French Revolutions

Napoletana-less amount to the final shitty centime, and was
preparing to fling this noisily on to his glass-topped counter when he raised
both hands in a grotesque parody of appeasement and in a voice as greasily
rancid as his ingredients said, ‘I make you a present. You no like, you must
pay — but is your first time in my town, so I make present.’ Imagining a putrid
gift-wrapped anchovy, I watched as he flicked a pen across the bill to delete
the Napoletana. Having paid, I turned for the door; then, with two dozen sets
of eyes boring into me, my brain suddenly delivered a present of its own: the
French word for disgusting. ‘Degeulasse!’ I shrieked as I crossed the
threshold.
    I didn’t think I’d slammed the glass
door, but as I flopped up the street in my espadrilles — surely the last-choice
footwear option for this type of confrontation — I heard an enraged bellow from
behind. ‘You break my restaurant, I telephone to ze police! Ze police!’
    ‘Allez-y!’ I screamed back, getting
into my stride, then immediately blundering out of it again with a stream of
Norman-accented Anglo-Saxon abuse of the ‘wankeur’ variety.
    Back in my hotel room, I washed my
shorts, socks and jersey in guilty triumph, tired but content. Was all this
physical endeavour somehow causing a build-up of testosterone and adrenalin
that suddenly overflowed into uncharacteristic aggression? Certainly all that
virgin stomach hair paid tribute to some sort of shift in my body’s chemistry.
The restaurant incident had been a bit unsightly, but reconstructing it I had
cause to be grateful. Unfortified by the hormones, I’d probably still be
cravenly sitting there now, a broken man paralysed and ensnared by this
smelly-fingered Svengali, a freak-show curiosity for the locals: ‘Mister
Anchois, le rosbif qui mange uniquement les poissons rancides.’

Four

     
    There’s always a lot of weather in
the Tour de France. In the space of a single day the riders can be slushing
about in halfmelted tarmac and half-melted snow: the two images that were my
default mental encapsulation of the race were Tom Simpson weaving deliriously
off the road as the mercury hit 131°F and the hypothermic ghost of Stephen
Roche juddering up through the icy mist of la Plagne. And then there’s the
rain.
    The morning Savlon ritual always
seemed like the prelude to some act of obscure ghastliness, and that day it
was. Heading south towards Limoges I’d soon be in the bottom half of France,
but you’d never have guessed it from the weather. The proprietress waved me off
into a vapoury drizzle that above walking pace imparted the sensation of being
sprayed in the face by one of those houseplant water-pumps on the mist setting.
I stopped to put on my rain top when the weather gods turned the nozzle to
squirt mode, and as the D975 ploughed its rural furrow between wheat fields and
herds of sturdy Limousin cattle they got out the fire hose.
    In seconds my helmet was pinging with
the spasmodic tattoo of heavy rain; in minutes so was the inside of my skull.
The scenery pulled down the shutters, and before long my blinking, slitted gaze
had dropped to the wet road in front of me. It was then that I got the idea for
a recreation I dubbed slug tennis, a name that adds a deceitful veneer of
respectability to what I can only shamefully describe as the bisection of
roadside arthropods beneath rotating rubber. In any case I soon stopped, though
only after noticing that at speeds below about 15 k.p.h. my shins got
splattered with orange stuff. When the rain redoubled its efforts — at la Trimouille,
20 kilometres down the road — I invoked the phrase traditionally applied to
games of soldiers, flinging ZR against a bar-tabac window and running through
the door.
    Inside was a Rita Heyworth barmaid
with brown-pencil eyebrows, along with the usual mid-morning clutch of
we’re-only-here-for-the-kir regulars. There was also a large tear-off-the-days
calendar, which informed me that today was St Eric’s Day. And, in bold
numerals, that it was also my birthday.
    In a way I was pleased that 18 May
had crept up on me unnoticed: this was exactly the sort of important personal
detail that a one-track-mind pro would have overlooked. With a little inward
sigh I accepted I was now as old as the oldest Tour de France winner, and
ordered a treble espresso.
    ‘Eh, Jacques — le Tour est arrivé!’
    I still have no idea how even the
tiniest communities each manage to support