French Revolutions

Robinson’s husband roused me with a gentle cough and a sorbet;
Jesus, I thought, jerking upright with an equine splutter: asleep at the table
at 8 p.m., and there were still 2,300 kilometres to go.
    ‘Excusez-moi,’ he began shyly, after
I had dabbed away a gossamer thread of chin drool, ‘votre nom — vous êtes
apparenté à l’ancien James Bond, Roger Moore?’
    ‘Oui — il est mon père,’ I said, a
little flatly, as during my visits to France over the years I had been asked
this question perhaps forty times.
    ‘Votre père!’
    He was so excited I didn’t have the
heart, or indeed the vocabulary, to explain that I had been making an
unimaginative joke. As I trooped out through the empty dining room, past the
trompe l’oeil murals and marbled panelling, I saw the Robinsons peering at me
excitedly from the door that led to the kitchen. This may explain why they
forgot to charge me for dinner, though not why I didn’t point this out to them.
I really am very sorry.
    I went up to the Lascaux caves the
next morning, in predictable rain, and trooped round a very cold recreation of
the world’s oldest art gallery. The originals were sealed up in 1963 after it
was noted that visitors’ breath was turning the ancient horses green, and
having spent an hour in there with a couple of dozen skunk-mouthed French OAPs
I can understand why. What’s really interesting about Lascaux isn’t so much the
paintings — the whole reproduction scam rather takes the gloss off that — as
the fact that they weren’t discovered until 1940, by four boys looking for
their dog. It was a mark of rural France’s vast emptiness that such a huge
place should be used by hundreds of generations of prehistoric hunters, then
lost again until halfway through the twentieth century. The guide accidentally
locked us in — one old man started crying when we realised it wasn’t a joke —
and by the time we were released five minutes later I’d started wondering
whether we’d be discovered in 17,000 years by four dogs looking for their boy.
And then get breathed on and go green.
    Tour riders, of course, never really
get to do much sightseeing. Paul Kimmage sourly recalls how sickening it was to
be cheered through purgatory by lolly-waving sunbathers, people so patently on
holiday when he was so patently not. After a day in the Alps during the 1984
Tour Laurent Fignon told reporters he had climbed like a tourist, going on to
critically compare the view from each peak; but then again, with only three
stages left and an unassailable nine-minute lead, he could afford to.
    Bugger the rain. The poppies were
still out, but were now all wet and limp. More slug tennis, more hills, more
rain — fewer restaurants. Foaming sweat into my airtight rainwear like a
nobbled racehorse, I bonked alongside the Vezere river and down through lofty
pine forests to the banks of the Dordogne. They liked their rivers big down
here: to my addled, sugar-free brain the Dordogne looked as broad as the Nile, and the bridge I crossed to Siorac seemed like the gateway to another world. But
don’t knock the bonk — in many ways it was. The sun abruptly burst through, the
clouds scurried away over Siorac’s severe-looking château to the horizon and in
four minutes I was getting a waitress to tilt the water off an outside table to
make way for my pizza. Sorry: pizzas.
    It was indeed a day of two halves.
With a hefty wind behind me I gradually picked up speed and maintained it so
effectively that I only realised in the evening that the road had been slightly
uphill most of the way. Momentum is all, I said sagely to myself, feeling
road-wise and fresh-legged as for an hour I whished along at 33 k.p.h. Before
lunch I’d been wondering how the pros kept going all day, but now I didn’t want
to stop. Waiting at a level crossing I heard the words ‘Astone Veelah’ leaking
through an open bar door and remembered that the FA Cup final was today, in
fact now; but I had bigger sporting fish to catch, to fry, to eat.
    When I finally did stop it was to
strip off portentously my rainwear and long johns: by morning he is a
mild-mannered transvestite ballerina, but in the afternoon he becomes...
Super-hardman. As I slipped on the Oakleys and remounted, there was a dash of
colour and another immaculate weekend-biker grandpa passed me. Right. One on
one. Mano a mano , or anyway old mano.
    The pannier/heel thwick was
constant but my front dérailleur was now issuing an