French Revolutions

who commit any crime or are unemployed
for over a year.
    I’d arranged to meet Birna at
Vinon-sur-Verdon, and in homage to Eddy’s break to Marseille I got there long
before my reception committee. Four o’clock is always a good time to arrive in
a small French town in summer: one minute everything’s all scabby and dead and
shuttered, then the shop-fronts all swing down or clank up and suddenly the
streets are full of garish fruit and noisy housewives. It’s like watching a
chrysalis open.
    Vinon wasn’t exceptional, but sitting
there in the tree-dappled shadows of the huge main square, Coke in one hand,
Mars Bar in the other, I was happy. One hundred and twenty-two kilometres: Moore was back. I didn’t even mind when the family turned up and Birna immediately
announced that Vinon was a dump and that she’d found a nice place 10 kilometres
up the road.
    ‘Come on, Daddy,’ said my 4-year-old,
‘you can put your bicycle in the car and go asleep on my feet like yesterday.’
But I wouldn’t hear of it. Yesterday the bicycle had been a monstrous
invention, an absurdly impractical device that I’d looked at with the same
amused scorn normally reserved for Reliant Robins and the wearers of platform
trainers. But not now. Now it was a superlative machine, the ultimate synthesis
of form and function, a part of my body. I winked at my children, cleated up,
put the hammer down and got to the Hotel le Grand Jardin in Greoux-les-Bains
ten minutes before them.
    Greoux was the sort of
slightly-past-sell-by spa town that could have done with a direct hit from the
Tour rather than this year’s near miss. Poodles and pearls, solitary Scrabble,
Mills et Boon, a coach party of Lancastrians with noses like W. C. Fields — the
arrival of our family halved the average age and doubled the decibels. When we
volunteered to eat outside and so minimise the scope for Generation X scaring
the frail diners into Generation-Ex, the uniformed waitress politely insisted
on laying out the full silver service on our plastic pool table: thirty-five
pronged and bladed instruments for the five of us, or seventy after Valdis
knocked my Bloody Mary over the lot as the waitress aligned the final fish
knife.
    Alimentary malaise is the
unacceptable face of cycling infirmity. Crossing the line with dried blood
caked on your face or a winged arm pressed to the chest of a shredded jersey is
heroic in a way that soiling your Savlon can never hope to be. Yet
unsurprisingly, effective digestion is way down the body’s priorities during a
Tour, and many a cycling swan has crossed the line as an ugly duckling, his
feathers all stuffy and brown in the most unfortunately literal fashion.
    If I could pin down the exact moment
when I realised I might not have made it as a professional cyclist it wasn’t
when I fell over at the Kew Bridge bus stop or cracked on the col de
Marie-Blanque, it was when I read Paul Kimmage’s account of the 184-kilometre
tenth stage of the 1986 Tour. ‘LeMond was in trouble today. He had a bout of
diarrhoea. He rode by me with thirty kilometres to go... God, the smell was
terrible. It was rolling down his legs.’ Oh, no, no, no. Having the physical
reserves to ride by people in that state, and the mental strength to
deal with a scenario from the worst public-shame nightmare... it was beyond
contemplation. And Greg LeMond went on to win the Tour that year.
    Such were my thoughts as I’d lain
awake in our restless dormitory, wondering if that noise was my stomach or two
fat women mudwrestling on slowly deflating Spacehoppers. A certain reluctance
at the breakfast buffet was inevitable, and by the time I’d pedalled into a
Saharan headwind to rejoin the route at Ginasservis, I was in no position to speculate
on the origins of its pleasingly odd name.
    It was certainly the hottest day yet.
My guts were percolating horribly and, though I knew I should be eating, the
mere thought of the Dried Fruits of Ventoux was enough to spark off a parched
retch. My warm-grape bidons were quickly but unenthusiastically drained, and
all I thought about was their refrigerated replacements: beers, carbonated
beverages, anything glistening with condensation.
    Crossing the river at Aups (I did it
again) I found myself recalling that the title sequences of both The Goodies
and The Monkees featured cyclists pedalling at speed into extensive bodies of
water. I couldn’t get the thought out of mind, the delicious immersion, the
baptismal sense of