French Revolutions

extended and prodigiously
amplified drrrrrrr against the chain, so loud that I didn’t dare attack
Gramps too closely in case he heard me coming. Only when he began to labour on
the occasional inclines, up in the saddle, his gleaming silver machine swaying
extravagantly beneath him, did I put the hammer down (and how I’d been waiting
to use that most brutal of cycling clichés). I got him under a railway bridge
and, though I could hear him clicking down a few gears to get the revs up, when
I looked back after two minutes he was miles back. I’d left him a broken man.
    I’m slightly aware that this is
sounding rather unedifying, maybe just two steps away from a solvent-fuelled
knock-down-Ginger session at the sheltered-housing estate, but at the time I
felt only a rich glow of exultation. And there was more to come — just up the
road another team-jersey johnny was out for a spin; younger, this one, perhaps
in his early forties, and though he was clearly giving it some I left him for
dead without even turning round.
    Green-lined scenic stretches; valleys
of death where cement factories covered every abandoned butcher’s and baker’s
in a layer of beige powder — it was all the same to me. I had the bit between
my teeth and I didn’t want to spit it out. Then, speeding into Fumel — a
decaying industrial town about as nice as it sounds — I almost collided with a
group of green-and-white Crédit Agricole jerseys pedalling silkily towards me.
Crédit Agricole was Chris Boardman’s team, and hang on, didn’t that guy at the
front have a big nose...
    ‘Hey, Chris!’
    No one turned round, which was just
as well as afterwards I wondered what I would have said.
    ‘Hey, Chris! I just want to say
that... that I really love your stretching exercises — you know, the ones I
forget to do every morning and evening. Yeah, those old cat stretches, eh?
Yeah. Hang on, don’t go — my gears are a bit fucked up and I wondered if...’
    Still, it was an omen of sorts, even
though I subsequently learnt that as he’d already withdrawn from the Tour it
almost certainly wasn’t him. I’d been planning to stop at Villeneuve, but
feeling good (and having read that it was a dump) I decided to plough on the
extra 30 kilometres to Agen, where the stage would start the next day. Two Mars
Bars at Saint-Sylvestre-sur-Lot, a litre of grape juice just over the river at
Penne and I was off again, up a horrendous incline out of town and over the
warm fields.
    I knew by now that any place with haut in its name was to be avoided on gradient grounds, but there was no getting
round Hautefage and during its ascent I did hit a patch of rather poor form.
But it was nothing that couldn’t be undone by lying flat out in an orchard for
half an hour, helmet still on, flies crawling over my face unimpeded by even
the most half-hearted swat. When the road sloped down to the Tarn and Garonne, the pair of fluvial fatties that run through Agen, things picked up again. I was
topping 40 k.p.h. when I weaved perilously through a snapshot of chaotic
distress: a teenage girl watching in frenzied grief as a farmer boot-prodded a
roadside cat that hadn’t looked both ways when his tractor went by.
    Naturally it all caught up with me as
I creaked into Agen’s unpromising wino-ridden suburbs, jelly-legged and
suddenly irritable. Motorists were dawdling up a slightly Harlem-esque main
drag, on a loud and messy, hot Saturday night, and only after a lot of weaving
and tutting and manual obscenity did I manage to pilot my way to an Ibis hotel.
There are times when you want a hotel to be an experience, when you want to
play a glittering cameo role in the proprietor’s life and vice versa, and there
are times when you really don’t want any of that. All I wanted was a lavatory
that didn’t look like it might disembowel me, a basin that didn’t fill up with
next door’s old bathwater, and a breakfast buffet I could empty into my pockets
without the worry that in doing so I’d be sending the boss’s kids off to school
on empty stomachs.
    Having said that, the Agen Ibis was
located in an uncharacteristically active quarter, all garbage stench, mopeds
ridden down the pavement and 7-year-olds on the fourth floor throwing down
front-door keys to their barefooted friends in the street. The New Zealand couple I met while locking up my bike in the basement car park seemed rather
shell-shocked.
    ‘Aren’t you worried, cycling about on
your own around here?’