French Revolutions

until I topped Hanger Hill two miles up the road.
    This effort, coupled perhaps with an
unwisely piquant supper that had paid extravagant homage to a lifelong fondness
for Tabasco, malt vinegar and grapefruit juice, so disturbed my body’s pH
balance that freewheeling down towards the Hanger Lane Gyratory System I began
to feel very unwell. It started as a stitch, I suppose, but the little man with
the needle soon got carried away. Wincing, I dismounted alongside a huddle of
pavement smokers outside a large office building, with the sensation of being
internally tattooed. During my many subsequent distress stops, I established
that temporary relief could be procured by bending double and stoutly pushing
the left side of my stomach in with both hands. This was not a pose one would
choose to sustain by the side of a public highway, and I would guess that my
resultant impersonation of a man attempting to remove his own spleen attracted
some interest among the rush-hour commuters of northwest London.
    I arrived at the Harrovian residence
of my friend Paul Rose looking like Stephen Roche at la Plagne and sounding
like Stephen Hawking at la Scala. Helping me over his threshold, he set about
my rehabilitation. This process incorporated three beers, six Rennies and
several dozen viewings of a crafts-channel cable TV video clip wherein an
erstwhile innocuous sculptor expresses abrupt and radical disgust for his
half-finished feline creation by decapitating it with a single, lusty uppercut.
It had taken me two hours to get there; the return leg required a quarter of
this time.
    Even so, it had not been an
encouraging maiden voyage. In fact, if I had been planning to cycle to, say, Oxford or Brighton, I’d probably have called it off. In a strange way, only the sheer
scale of my itinerary stopped me from losing heart: that daftly inflated figure
of 3,630 kilometres was difficult to take seriously.
    The night before leaving, very
slightly drunk, I’d wandered down my road to the river. It was balmy; a group
of girls sat around a cheerily crackling bonfire on the foreshore; before I’d
even left, the elements and environment were in cahoots to engentler
homesickness. Almost inevitably there was a little crowd of French students on
and around a towpath bench, and almost inevitably they were talking with some
excitement about the Tour de France. Though I only got the odd noun —
‘Armstrong’, ‘Virenque’, ‘EPO’ (the notorious haemoglobin-boosting drug) — the
relish was unavoidable. The race was still over a month off and already the
expatriate youth of Gaul were on amber alert.
    ZR3000 was propped by the front door,
and on the way back in I squeezed round it, wondering how I felt about my
bicycle now and how those feelings would have changed after 2,256 miles. Bowed
down with baggage, the machine’s lean, hungry look was gone: it was like
putting a roof-rack on a Lotus. My children had fulsomely decorated the
saddle’s diminutive surface area with Cinderella stickers (you shall go
to the balls, Cinders); there were already long scratches and an ugly dent
where my trailing cleat had failed to clear the crossbar when I repeatedly
dismounted in clumsy agony en route to Harrow.
    Was I really going to cock my leg
over that crossbar and not uncock it for a month and a bit? As a perennially
shiftless slacker I had been urged more than once to get on my bike. To think that it should come to this.

Two

    Cycling is the national sport of France, so I’m slightly annoyed with myself for failing to predict that it is consequently
impossible to take bicycles on French trains. Or, even more appropriately, that
it is possible, but only on randomly selected local services, and then on
condition that the bicycle is dismantled, boxed, put on a freight train
scheduled to show up seventy-two hours after your own before being thrown into
the canal by a mob of opticians protesting about biscuit subsidies.
    Newly acquainted with this reality
brief hours before departure at least gave me something else to think about as
my family pushed me out through the door into a glorious morning. Seven stages
began some distance from where the previous one had ended; I’d hoped to take
trains between these points. More immediately — in fact in, um, six hours’ time
— I’d hoped to be on a train from Calais to Futuroscope, the technological theme
park near Poitiers where the Tour was to start.
    Organisation is not my strongest
suit. When I