French Revolutions

found no identifying sign other
than a gate cleverly crafted from two old bikes. ‘We’re not really bothered
with passing trade,’ said Nick in Scouse tones mellowed by nine years in the Pyrenees. ‘It’s more a word-of-mouth thing.’
    Nick hadn’t come to the area known as
the Ariège for the money. He’d arrived in 1991 with his new wife and an
early-retirement pay-off; both keen cyclists, the guesthouse concept had seemed
the ideal business/pleasure marriage, with the latter wearing the trousers in
the partnership. ‘You don’t need much when you’ve got this,’ he said, seating
me on his patio with a beer and passing a careless hand across a backdrop of
towering green peaks. An orchard, a field over the road running down to the
excitable River Arac, additional acreage up the mountain: ‘I haven’t found half
the land we own yet,’ said Nick indulgently. As he talked of skiing in the
winter and horse-riding in the summer, the lifestyle seemed blissfully enviable
(at least to people who don’t find such activities both scary and ridiculous),
and though I’d have predicted dark glances at the school gates and
conspiratorial muttering in the supermarché, the locals had apparently been
cheerfully welcoming. ‘The Ariège isn’t like the rest of the south of France:
it’s a poor area, kind of remote, off the tourist track, and the locals respect
anyone with the courage to come here and try and make a fist of things.’
    Introductions were effected to Jan,
their 6-year-old son Dominic and a sympathetically maternal one-eyed dog
slobbering over a very tolerant cat and her brood of kittens, followed by
another beer, followed by a quick tour round an extensive collection of cycling
memorabilia that included a photograph of the peloton sweeping past their front
door in 1997 and a warm personal message from Chris Boardman. Finally Nick
sighed in an enough-of-me way and said, ‘So — the Aubisque, eh?’
    During our telephone conversations
Nick had been brought up to speed with my project, but as his eyes twinkled
encouragingly at me I realised I might have glossed over certain issues, most
notably my physical ineptitude and an associated propensity to cheat. A minute
earlier, leafing through a book on the Tour’s history that had been presented
to Nick by the author, I had chanced upon the statement: ‘I am a cyclist. I do
not get off and walk.’
    For an accurate précis of my not
altogether admirable Pyrenean performance one would simply cut the negative
word from the second of these sentences and paste it in the first, but somehow
it seemed a shame to disappoint him so early in our acquaintance.
    ‘Well,’ I began, concocting an answer
that dropped right on the boundary fence of the honesty ball-park, ‘I paced
myself.’
    He gave me an understanding smile.
‘Ah — saving yourself for Hautacam.’
    It was supposed to come out as a
helpless self-deprecatory snort, but somewhere between brain and mouth it
evolved into a heroic sigh of painful recollection.
    ‘Paced yourself again, yeah?’
    ‘No — no, actually, no. No, I didn’t.
No.’
    ‘Chapeau!’ said Nick, raising his
beer can, and with a single modest shrug the humble economies of truth were
inflated to a huge and ugly edifice of deceit. I think I might even have rubbed
my legs with a showy grimace. What had I done? This was certainly the most
idiotic duplicity I had essayed since pretending to be Portuguese during a
youthful confrontation with two London Transport ticket inspectors. I could
hardly ask Nick to sort out my gears now.
    Much to everyone’s surprise another
guest turned up at this point, a middle-aged Australian with a face like a
jolly 1950s schoolboy, wheeling a hefty tourer weighed down with front and rear
panniers and a tent. Rhys had found something on the Internet about Pyrenean
Pursuits, and was stopping off halfway through an eight-week European odyssey.
He was older than I am, and fatter, but had done 2,500 kilometres already at
100k a day, and camped every night except one. Rhys was instantly identifiable
as a very nice chap, but statistics like these were intolerable. I smarted as
Paul Kimmage had done when a bearded tourist lurched out of an Alpine crowd on
his panniered tourer and pedalled up past him as the Irishman struggled
desperately to keep the approaching broom wagon at bay. Humiliated, and
humiliated by a tourist, ‘a bloody Fred’.
    ‘Any mountains?’ I felt myself
constrained to