French Revolutions

chase.
    Interestingly, it wasn’t the ups that
did for me, but the downs. The D704 was on a roll, and every time I got near
enough to read the old blokes’ sponsors’ logos at the brow of a hill, they’d
lean and glide and swoop nose-to-tail down the other side, leaving me to flail
distantly about the wet carriageway, convulsing over the pot-holes. Whenever I
tried to raise my belaboured behind from the saddle the weight of the panniers
threatened to pull us all over, and above about 3 5 k.p.h. the wind rushing
through my ears eerily replicated the sound of a motor vehicle nosing up to my
rear wheel. The answer to all these problems was to grip the handlebars so
tightly that the whole of my upper body would be in spasm by the time I got to
the bottom. It also seemed slightly unfair that though none of us had
mudguards, mine was the only jersey splattered from coccyx to nape with a
healthy covering of road slurry.
    When the muscles of the arse became
an issue — and frankly it was about time — I pulled over, just as one of my
conquerors turned to deliver what even at 200 yards was clearly a triumphant
smirk. In half an hour of buttock-punching, hamstring-yanking, chest-broiling
pursuit I had boosted my average speed for the day from a pedestrian 18.9
k.p.h. to a... oh, to a pedestrian 19.1 k.p.h.
    I tried to rationalise the depressing
implications of these statistics by tackling hills in a new way. The key, I
decided, was to stop at the top of each and award myself a treat: a sip of
water, a blow of the nose, a slow-motion cleated fall into the wet brambles. It
worked until the rain reached pause-discouraging levels, and with my average
speed (or ‘AVS’, as the stop-looking-at-me-like-that odometer would have it)
stubbornly static I gave up and dropped back.
    One hundred and one kilometres into
my day I got to Montignac, saw a sign saying ‘Alight here for the Lascaux caves’ and decided that would do. I suppose Montignac has only prospered due to its
proximity to the famous palaeolithic hunters’ paintings, but it seemed a lovely
place in its own right: timberframed medieval houses with lopsided balconies
overlooking a big river, a splendid pyramid-roofed, ashlar-colonnaded
Napoleonic town hall and a venerable thirteenth-century hospital housing a
clueless tourist office (‘Le Tour? Oui, er... par ici, et après... Périgueux?
Brive?’ — both improbably located). I imagine Montignac must be completely
overrun in high season — in the estate agents’ windows all the details were in
English — but on a belatedly sunny mid-May evening I had the place more or less
to myself.
    Just up the main drag from the
tourist office I found a lovely hotel run by a lovely Mrs Robinson proprietress
— white capri pants, snakeskin loafers — who ran her establishment exactly as
my family would if they ran a hotel: lovely old Victorian wallpaper and
high-back velvet thrones in the bedrooms; ceiling-mould and hairy plugholes in
the bathrooms. Another feature of the latter was a deeply disturbing lavatory,
the watery base of its bowl containing a waste-disposal grinder guarded by two
rubber-starfish sphincters. It took me five minutes to find the flushbutton, and when I pressed it a large pink pill was
mysteriously ejected by the starfishes with such force that it flew into the
bath. It could have been worse. Pedal all day and there’s only the tiniest
residual evidence of those 9,000 calories.
    I had a slow beer by the river,
opening out the maps and watching some sort of swallowy bird swooping down to
skim the ripples. On to Michelin 235 — an exciting moment, as this one,
subtitled Midi-Pyrénées, revealed that I was unequivocally in the south of France. On the other hand, I was becoming progressively more weary every evening. Having
spent all day looking like — and in fact being — an imbecilic two-wheeled
tourist, I normally made at least some effort at camouflage in the evenings,
buying the local paper and pretending to read it, nodding and tutting at the TV
news in bars. That night, though,
    I simply couldn’t be arsed, stumbling
listlessly around Montignac with an armful of badly folded maps, in skin-tight
black rain leggings, white socks and black espadrilles, like a Bolshoi reject.
    I was so tired, in fact, that halfway
through the second of three splendid courses of Périgord cooking at the hotel,
my head sagged limply towards the riot of linen, crystal and electroplated nickel
silver. Mrs