French Revolutions

salvation from the hot highway to hell, the distant
acceptance that having forgotten to twist out of the cleats I would quickly
drown, but not caring because I would drown happy, hopefully before Mickey
Dolenz tried to give me the kiss of life.
    It’s always a bad sign when I can’t
remember where I had lunch. No such problems, however, in recalling its
constituents: beer, Badoit, Coke, Badoit, beer, and a 300-degree segment of
uneaten pizza. Sitting vacantly in the restaurant garden with cold sweat
dripping from my temples to dough-up the pizza flour on my shorts, I was gently
approached by the concerned patron and his wife: ‘Ça va, monsieur?’ No. Not
really. ‘La Tour passe... passe...’ I began automatically, but I didn’t finish.
A teenager was cycling at some speed up the considerable hill next to us, a
compelling sight made more notable by his below-average limb quota. Spotting my
Peugeot jersey he raised his one arm from the bars as he passed, accompanying
it with a defiant yell: ‘Vive le vélo!’
    Having rushed away to do terrible
things to le patron’s vitreous enamel, I was clambering pallidly back on to ZR
when he trotted over. ‘Voilà,’ he said, pressing a postcard of his
establishment into my clammy hand. ‘Pour vos amis.’ I don’t know why I did this
— possibly it was a slightly delirious obsession with saving weight, more
probably because the composition was dominated by a huge platter of glistening
innards — but as he turned back I wearily flicked the card away.
    I could never whistle with my thumb
and forefinger, or catch a pile of coins dropped off a crooked elbow, or get
the Pritt-Stick to adhere temporarily to the laboratory ceiling directly above
the teacher’s chair just before Mr Burrows came in, but the one juvenile
pastime I mastered — though, thinking about it, I can also skim stones and blow
up a telephone box — was the ability to propel a playing card at high speed
over some distance by means of a wristy backhand flick. In defiance of my
debilitated condition the postcard left my sweaty fingers already spinning
fast, curving slightly up and around in a curtailed death-star arc before
striking the retreating patron sharply between the shoulder blades. He yowled
in distress and messily threw his hands in the air like a stuntman picked off
by a sniper; then, pressing a hand to the point of contact, turned to survey me
with confused horror. His lips were starting to jabber; soon sounds would come
out of them, then questions, and because I didn’t want to answer these I held
up a traffic-policeman palm, saddled up and fled. It was the rudest thing I had
ever done.
    By announcing itself as ‘home of the
artillery’ Draguignan hardly coos beguilingly at passing tourists, and though I
only saw its ring-road hinterland, the usual bland, beige boxes stalked by
Ronald McDonald and Monsieur Bricolage, the word ‘unprepossessing’ loomed
large. In fairness, I was distracted. Despite the heavy traffic barging along
my alimentary canal, I had once again allowed myself to be lured into
competition, this time with a knees-out, boiler-suited mechanic on what I could
only assume was his grandmother’s bicycle.
    It was an unedifying contest,
particularly given my reluctance to share the work at the front. In Tour argot,
I was wheel-sucking: toiling in his slipstream, letting a man on a rusty
sit-up-and-beg do the sitting up while I took care of the begging. Winding it
up round the cork-walled Gorge de Chateaudouble, he never looked round once,
not even as he rumbled off down a side track, jabbed a forefinger at the road
ahead and shouted out a rut-juddered ‘Bonne chance!’
    The road narrowed, carving into the
sheer gorge walls, writhing round corners of sufficiently exaggerated radius to
ease oncoming tourist coaches right into my path. Stage thirteen had finished
in Draguignan and I’d continued seamlessly into stage fourteen, which by common
consent was the most appalling, the sort of ludicrous itinerary that made
substance abuse almost inevitable: 250k northwards into the cold heart of Alps,
with two first-category climbs that were statistically more awful than some of
the HCs, topped off with the notorious col d’Izoard whose poisoned, Martian
summit stood over 1,000 feet above Ventoux.
    Oh, and the second-category Côte de
Canjuers which Knees-Out had presumably been indicating, an attritional,
never-ending ascent of hot, red earth and unabundant scrub. The sun