French Revolutions

seemed to imagine they wouldn’t be taken
seriously without at least one mini roundabout.
    It got hotter and quieter. There were
no châteaux around here, and the farmhouses looked meaty and squat, like old
forts; every barn was fronted by a huge chicken-wire cage of corn cobs, propped
up on stilts to keep it out of the reach of the few rodents whose corpses were
not festering by the roadside. Whole valleys reeked of smoked and smoking Bayonne ham. A rider in the crimson strip of Saeco careered towards me from a rippled
horizon and shot past, a medley of loud respiration, sweat beads and nurtured
machinery. There were signs for Pamplona, and then, biting into the heavens
miles above the churches that wallowed up to their towers in heat haze, there
they were. Some soft and round, with jolly Friesian snow patches, others
shredding the sky with frightful grey claws: the Pyrenees.
    Sobered, I got drunk. Lunch was taken
in a fly-filled bar in the company of a loud road-gang who’d been resurfacing
the Tour tarmac, all red wine, red faces, scratch cards and cap sleeves. There
was no menu: the barman simply came over and filled the table before me with a
huge aluminium tureen full of broth, a plate of black-pudding slices and a big
jug of wine. ‘Ah — le dopage!’ guffawed the barman, sticking to the accepted
script for all witnesses to my bidon-refilling routine. As I topped up water
with Leader Price grape juice, he bent towards me with mock disapproval and
sighed, ‘Et voila — l’EPO.’ I laughed as much as I could. I didn’t want EPO. I
wanted GTi.
    It was real fuck-this heat by now, a
dogs-in-the-fountain afternoon that drawled out for a siesta. Detecting an odd
slushy pulping sound as I approached my first official climb, the Cote de
Barcus, I looked down and saw my front wheel almost up to its rim in melted
tarmac.
    It didn’t help that I had no idea how
much had been in that jug, except that it was slightly too much. They say that
pride comes before a fall, but in my experience it’s far more likely to be
wine. Forgetting to decleat I keeled over into a ditch alongside the temporary
traffic lights erected by the road gang, and when I wobbled up to the next
roundabout the fingerposts were a sozzled, illegible mass of obscure consonants
that raised grander doubts concerning my sobriety. Presently I understood I had
entered Basque country, a region whose fragile linguistic tradition is these
days bolstered by bilingual road signs emphasising a perverse fondness for
‘k’s, ‘z’s and ‘x’s. I never heard anyone speaking Basque, except on telly, but
the heavily accented French was almost unintelligible. For two days I had to
deal with people who greeted me with a ‘bon-jewer’ that sounded like a
Yorkshireman reading from a phrasebook.
    The Côte de Barcus was a coiling
category — three ascent through Teletubbyland: meadows that were too green, sky
that was too blue, cows that were too dun. It was bad, but not that bad. I
reached the village of Barcus in third-bottom gear, hot but happy. In
commentatorspeak, Moore was never in serious trouble on the first climb of the
day. The regrettable truth is that such statements are almost inevitably
followed by a huge, Pyrenean-sized but.
    It had been a lovely, gentle ride
along the Aspe valley to the village of Escot. The looming terror of the
mountains had somehow been shielded from me by foothills and foliage, and with
110k up for the day I should by rights have looked for a hotel. But it was only
5.30 p.m., and the idea of tackling all the stage’s big climbs the next day in
one fell swoop (with more of the fell and less of the swoop) seemed
overambitious. The col de Marie-Blanque was a category one, but on the Michelin
map the road over it didn’t flail about like a dying snake. The hors
catégorie monsters went up to 1,800 metres; at just over a grand the
Marie-Blanque couldn’t be, or anyway shouldn’t be, a ridge too far.
    There were several large ifs to go
with the aforementioned but. If I had troubled my imperial brain with the
old-money translation, I would have realised I was departing at clocking-off
time towards a formidable eminence as tall as Snowdon. If I had read Graeme
Fife’s Tour de France I would have found the Marie-Blanque described as
‘a killer in disguise’. If I had spent a little more time looking at the map I
would have noted that while the road was reasonably straight, it was also
decorated not with a single, nor a