French Revolutions

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