French Revolutions

point if I’m not cycling today.’
    ‘What do you normally use?’
    After the washing powder’s
insecticidal contamination, there had been only one all-purpose emulsifying
surfactant in my life, used for laundering shorts, socks and jersey, cleansing
bidons and — applied directly to a pilfered hotel flannel — to bring an
occasional shine to ZR’s filthy flanks. ‘Wash ’n’ Go,’ I said.
    ‘That isn’t very good,’ she replied,
and it wasn’t. Apart from anything else, whatever I poured into the bidons now
came out tasting of perfumed paint. ‘And when did you last boil them?’
    When did I last... If this moment had
been filmed, the camera would have careered towards me on rails as I slapped
palms to cheeks in a wide-eyed, round-mouthed epiphany of painfully abrupt
realisation. Nick and Jan had asked me that same question; had in fact offered
to do it for me. ‘Whenever we get a big party here, we always boil all the
bidons once when they arrive and once before they leave.’
    I just thought they were being...
well, British. You know: fussy. Driven by a mindlessly slavish adherence to
routine. You were supposed to pump your tyres and wipe your chain and brush the
crap off your dérailleurs every night, but my progress didn’t seem to have been
adversely affected by not doing any of these things even once. In my book — and
what a smelly little pamphlet that is — bidon-boiling was on a par with the
checklists headed ‘Preparing for a long journey’ that they always put in car
manuals, which you flick through while you’re on a double-yellow waiting for
your wife and kids to come back from Clark’s, and then think, Jesus, I’m
sitting here in a Volvo estate reading the owner’s handbook while my children
are having the width of their feet measured, which may mean that I am already
one of Europe’s dullest men, and if anyone thinks I’m now going to start
inspecting wiper-blades and hosing loose chippings out of my wheel-arches every
time we breach the M25 they’ve got another think coming.
    But Birna is not British. Birna is,
in fact, the answer to the riddle of what you get if you cross an Icelandic
virologist with an Icelandic immunologist. The agenda of her life was
forthright: the global eradication of filth. Tough on grime, tough on the
causes of grime. Adopting a tone and rationale normally employed against
children who don’t wash their hands after going to the loo, she railed, ‘You’ve
been putting fruit juice and God knows what in those bottles, and they’ve been
fermenting away in the sun all day mixed up with your saliva and...’ Appalled
at this toxicological scenario, the rant tailed off into a little quiver of
revulsion.
    I had imagined that my condition was
stress-related, not so much mental as the physical strain of Herculean effort:
I had made myself ill by trying too hard, pushing myself beyond the limit. ‘He
destroyed himself — he had the ability to do that.’ Now I saw that it was none
of these things. I was sick because I was dirty. I was a dirty boy.
    I sent Kristjan into the campsite
office to retrieve my laundered kit and with ZR dismantled in the boot we drove
into the centre of Castellane. A day of campsite convalescence had been on the
cards before I calculated that Birna and the family had to be back in five
days, and that on current form the Alps would be occupying me for at least that
length of time. A reluctance to attract public attention to my modest rate of
progress had inspired me to spurn the support vehicle the day before, but in
the ghosdy light of the ensuing travails I wanted to see out the mountains with
a back-up crew in close contact. A lost day was off the agenda, and cheating
was back on it.
    Before leaving Castellane, however,
there was something I had to do. Birna pulled up outside a pharmacy, I
clambered wanly out and hobbled in. Water purification tablets were what I
wanted, though as I saw the silver-haired chemist listening in some alarm to my
request for ‘pills to sterilise myself’ I clumsily effected additional
explanations to ensure I didn’t end up with a very different sort of
medication. Henceforth, the content of my bidons would have all the zesty
refreshment of a lusty swig from the municipal paddling pool, but at least I
wouldn’t die. It was awful to think that up Ventoux and the Alpine foothills —
and, who knows, all through the Pyrenees — my bottles had been nurturing
contagion, that with every parched