French Revolutions

the way down. Today. I looked up and
caught the wary eye of the quiffed, bow-tied waiter, and thought: please,
please take me in. I can wash dishes. I can make beds. I can walk about
reception on stilts yodelling limericks. Maybe if I pretended I didn’t have any
money to pay the bill... Maybe if someone stole my bike...
    Lowering my face to the rim of a
double espresso for an aromatic facial sauna, I thought how typically
ridiculous the organisers were to twin the mountain with Lourdes, which lay 3 3
kilometres up the valley. It was a geographical pairing to embarrass the most
devious estate agent. ‘Lourdes-Hautacam’ — read like that, it now sounded like
a choice. Take your pick. And so I did. Was I going to do Hautacam?
    One of the most unfortunate things
about being an unfit Englishman cycling long distances in France is the number
of signs that yell ‘pain’ down
every high street, and directing my acid-impaired gaze out of the window I saw
a strident red neon example swaying ominously above a distant boulangerie in
the cold wind. It wouldn’t have taken much to convince me, and in the
geo-spiritual circumstances this counted as divine intervention. No, I was not
going to do Hautacam. The way I felt it might take a miracle to get me to Lourdes, but I didn’t have a prayer of making a sermon on the mount.
    Feeling the same sense of sordid
elation I felt when getting off to push up the Marie-Blanque, I pedalled up the
valley a different man. This was like walking out halfway through an impossible
exam; soon, I knew, would come the long, slow mudslide into guilt and failure,
but for now I was feeding off an instant rush of ecstasy. I glided serene and
alone up the misty road to Lourdes, Christ on a bike.
    The heavens opened as I rolled
through Lourdes, but only metaphorically. A thousand neon souvenir shops
selling plastic jerry cans of holy water and glow-in-the-dark Last Suppers; a
million Pac-a-Mac pilgrims queuing outside McDonald’s or nodding vacantly along
to the unholy muzak hissing out of every bizarre bazaar — Lourdes is the Blackpool
of Christianity, the world capital of kitsch. It has more hotels than any
French city except Paris, and may be the only town on the planet that sees no
problem in selling alabaster saints alongside postcards of splayed female
hindquarters emblazoned with the slogan ‘Ahh — don’t you love the smell of
nature?’ And who could not marvel at the effrontery of calling your
nodding-saint naffmart Au Sacré Coeur de Jésus, or your package-holiday outfit
St Peter’s Tours? Madonna knew just what she was doing when she named her
daughter after this triumph of two-faced tack.
    The 1,000k came up as I was halfway
to Bagneres-de-Bigorre, the old spa town 22 kilometres east of Lourdes where stage eleven was to kick off. I developed a detailed hatred for these dead
miles, the off-the-route transfer bits the riders would do in buses and team
cars, but wincing at my Hautacam surrender I gritted my teeth into the
wind-driven rain and ground on in a spirit of self-flagellatory penance. And
thinking about it now there was something slightly unreal, slightly
apparitional, about the black-jerseyed granddad who slid gently past me in a
shotblasting downpour with a beatific ‘Bonjour’. Nose to the handlebars and
rain-reddened thighs furiously pushing the pedals, I could never reel him in.
The harder I pressed, the further away he seemed, a relaxed, almost jaunty
silhouette freewheeling nonchalantly across an iron-skied horizon. I topped 60
k.p.h. downhill, sending impressive curtains of spray up over the hedgerows and
aquaplaning terrifyingly up to a rush-hour intersection, but it was hopeless.
    Another ville d’étape, another
knackered spa town. Deep in introspective decline, Bagnères-de-Bigorre
displayed no discernible character and was clearly hoping the Tour would leave
some of its charisma behind when it rushed off. Comprehensively rain marinaded,
I wheeled ZR into a hotel and instantly found myself being addressed by a
proprietress whose fondness for onesided discourse far outweighed her dislike
for mopping up brown water. For maybe fifteen minutes I stood there, shivering
first internally and then with all the convulsive abandon of a cartoon
character, trying to smile and nod as the road filth slowly sluiced down my
body and puddled muddily around my ankles. The hotel trade, her son in Clapham,
Ryanair — all were debated at length, along with an extended lecture