French Revolutions

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 clicked 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