French Revolutions

dress singing, ‘Bernard, Bernard, je m’appelle Bernard’. It
was an unbridled, primal rage that one could quite easily imagine being sated
only by a fight to the death with a load of dogs.
    Chris Boardman, however, was just a
friendly bloke with a big nose, peering mildly into the Southport mist with an
expression that said, ‘On a clear day I can see me mam’s house from here.’ He
was an exceptional cyclist, but he was no Cannibal. If you had to give him a
nickname it would be The Grocer.
    Half-heard snatches of notably less
flattering epithets jeered down from French-exchange shoplifters on the sundeck
as I freewheeled down the gangplank at Calais. But with ZR3000 weaving
perilously through the articulated mayhem and on to French soil, I didn’t
really care. It had been a splendid crossing: I’d been the only cyclist on the
ferry, and had ridden in through the cavernous bow doors exhilarated by the
peculiarity of doing so, lashing my bike to a rusty railing beside those huge
trailers of whatever it was of ours that the French could possibly admit to
wanting. No less significantly, my mood had been lightened by the successful
realisation of The Daytrip Gambit: twelve-hour returns are invariably much
cheaper than singles, and I’d managed to blag the bike and me on to the boat
for a fiver. Things had improved further with the mid-Channel epiphany that my
logistical woes could of course be neatly resolved by hiring a car in Calais,
dismantling the bike (stick that one on the back burner just for the moment),
shoving it in the boot and dropping the car off in Poitiers.
    ‘You are not maybe a mechanical man,’
said the Avis official at the ferry terminal, watching as I made a mockery of
the expressions ‘quick-release hub’, ‘folding rear seat’ and ‘big boys don’t
cry’. ‘Affirmative, master,’ I said, in an idiotically camp C3-PO trill that failed
to deter him from easing the now alarmingly cockeyed ZR3000 out of my battered
hands. ‘A beautiful vélo’, he continued, working with neat efficiency as he
filled my Volkswagen Polo with bicycle parts. ‘You do a tour?’
    I knew it was going to sound ridiculous,
but I said it anyway. ‘No. I do the Tour.’
    Having mentally purged this exchange
of its denouement, wherein Monsieur Avis turned slowly to showcase a cheesy
‘that’s the spirit, Tiger’ wink of the sort normally reserved for young nephews
who have expressed an intention to pilot the Space Shuttle, I set off for
Poitiers in a portentous state of mind. With ZR3000’s front wheel grazing my
neck, I barrelled down a succession of autoroutes, many of them heading the
right way, feeling like the Danish cyclist at the end of the 1973 Tour of Italy
video I’d watched the night before, cheerily shoving his bike into the boot of
a Peugeot 504 and speeding off into the Rome rush-hour with a farewell scratch
of those big sidies. Off to the next race; wherever I lay my bike, that’s my
home; have bike, will ride; this bike’s for hire — it’s a tough job being a
pro, but someone’s got to do it. And here I was, flashing past old farmers
dangling their leathery left arms out of Citroën van windows, my cleats
clicking the clutch, doing it.
    Sustaining this spirit for the six
and a half hours it took me to get to Futuroscope was a challenge, but
shuffling into the painstakingly anonymous reception of the Ibis hotel I was
still clinging on to a thread. It was 10.15 p.m., and I caught the restaurant
by the skin of my teeth; feasting alone among the impatient staff, I
singlemindedly stocked up on carbohydrates before stumbling up to bed for a
mercifully dreamless sleep.
    Six hours later I was awake and
peering blearily out of the window at the dawn-fringed outlines of some of the
huge, mirrored tower blocks housing the enormous virtual-reality rides that are
Futuroscope’s raison d’être. Being flung down ski slopes, hurtling through the
Milky Way (‘a vertigo-inducing 3-D nightmare’ said the Rough Guide to France [620 grams], which was more than enough to put me off): there are cheaper ways
of losing a pair of sunglasses and making yourself feel sick. Indeed, I was
about to do one of them.
    With its hordes of picnicking
families and unashamed commercialism, the Tour de France is somehow a very
Fifties event. It’s appropriate, then, that the Tour regularly visits
Futuroscope, whose breathless glorification of technological progress is the
epitome of post-war, Dan Dare