French Revolutions

raised it. ‘Chapeau!’
    Two hats in three days — it was a
good feeling. And ten minutes later I almost made it a — woo-hoo — hat trick,
defying the gloomy predictions of the girl at the ticket desk by covering the
vast acreage of tarmac between her office and the ferry in less than the ninety
seconds she had given me to get there before the ramp was raised. After an
all-hands-on-sundeck crossing I whisked through the customs at Dover, waved
past by officers who clearly couldn’t imagine an earnest sportsman like that
shoving a condom full of Kruggerands up his jacksy. More fool them!
    On the way out, the route from
station to ferry had seemed a white-knuckled, knee-buckled roller-coaster of
mountains; on the way home, I honestly didn’t even notice the change in
gradient. The same Victorian guard’s van and the same rattling progress, the
scenery dribbling by when the noise and commotion implied an indistinguishable
blur of greens and browns. We went through Staplehurst, and as I said this name
to myself I somehow knew that my former sloth was already beckoning, that my
endeavour had not been a turning point in my life, just a memorable detour, and
that a lot of this might be because cycling around Avignon had something about
it that cycling around Staplehurst did not.
    And two hours later I was cycling up
my road, oblivious to the highway hazards that had so unsettled me as I’d set
off for London Bridge. Birna opened the door and smiled, then looked down at
the flesh between shorts and socks and stopped.
    ‘Oh, you haven't ,’ she said.

Epilogue

     
     
    I can’t pretend it was unpleasant to
reacquaint myself with activities not focused either on doing an enormous
amount of physical exercise or recovering from it, but it certainly was odd. No
longer did each day begin with a wake-up gut-punch of nauseous fear at the
wretchednesses ahead; no longer did it end with a dead-eyed vigil at the dinner
table, wordlessly watching bits of wasp and Alp and sun-flayed nose drop into a
half-eaten plate of pasta. Nevertheless, it was at meal times that I had most
trouble. Breakfast had to be relearned as a time to sip tea and read the paper,
rather than an industrial process centred on funnelling a kilogram of Bran
Flakes down my gullet straight from the packet; at lunch and supper I searched
in vain for the tureens of Coca-Cola and the side orders of chips. I no longer
got drunk before reaching the fat bit of the wine bottle, and no longer avoided
a hangover if I proceeded down to the dimpled bottom. The weather forecast had
lost its status as the day’s most significant media event, and the nutritional
information on food packets played a diminished role in my nocturnal
ponderings.
    For the first few nights my legs
itched and twitched from lack of exercise; once I’d had to get up and run on
the spot in the bathroom for ten minutes, and once I very nearly went for a
bike ride. After two weeks my legs were stubbling up and those muscles
beginning to waste, fruit rotting on the bough. ZR was outside the back door
with the kids’ bikes, a spider’s web under the crossbar, its chain rusting in
the late-June rain.
    July was twelve hours old when the
Tour started, and fourteen hours after that, with Michelin maps all over the
bed and a sympathetic knot of anguish in my innards, I was embarking on the
first of twenty-one nightly vigils, tuning into Channel 4’s extended 2 a.m.
highlights. The Futuroscope prologue was won by an incredulous 22-year-old
Scotsman, David Millar, riding in his first Tour, but if I’d hoped to feel a
chest-swelling affinity I would be quickly disappointed. On the flat stages at
least, the cameras, their focus narrowed on the leading riders’ faces, would
show little that I recognised. Behind all those hoardings and gantries, the
view beyond was obscured by massed ranks of picnickers waving merchandise
thrown out by the advance caravan of publicity vehicles: yellow feeding bags,
polka-dot caps, green cardboard hands as big as bin lids.
    The corn was stiff and yellow and as
the race turned south the maize was up to the riders’ shoulders; inevitably,
the sunflowers were out. The stage into Limoges was won by a Frenchman, the
host nation’s first win for two years, but he had an Italian name and a face
like a proboscis monkey so they couldn’t get too excited about it. An ageing
Dutchman won the next after an epic breakaway and when Channel 4’s Paul Sherwen
interviewed him beside