers back to front, but even with this significant wrong righted for the return journey I came home minus one block and two springs.

  My next ride round the block ended with the handlebars pointed at the floor; the one after shifted the pedal cranks from the traditional six o’clock position to quarter past seven. A lone, reedy shriek from the bottom-bracket area swelled into a full-bike orchestra of rattling groans. The rear wheel went suddenly off-kilter, and after three hours of soul-draining spoke-fiddle I realised the issue was the axle supporting it, which had bowed in the middle. I found a solitary compatible spare in one of Max’s boxes, along with a number of old leather toe-straps, which I lashed round parts of the bike in a mad-looking but generally successful bid to shut them up.

  With two days to go I rode the Hirondelle to Lance’s workshop in Ealing, packing three extra brake blocks and half a dozen springs from a job lot of 150 acquired through eBay. I only needed one of each but still wheeled it in on foot: halfway there one of the pedals literally fel
l to pieces, cheerfully scattering the bus lane with fractured metal and ball bearings. Questions of the most fundamental nature were being asked of my ancient machinery, and being answered with a long, splattering raspberry.

  Lance had very generously offered to give my bike a last-minute once-over, and though it plainly needed at least a thrice-over, just being in his workshop made everything feel better. It was the stuff of wholesome male fantasy in there, a cosy, oil-stained man-nest dominated by the shell of a Sweeney Jag and an Al Capone-era mobster-mobile, whose roof Lance was loudly reshaping with what I now know to be a cross-pein hammer. Stacked claustrophobically amongst the tool racks were dusty display cases of old Dinky cars, vintage sunglasses, enamelled garage signs, and a naked shop mannequin with hubcaps for tits. And hanging from the low-slung ceiling and the breeze-block walls, bike after bike after bike, a dozen or more immaculate vintage track and road racers.

  This was the lair of a man who knew all I needed to know, who could do everything that needed doing. Lance put down his hammer, walked over, stooped down by the Hirondelle and said: ‘What the fuck have you done to those cotter pins?’

  I was there for the rest of the day, soaking up well-earned reproach and helping to inch the Hirondelle closer to road-readiness. Lance had me remove and discard the surviving pedal – ‘no great loss, they’re total shit’ – and retrieved a far sturdier replacement pair from some buried stash of period components. With surgical force he expelled the half-squashed cotter pin, tapering a substitute to fit the hole via the use of what he called his ‘Polish lathe’ – an electric drill with an abrasive bit. I watched him delicately tap the new pin home. ‘Never use a forearm with a hammer. Got to let your wrist and fingers do what you’re seeing in your head. It’s a feel thing.’ I later found out that the young Lance had crowned his metalworking traineeship at Rolls-Royce by fashioning a cube of steel more geometrically precise than that managed by any other apprentice at the firm before or since.

  Still, the cock-eyed, cork-wobble embarrassment that was my Hirondelle’s braking system didn’t seem to concern him, any more than the various mechanical death-rattles or the ovoid profile stubbornly discernible in both wheels. ‘Anything that’s bolted on doesn’t really matter,’ he announced airily. ‘Just have it replaced or get some local feller to fix it. Italians will do anything if you wheel out a few ciaos and benissimos and promise not to shag their sisters.’

  Lance plugged in a caged inspection lamp and popped on his Harry Palmer bifocals. ‘Structural stuff is different,’ he murmured, holding the light close to the Hirondelle’s vital joints and squinting at them intently. ‘My bikes are old, but this thing’s a fucking antique. If any of these frame lugs go, that’s the end of your trip.’ He lingered over the seat post. ‘See that mark?’ I tried to, couldn’t, but hummed assent anyway. ‘Hairline crack. If it starts to go you’ll hear it. Old steel’s useful like that.’ He stood up, and by way of demonstration let out a terrible rending shriek. ‘I’m jealous, you’re a lucky fucker. Take care.’

  It was quite a send-off, and my breakthrough incident-free ride home was crowned with another. Waiting for a green light at the fearsome multi-junction by the end of my road, I heard a distant shout defy the North Circular Road traffic. ‘Hey, mate! Mate!’ I looked around and spotted its owner, a lightly bearded young man on a plain-black fixie five lanes away. ‘Top bike, mate! You doing the Eroica or what?’ The only attention the Hirondelle had previously aroused on the street was in agonised response to the blackboard-raking dissonance of its progress.

  ‘Actually!’ I shouted back, before the other lights changed and a column of buses passed between us. When they’d gone, so had he.

  A strange new mood sidled into my head that evening, hitching a ride with the third glass of red. I went to the back window and gazed out at the Hirondelle, propped against the bike stand and glinting in my neighbour’s Stalag Luft patio searchlight. Hope, excitement, anticipation: for the first time, I could imagine myself successfully achieving what I had set out to achieve, piloting that ancient velocipede all the way round Italy in Alfonso Calzolari’s ghostly wheel-tracks. Halfway through the fourth glass I understood that we had a thing going on, me and that old dear out on the patio. Peas from the same wrinkled pod, a couple of road-rusty veterans shackled together for one last comeback. I may not have mentioned that my family had at this point been away with the Icelandic in-laws for three days, and that by the time they returned I would be gone, off on a mammoth journey of unknown duration. Glass five reminded me.

  The next forty-eight hours hurtled by in a nauseous blur of panic. So much still had to be done, most of it incredibly fundamental for this stage of the game. I affixed the seat-post bracket that would support my saddlebag. I fashioned a canvas insert for the bidon carrier, to dampen the brain-melting milk-crate rattle of metal bottles in metal frame. I rooted out Max’s rustiest pair of toe-clips and bolted them on to Lance’s pedals, then threaded them with his crustiest pair of toe-straps.

  The clips were branded ‘Christophe’, in appropriate honour of Eugène Christophe, the man who embodied the heroic awfulness of those early grand tours. Leading the 1912 Tour de France up the Pyrenees, Christophe broke his front forks, shouldered the stricken bike many mountainous miles to the next village and forged himself a new set at the blacksmith’s, where the several hours he had already lost were supplemented with a further time penalty for receiving illegal outside assistance: a watching official had spotted a local boy pumping the forge bellows. Those were the days. And, give or take a couple of years, those were now my days.

  Also, I packed. This wasn’t supposed to take long, on the grounds that I wasn’t taking much. Twelve years before, the fitter, sillier me had set off to ride the Tour de France route with a bulging pair of panniers crammed full of such featherweight professional essentials as six copies of procycling magazine and the 1,123-page Rough Guide to France. I had also taken along a wardrobe of après-cycling wear to suit a variety of moods and occasions, an electric razor the weight of a Neolithic hand-axe, and a lucky house brick. (I wish I was joking – and my wish is granted!)

  With a combined age of 146, the Hirondelle and I weren’t up to that sort of burden, any more than my tiny South Korean canvas bag could accommodate it. At the same time, authentic necessity dictated I carry whatever the bike and I would need to survive. Food, drink, spares, tools, knee-length sou’westers: the 1914 rules decreed you lugged it all. So: no spare kit, whatsoever. I’d wash my entire cycling outfit – socks, shorts, jersey, every fetid, woolly inch of it – every night. Common decency and the probability of being refused service demanded a change of clothes for the evening; I assembled a solitary lightweight outfit. All my shoes seemed too hefty, though, so I went to the TK Maxx up the road with our digital kitchen scales and weighed all their size 42s (you can get away with anything in that place – I once saw an eight-man piggyback race around homeware).

  The 516g pair of hideous canvas slip-ons I came home with filled half the saddlebag. I stuffed one shoe with micro-toiletries: a mini tube of toothpaste, a sawn-off toothbrush, concentrated detergent/shampoo, four disposable razors plus a tiny bottle of shaving oil/chain lube. And a wrinkled, half-empty tube of Savlon, left over from my Tour ride’s fight against saddle sores. (How I looked forward to that morning ritual: one handful down the front of the shorts, another down the back, and off down the hotel stairs for an oily-loined breakfast.) The other shoe could swallow no more than those non-authentic but sadly unavoidable contemporary companions, phone plus camera plus chargers. I scrunched and punched my pitiful capsule wardrobe into what little space remained, wedged in two 1:200,000 maps of northern Italy and Paolo’s book down the sides, then with empurpling effort yanked the bag straps into their final notch.

  Max had furnished me with an old leather tool bag, angled to fit snugly in the meeting point of top tube and down tube. The bare essentials of daily maintenance – even my lightest pliers weighed almost as much as a h
ideous canvas shoe – had its ancient seams straining. I glanced helplessly around at the sizeable heap of stuff I had yet to accommodate, then for the penultimate time pushed the Hirondelle out of the front door.

  Sixteen hours to go, and this was my first ever experience of toe-clips: impressive unreadiness even by my standards. Easy enough to ram the first foot into its little cage while stationary, but cajoling home the second in motion seemed like a knack it might take 3,162km to master. Extracting at least one foot before coming to a halt was the more urgent skill, though, especially as I’d soon be dressed up like the kind of daft twit who absolutely deserved to topple stupidly onto the tarmac at every set of traffic lights. Perhaps I’d find the clips easier when I was wearing the shoes of Gerard Lagrost. Perhaps by now I should have tried wearing those shoes for more than eleven seconds.

  I wobbled round west London for a farewell plunder. I came away from Matthew’s with a pair of old cone spanners and an illegally modern multi-tool, from Suneil’s with a roll of tubular-tyre tape and a bottle of puncture sealant, and from Jim’s with a spoke key of the requisite diameter. Nobody welled up and clamped a quivering hand on my shoulder, the heartless bastards, but I still pedalled home feeling that I wouldn’t just be letting myself down if I messed this whole thing up. Maybe this is why, cresting the bridge outside Boston Manor tube station, I suddenly decided to give the Hirondelle its first dose of full beans, standing up in the saddle and forcing those old cranks round, sweeping past two homecoming commuters in high-vis tabards. The whole bike creaked and shrieked and grated and shook, and I pedalled on, harder, ever more astounded that nothing was giving way, and glad that at least when it did I was about seven feet from the Brentford branch of Evans Cycles.