French Revolutions

only hire-car available at the
airport was the one Mike had just returned.
    It was odd to be driving again, odd
to ease down on the sort of pedal that effortlessly whooshed you up to idiotic
velocity. Cleated to the bike I’d forgotten what it meant to be footloose and
fancy-free, and it was good to remember. Hammering eastwards on the hot
motorway I passed the pop-up medieval horizon of Carcassonne, deafeningly
serenaded with the bygone sounds of Nostalgie FM, the station selected by Mike
and, after a fruitless attempt at mastering the tuning procedure, tolerated in
default by me. I’d read somewhere that French radio stations are obliged to
broadcast 40 per cent of their music in the native language as part of the
nation’s campaign to prove that it is better than England, and the distressing
Halliday-heavy consequences of this made themselves apparent as I flew up the
fast lane. Still, the Nostalgie playlist devisers had found the odd grey-area
loophole. ‘Michelle, ma belle’ and ‘Chanson d’amour, ra-da-da-da-da’ had both
blared out of the speakers twice before I began the first of several
late-afternoon laps of Avignon’s city walls.
    Avignon was my second pre-booked flash-hotel stopover,
though given the modest scale of my achievements since Dax I barely felt I’d
earned it. I eventually found the Mercure Palais des Papes near the famous half
bridge, embedded in the man-made cliffs that shore up the Pope’s palace. My
plan had been to bugger about up and down the ochre boulevards and high-sided
alleys, then early to bed for a prolonged toss/turn session mulling over the looming
horrors of Ventoux, but this scheme was adapted somewhat by the revelation at
reception that my single room had been upgraded to the rather larger one
necessary to accommodate Birna and our three children. The party had arrived on
the TGV an hour before and, as I presently discovered, were currently in situ.
    I will leave you to imagine the
emotional, high-pitched yelps of ‘Daddy gone but Daddy here now!’ as well as my
children’s own reactions. Birna explained that my unsettling telephonic
performance had triggered much domestic concern, and I belatedly understood
that all the car-hire booking and detailed enquiries into my itinerary were
related to the planning of this half-term surprise. ‘In fact, I’m completely OK
now,’ I said with an effort. ‘I went up a big mountain yesterday without any
problems at all.’ Birna has an impressive armoury of level looks, and she
treated me now to her most horizontal. ‘Isn’t that what you said to those men
in the Pyrenees?’
    My morale roller-coaster had been
round a few loops and corkscrews since that terrible phone call, but I realised
just how bad I must have sounded for Birna even to have considered marshalling
three children aged 1 to 6 single-handed from London on the train. I-Spy had
regressed into We-Punch well before the Channel, and after the sweets ran out
at Lille Birna had been drawn inexorably into yet another prolonged search for
our children’s on/off switches, or at least volume controls. A snooty
businesswoman had repeatedly demanded that ‘the calme of the wagon to be
respected’, and though she abruptly relocated to the next carriage after a
co-ordinated ‘bouncing’ incident outside Dijon, those final hours of onboard
high jinks had been inevitably trying.
    The presence of my family was joyous
but utterly dislocating. Things I had become accustomed to — strewing all my
road-ravaged clothing carelessly about the room, spending less than £400,000 an
hour, performing Mr Boardman’s Patent Stretches without rowdy hecklers, waking
up in full daylight — were to become distant memories. Of course all of this
was comfortably outweighed by the benefits of an Alpine support vehicle, loaded
with panniers and cheerleaders, urging me up the mountains. Then watching in
grim-faced, nauseated disillusion as I wheezed and swore and flobbed and fell
and failed.
    You really don’t want to cycle up
Mont Ventoux when it’s hot. 28 May 2000 might not have been as fearsome as 13
July 1967, but even at 10 a.m. the dark green litter bins out in front of the
Palais des Papes were sufficiently sun-grilled to make a small child squeal
almost as loudly as the slightly smaller child he was trying to upend into one.
I looked up at the cloudless sky and tried to regulate my breathing. Tom
Simpson’s fate wasn’t one I aspired to, and no matter how large a shadow