French Revolutions

Prologue

     
     
    Parasailing, pot-holing, the luge:
even those sporting activities that appear to require no skill invariably
demand an abundance of human qualities that I might only hope to acquire if the
Wizard of Oz was in a particularly generous mood. But we can all ride a bike.
We have all known what it is to grind agonisingly up a steep hill and freewheel
madly down the other side. In its unique dual capacity as mode of transport and
childhood accessory, the bicycle has played a formative role in all our lives.
    But thinking back, I find that my
cycling memories are imbued less with a nostalgic sepia glow than a stark
fluorescent glare of fear and failure. Reading the back cover of Rough Ride ,
the autobiography of former Irish professional cyclist Paul Kimmage, I feel
profoundly chastened. Describing a portentous first ride at the age of 6,
Kimmage fondly recalls his father immediately removing the stabilisers before
plonking his son on the saddle and pushing him off across the car park in front
of their Dublin flat. ‘I wobbled, but basically had no trouble and was
delighted with myself.’ Replace ‘trouble’ with ‘balance’, and ‘delighted with
myself’ with ‘repeatedly injured’, and you have the encapsulation of my own
debut.
    I lived in the tricycle age for far
too long, squeaking about Walpole Park on a maroon three-wheeler, its capacious
tin boot flamboyantly emblazoned with a royal coat of arms my father had
mysteriously acquired from somewhere. It may be that in this fashion I appeared
a ghastly little ponce. After all, I hadn’t learned to ride without that
shaming third wheel until I was almost 8, being pushed again and again across
our back garden on a hand-me-down girl’s bike by an increasingly frustrated mother.
I was not a natural. I lacked the reckless bravado that propelled other boys to
pedal across Ealing Common with their arms ostentatiously aloft, or, worse,
nonchalantly folded.
    My first real bike was an ancient
machine whose name had a stolid, Empire twang, something like Wayfarer or
Valiant, and whose cast-iron forthrightness of design you could never quite
shake off by removing the mudguards and fitting a pair of cow-horn handlebars.
I should by rights have aspired to a Raleigh Chopper, but then Tomas Kozlowski
got one, and seeing those already burgeoning Slavic buttocks unappealingly
cleaved by that slender bench saddle I understood with a youthful prescience of
which I am still quietly proud that Raleigh Choppers were laughably awful. So
it was with Valiant between my pistoning young knees that I breathlessly eluded
park-keepers seeking to enforce the new ‘Sling Your Hook, Eddy Merckx’
no-cycling rule; his were the wheels that shot across mad Mrs Lewis’s feet and
prompted her to send my parents an admonitory letter that famously included the
word ‘delinquent’. My Valiant was there outside Gunnersbury Park when a trainee
psychopath treated me to my first encounter with a number of other new but much
shorter words; there too when, perhaps four seconds later, I accepted that
fondly remembered inaugural smack in the mouth.
    A succession of inherited shopping
models followed, and I had to wait until my sixteenth birthday for my first new
bicycle, a ten-speed racer of East German origin. On the way to pick it up, my
poor father felt obliged to usher his youngest son into manhood with a dilatory
lecture on birth prevention, one whose more poignant euphemisms would recur to
me whenever I rode it thereafter. Mercifully almost every component shattered,
buckled or split within weeks — I had never previously thought of corrosion as
a process you could actually sit down and watch happen. On the other hand, its
demise did mean that the balance of those important mid-teenage years was spent
wobbling about on my father’s foldable Bickerton.
    My girlfriend at that time, in fact
my wife at this time, had a recurring dream in which I would pedal away from
her house naked on the Bickerton. If I tell you that the Bickerton resembled
two dwarf unicycles clumsily welded together you will understand that this was
not an erotic dream. The Bickerton was a ludicrous machine with the handling
characteristics of a human pyramid. Its unique selling point was portability,
an asset summarised by a long-running television commercial in which a haughty
executive defied a platform full of generously trousered commuters to snigger
as he laboriously hauled a huge sack of metallic angles