French Revolutions

window.’
    ‘Fair enough. We’ll do it when we
stop to crap in the next lay-by.’
     
    I cut down to Dax on stretches of the
old N124, through moribund villages that must have cheered the day the
expressway took the traffic away but now looked like they were missing the
noise and excitement. For much of the way I kept pace with a postwoman in a
little yellow van: the dogs always gave her a welcoming pant as she ambled up
their front paths, then flung themselves in spittled rage at their chain-link
fences when they saw me.
    The journey to Dax was a mere 60
kilometres — I should warn you that I’m about to start saying ‘k’ instead of
kilometres — and I got there before lunch. Though by most standards unassuming,
it was considerably less dead than Mont-de-Marsan, a place I’d erased from my
mind so successfully that when the shopkeeper I asked for directions enquired
where I’d come from that day I had to get the map out to remind myself.
    Dax had a slightly flyblown, Mexican
air, with plenty of scabby whitewash and hot dust, but there were a couple of
breezy, palm-lined squares, a well-tended maze of pedestrianised shopping
streets and the inevitable big river, this time bordered by a bank of
enormously flash spa hotels. The most enormous and flashest was a dazzling
art-deco palace unashamedly labelled splendide, which was good news for me because, as I appear not to have mentioned I
had booked myself in here before leaving England. This was the first of my
stops under Simon’s reward scheme, and though I’d arrived a couple of days
early, due to the now-notorious excision of the Brittany Loop, the room I’d
reserved was free.
    Can’t say the receptionist seemed
overjoyed, however. Wheeling ZR across the Splendide’s lobby, an echoingly
regal Grand Central Station job, I’d felt somewhat out of place amongst the old
men in dressing gowns perusing brass-and-glass cases full of expensive leather
accessories and hampers of foie gras. The garage was ‘not correct’ for
bicycles, she said, flashing tell-me-about-it peripheral smiles at passing
guests as if to say: Don’t worry, we’ll have this sweaty buffoon out of your
way soon.
    ‘That’s OK. I’ll just take it up to
my room,’ I said, raising the stakes with a wide-eyed beam.
    ‘Non! No — I...’
    ‘This bicycle,’ I said, patting ZR’s
sweaty saddle with exaggerated respect, ‘is worth 24,000 US dollars.’
    The receptionist glanced down at the
muddy panniers, then looked me straight in the eye and smiled with marked
coldness. But she said nothing, perhaps knowing that the spectacle of
laboriously levering my bike upright to fit it alongside me in the tiny lift
would offer ample recompense.
    My room was intensely exciting, a
symphony of restored art-deco glass and mahogany, everything authentic except
the whopping great telly and the groin-soaking turbo tap in the bathroom basin.
And it was also immense, big enough to cycle round, though this didn’t stop it
feeling very odd to have the bike in there with me. Propped up against the
mirrored wardrobe, it stared accusingly from every angle, even glinting in the
dark when I went to the loo in the night. And, because the Tour de France press
office fucked up and/or lied — difficult to accept, I know, but bear with me —
there would be two nights for it to glint through before I could get my faxed
itinerary and be off.
    Still, it could have been worse. The
room was just £40 a night — an absurd bargain — and a rest day before the
(eeeek!) Pyrenees could only be good. After a pleasant interlude making alien
faces in the wide-angled make-up mirror, I walked out into a lethargically hot
afternoon and somehow ended up talking Tour at the town hall.
    Turning up unannounced at a public
office in France and requesting an instant meeting must be right up there with
alchemy in the long-shot stakes, and I was still in shock when Eric, a nice
young man in the service de communication , tapped a Marlboro Light on
his desk and asked what he could do for me. Well! After five minutes I had
learned that Dax had paid the Société du Tour de France one million francs to
be a ville d’étape; that doing so was considered an important investment for
the town’s national and international profile in terms of both commerce and
tourism; that the civic celebrations would include music, dancing and
bicycle-shaped flower-beds.
    If my French or Eric’s English had
been better I might have learned more,