French Revolutions

I stopped or went
uphill, and they were right. The road northeast out of town offered views of
some arrestingly attractive chateaux, but when, at Dissay, I stopped to look at
one I found myself sagging into involuntary siesta almost immediately. Besides,
I wanted to get some kilometres under my belt. After all, by now the real
riders would be... yes, actually, where would they be? I kept forgetting I was
making the route up as I went along. The best I could divine from the procycling map was a sweeping spiral, up to the east of Futuroscope, then north to Loudun,
but trying to extrapolate anything cartographically meaningful from this was
like giving someone directions from my house to Sainsbury’s using a child’s globe.
    Still, I was heading in the right
general direction and it was a splendid day if you kept on the move. Birds and
crickets shrieked manically from roadside copses that exuded a strong smell of
hot tea; old women in straw hats and housecoats prodded hoes at gaudily
immaculate beds of irises. During a white-knuckle descent through Saint-Cyr I
broke the 50 k.p.h. speed limit — a defining moment in my fledgeling career as
a cyclist — and swallowed my first fly. I don’t know why I swallowed a fly.
Perhaps I’d die.
    And curiously enough, in accordance
with the generally accepted rule that steep downward hills are followed by
steep uphill ones, after five minutes I almost had.
    Simon had urged me to take advantage
of the clear-plastic map-envelope thing on top of my handlebar bag, which
permitted time-saving on-the-move navigation (albeit at the expense of taking
another large step towards visual association with the worst sort of beardy
hiking-socked cyclo-dullard). He had also recommended taking a set of hugely
detailed ramblers’ maps, but because this scheme involved the traumatic
logistical undertaking of saving weight by mailing relevant batches of maps to
poste-restante boxes in pre-booked hotels and sending the old ones home, I
hadn’t bothered. A more generously scaled map might have been more forthright
in identifying the ascent of Beaumont as a labour straight out of Classical
mythology; an illegibly minuscule couple of chevrons was all Monsieur Michelin
had to say for himself, other than ‘Please don’t hurt me — I’m really
stupid-looking and fat.’
    As those with more experience than I
had predicted, the heat soon become a very real issue as the road narrowed and
rose; dropping my hazy gaze to the pitted asphalt immediately before me I was
soon blinking body brine out of my eyes. I had not yet begun to master ZR3000’s
embarrassment of gears, forever clunking down at the front dérailleur when I
meant to go up one at the back, but it had seemed inconceivable that I’d have
any occasion to engage bottom gear, number twenty-seven, until I crossed the
Pyrenean tree line. But though Beaumont was no doubt a mere pimple in
professional cycling terms, here I was, grinding jerkily down into gear
twenty-seven with the gradient still rising and the summit nowhere in sight.
    ‘Spin the pedals,’ I’d been told by
Martin Warren. ‘Get in an easy gear and keep the revs high.’ Mr Boardman had
been more specific. ‘Maintain an average pedal cadence of around 80 revs per
minute,’ he’d said. The small parts of my brain not blaring manically like
klaxons calculated this was more than one turn a second; surveying the humid,
tortuous progress of my damp and reddening legs it seemed obvious that I was
nearer 80 revs per hour.
    Looking like Bernard Hinault giving
birth to a cement mixer I made it to the village at the top, distantly grateful
that because this was a mid-afternoon in France there was no one around to see
me. At Poitiers I’d filled both my 750-millilitre bottles — or bidons, as I would quickly be bullied into calling them — and already they were empty.
It was 40 broiled and brainless kilometres before I found anywhere to refill
them, a grotty bar in Angliers through whose nicotined net curtains I could see
a clutch of Tuesday-afternoon regulars sitting before little glasses of fluorescent
aperitifs.
    Until the Seventies it was a Tour
tradition for riders to conduct lightning beverage raids in bars like this when
the race passed through, tolerated and even eagerly awaited by the proprietors.
As a silly-looking English tourist I hadn’t anticipated the same reception, but
as soon as I stumbled in with an empty in each hand the place came to life.
Dogs barked; a