French Revolutions

control
to Major Tom.

Ten

     
    The trouble with cycling up mountains
is that — panniers or, as today, no panniers — after about four minutes, as
soon as that first metallic-tasting, lactic gasp rasps inward at the back of
your throat, any thoughts of appreciating your surroundings, contemplating the
Continental way of life or otherwise entertaining an appropriate holiday
mentality have been booted out of your brain by an all-encompassing him-or-you
struggle to the death with the force of gravity.
    If I’d known this, of course, I might
have made more of an effort to admire the view as I’d sat under a café awning
in Sault, unenthusiastically ingesting two-thirds of a croque-monsieur, my
usual half-litre of the old pink stuff and a Coke. A good few dozen
cyclo-tourists take on Ventoux every day during the summer, and as I bounced
and booted and bullied ZR’s front wheel into its carbon-fibre lugholes a trio
of large, ruddy Americans freewheeled slowly by in auspicious silence, their
mashed-rainbow cycling jerseys clashing with everything and themselves. If they can make it, I thought... But then I realised they probably wouldn’t.
    The category two col du Notre-Dame
des Abeilles was supposed to be only the warm-up act, but as I wound gingerly
up its lazy, shadeless curves it soon became clear that it had fulfilled this
role rather too well. Cresting it with sweat stinging my eyes and dripping
hissily on to the scalded crossbar, I was beginning to feel a karmic payback
for the terrible things I had done as a boy involving sunny afternoons, a
magnifying glass and woodlice.
    The summit took me by surprise; one
second I was creaking along at a rate that permitted detailed perusal of the
health warnings on discarded Gitanes packets, the next I was screaming down at
terminal velocity, airborne fauna spattering my larynx; hot, thin tyres neady
bisecting an unwary lizard. A sudden blast of mistral snapped back the poplars,
yanked the helmet chinstrap against my windpipe and buffeted me towards a
family of hard-shoulder picnickers; the bellowed warnings were ripped from my
mouth and dispatched so abruptly that I never heard them. A transient whiff of
roadkill, a flash of vineyard, a fleeting, wobbly glance at the speedo — Jesus:
65 k.p.h. — and then I was easing into the Provençal plain, able at last to
raise a glove to my nose and restore some element of facial respectability.
    Maintaining the momentum, for an hour
I was eating up the kilometres rather than choking on them. There was a
fourth-category hill somewhere along the way but it came and went unnoticed,
and I cruised with growing confidence into Bédoin, the town at the base of
Ventoux, untroubled either by the parched associations of its name or the
mobile donation unit in the main square emblazoned with a banner heralding the
following morning’s ‘Day of Blood’. It was here that Tom had necked that
fateful cognac, and I was just wondering under which of the bar awnings he’d
pegged it when I became aware of an abrupt and painfully bone-shaking decline
in ride quality.
    There are few sights more instantly
dispiriting than a wrinkled, folded, cellulite-dimpled, pancake-flat bicycle
tyre, particularly when accompanied with a cortex-freezing epiphany that
somewhere within the panniers one has so joyously hurled into a car boot lies
the pump. I couldn’t believe it. Over a thousand kilometres covered and I
hadn’t even had to put any air in the tyres up until then. And what made the
scenario even more cat-swallowingly infuriating was that I’d remembered to
stick all other repair accessories in my bar-bag — tyre levers, patches, glue,
spare tube, even a shag-arsing square of emery board, for cock’s sake.
    It was while wondering whether to
tackle this situation by biting random parts of the bicycle or gluing repair
patches over my eyes and mouth that I looked to my right and saw a thin man in
army shorts standing before a barn full of mountain bikes. In less than a
minute he had cheerily repaired my tyre free of charge and sent me
enigmatically on my way with a banana.
    It seemed too good to be true, and
after fifteen minutes of dusty maize fields and increasing gradient I found
myself wondering whether it was. Things were starting to acquire a queasily
ethereal air, a heat-haze sense of unreality. By now familiar with the
early-warning signals of an impending bonk, as soon as I found myself
struggling to remember which side of the road I was