French Revolutions

old
pro’s trick picked up from Paul Kimmage’s book (how^ monstrous it seemed that,
having flogged themselves half to death in the saddle, peloton riders were
expected to relax by laundering their own filthy kit in a hotel bidet). Then,
round-shouldered and espadrilled, I shuffled out to inspect the town that from
the afternoon of 2 July to the following morning would be the focus of the
sporting world’s attention.
    By being rather ugly and boring,
Loudun offered the first suggestion that towns prepared to pay apparently large
sums for brief glory as a ‘ville d’étape’ — one where a stage ended or began —
were invariably hoping to rectify some sort of image problem. The threatened
thunderstorm had come and gone during my slack-jawed coma, leaving the messy
streets wet and empty; the only sign of life was a lot of bad-tempered shouting
from a snooker hall under the scary hotel that I’d tried first and was
delighted (not to say astonished) to be told was full. The Rough Guide could find no reason even to mention Loudun in the course of its 1,124 pages,
and it wasn’t hard to see why. From the trolleys upside-down in the pot-holed
supermarket car park to the sombre ranks of dirty-windowed nineteenth-century
terraces there was the drab, neglected air of a place where there was nothing
to do and yet so much to be done.
    A lot of the small towns I’d passed
through that day had introduced their unique attractions beneath the road sign
that welcomed you in: Ouzilly — ses parcs, Lencloitre — son château. Approaching
Loudun the locals were getting desperate: son camping was the best one
place could do; the next could only manage son parking. Loudun itself
gave up altogether (though did proclaim to visitors that it had been twinned
with a town in Burkino Faso, presumably because no one else would have it).
Outside a bar near the centre, however, I did see an ad for a modest casino
wooing punters with the memorable boast son craps.
    There were National Front posters on
most of the many abandoned houses; the youth whose parents once occupied these
places had presumably gone off to the Big Smoke, or at least the small puff
that was Tours, 60 kilometres to the northeast. The few who remained now
cruised mournfully about in sorrily customised, black-glassed old Renaults
souped up by the traditional bucolic expedient of long-term exhaust neglect.
Hordes of discarded blue flyers rain-glued to the pavement suggested that the
place to go for club-style nightlife was Morton, which I later noticed was a
tiny village over 20 kilometres away. Having perused the local estate-agent
windows it wasn’t hard to conclude that however tempting the possibility of
trading your poky little London flat for a huge nineteenth-century château with
turrets and woodland, you probably wouldn’t want to do so if it meant having to
do the weekly food shopping in Loudun.
    Still, they were trying. After an
aimless fifteen minutes of rather zombie-like, malnourished blundering, I
eventually found myself in what must have been the old town, up on a slight
hill, its narrow, meandering streets brightened with fountains and frantically
scrubbed limestone. And wandering at random into a cellar crêperie, I pondered
that though there isn’t much to be said for being marooned in a dead-duck,
dead-dull town, at least in a French one you get to eat well. Around me, even
on a wet Tuesday night, shifty, sniggering kids were doing it en masse,
clinking glasses of rosé and tossing their salades vertes , whereas in
England they’d have been hanging dimly around a bench with a damp bag of chips,
trying to think up a new way of melting stuff.
    With the tolerance that the mean and
hungry man experiences on finding himself presented with a large plate of cheap
food, I set about a Bible-sized lasagne in a mood of rapprochement. The NF
posters were old and faded. The Burkino Faso link imbued the town with a sense
of exotic mystery. The arrival of the Tour would resurrect Loudun’s flagging
fortunes and unite the dispirited populace; thinking about it, even my hotel
had been getting ready for the big day, or anyway thrown all its old carpets
out into the back garden. Brushing aside the deleterious effects of three
thousand calories on an empty stomach and four glasses of red on an empty head,
I even attempted to enquire of the unkind-looking waitress what the Tour meant
to Loudun. She stared grimly as I floundered through my syntax, then delivered
a