French Revolutions

a state of advanced
decomposition on a forecourt, waiting for a fill-up that the oxidised-skeleton
pumps weren’t about to deliver. In some villages, two-thirds of the houses were
roofless wrecks. Even the cartographers had given up: Bousses was down as
Boussé, gradient chevrons and scenic-route green borders were bandied about at
random.
    The road began to blend seamlessly
into the undergrowth, its surface defiled with horrid, scabrous pockmarks that
were uncomfortable to both arse and eye. ‘Chaussée déformée’ warned the road
signs superfluously. The French were good at this. If they spent even 2 per
cent of their budget for warning you about carriageway deterioration on
actually doing something about it, France would have the best roads in Europe. And it wasn’t just the infuriating frequency with which they stuck up the triangled
exclamation marks, it was the wilful obscurities they enamelled beneath them.
The bandes rugueuses and accotements dénivellés, the affaissements and aspersions — all spawned more fears than they laid to rest. Even the
few I managed to translate conjured improbable scenarios, the ‘impractical
surface’ that suggested whimsical experimentation with brass or feathers, the
dark conspiracies implied by ‘holes in formation’.
    I stayed in a town called
Mont-de-Marsan. It wasn’t very nice. I ate chips in the street. I found a room
in a big hotel with long corridors and no people and a fat man on the front
desk who licked his lips a lot and wrote my name in a big empty book. There
were no shops but lots of bars with men who stared when you walked past, and
lots more men standing on bridges over big rivers looking like they wanted to
jump in. I got a bit scared and went back to my hotel. In the middle of the
night I woke up and realised I was in Room 101 and couldn’t get back to sleep.

Six

     
    Eurosport was on in the breakfast
room and there was Axel Merckx, Eddy junior, winning a stage of the Tour of
Italy. This was
    the first time I’d seen real cyclists
since I’d been doing some real cycling, and I found myself intently scanning
the peloton for tips on technique. But there was no secret. They just pedalled
really fast, and the man who pedalled the fastest won. Merckx senior,
congratulating Axel on the line, was clearly still on race rations, eating for
eight hours in the saddle — Fast Eddy had lost an ‘s’. The man they once called
Cannibal looked about as man-eating as the owner of a small but prosperous
chain of carpet warehouses.
    I could talk. I was regularly
sticking away enough fuel for 250 kilometres but doing only half that: I might
be the fittest I’d ever been in my life, but I was also the fattest. The Pyrenees loomed and no amount of liberal toothpaste use would offer gravitational
compensation for the nascent spare inner-tube ruching up above my shorts.
    Mont-de-Marsan had been a profoundly
horrid place, and I was so eager to leave it that I didn’t notice until it was
too late that the N124 marked on my — oh, seventeen-year-old — map had been
supplanted by a 110 k.p.h. expressway. Parped reproaches informed me that my
presence on this many-laned drag strip was inappropriate; lorries took especial
pleasure in buffeting me into the calf-slashing tall grass that lined the hard
shoulder. It was a long way to the next turn-off, and by the time I got there
an already keen connoisseurship of roadside debris had been broadened still
further.
    We’re all familiar with the bits of
glass, rubber and animals that line major thoroughfares, and I could have
contributed a thoughtful foreword to Chrome Alone: The Lost Hubcaps of
France, but it was intriguing to note the range of objects that motorists
discard voluntarily. Why all these hundred-yard lengths of cassette tape?
     
    ‘Gérard, we love Johnny Halliday,
right?’
    ‘Everyone loves Johnny. Go, Johnny!’
    ‘Yeah. Go! But I was thinking — why is that?’
    ‘Well, because he’s a global pop-rock
legend who just happens to be French, that’s why.’
    ‘Even though no one else in the world
has heard of him.’
    ‘Well, yeah.’
    ‘And even though he looks like a
chain-smoking old tramp in mascara.’
    ‘Yeah. But you know: go, Johnny!’
    ‘Right. I mean, I really love Johnny
too, but the thing is, all of his music is just so utterly, utterly abysmal,
that I was wondering if we could carry on doing the whole love bit while at the
same time throwing all his tapes out of the