French Revolutions

asked the concerned wife as I hoisted my belongings
towards the stair door leading up to reception.
    ‘I think I can look after myself,’ I
said, fatigue stretching my words out into a vainglorious drawl, one whose
effect was compromised when I pushed against the door and was completely unable
to shift it. ‘Bloody panniers,’ I mumbled cravenly as the husband came over and
levered it open with one hairy hand.
    Refuelling outside a studenty
bar-restaurant while a middle-aged blues band entertained an audience comprised
largely of their own small children, I could feel the day’s 151 kilometres
wafting slowly out of my body like a heat haze. As the shopkeeper who’d
Mars-Barred me up in Saint-Sylvestre had said, the cycling conditions that
afternoon had been perfect: not too hot, not too wet, a tailwind and generally
benign gradients. It was slightly deflating to think that despite all this I
hadn’t quite managed 100 miles, though I felt better when I looked through the Rough
Guide travel section and worked out that the equivalent train journey took
105 minutes. Overlooking the dilatory nature of French local railways, I was
sure I could make this man-against-locomotive showdown sound impressive when I
got home, particularly once I’d rounded it up to two and a half hours.

Five

    Leaving Agen’s listless, jerry-built
skyline in my dusty wake, I headed west across the rivers and motorways and
into a slightly scorched landscape that bore little relation to the damp,
tossed-salad lushness I’d been accustomed to. Yesterday the fields had been
lined with tentative seedlings; today it was all wizened-looking crops ready
for harvest, the rippled air thick with the smell of onions and dried slurry.
    It was a Sunday, and for the first
time I found myself moving among big groups of club cyclists, though not in
anger. That morning offered the first suggestions that the malaise blighting
French cycling may be traced to the neglect of competitive training in favour
of poncing about in new-season jerseys affecting a look of extravagant ennui.
Much has been made of the ability of top riders to shield their pain and
fatigue beneath poker faces (and wraparound shades); the club-class poseurs had
borrowed the expression (and the shades) while cutting out the irksome physical
labour it was intended to conceal. And they were so snotty: having sneeringly
assessed my outmoded jersey in a way that made me feel I’d turned up at a
school disco wearing my aunt’s gardening smock, they turned their heads with a
dismissive tut.
    I’d tried the Tour de France press
office again that morning, and after an exchange of sighs and, no doubt,
beastly gurns and hand-over-mouthpiece imprecations I had extruded the
reluctant concession that the complete and precise itinerary would be made
available to tiresome foreign irrelevances in two days’ time. Looking again at
the procycling map, I saw that the stage from Agen to Dax shifted west
across France in a series of down-left steps; transposing these on to the
Michelin directed me towards an enormous vacant slab of green, nothing but
marshes, forested hunting reserves and firing ranges. As well as being
wonderfully flat, this provisional route had the additional benefit of avoiding
the nearby town of Condom, where I would be certain to encounter the sorriest
sort of sniggering Britons.
    You take the high road, and I’ll take
the low road, and I’ll definitely be in Paris afore ye, I thought as the
poppies and abandoned hotels petered out and the D665 plumb-lined through the
parallel pines. Breathing in hot Badedas vapour, and trying not to notice that
the wind was turning to face me, I ground on, bored as Belgium. Increasingly abstract speculations wandered into my mind. How long would it take
me to cut down one of those pines with a screwdriver? Would I kill that
blackbird and eat it raw for £20,000? A deer leapt out in front of a deer-warning
sign, somehow arranging its spindly limbs into a precise replication of the
complicated prance depicted, and for some considerable time I found myself
internally debating how it was that these animals managed to survive for even
twenty-four hours without snapping at least one of their silly legs off.
    The forest thinned, but not the sense
of isolation. I didn’t know whether the Tour would pass this way, but if it did
it was going to be too late for most of the towns. A tree grew from a church
roof, a Monsieur Hulot Renault Dauphine crouched in