French Revolutions

sip I’d been slowly poisoning myself.
    There’d been a chastening broom-wagon
finality about stowing the bike in the boot. Today I’d be the one making rueful
faces at cyclists from behind a windscreen, trying to gauge gradients,
empathise with their labours and offer encouragement, but knowing that,
whatever I did, to them I’d be just another gloating wanker in a car. We looped
round the Lac de Castillon, its almost chemically turquoise surface dotted with
pedalos, the surrounding hills all cedars and smooth granite, more
Mediterranean than Alpine. The col d’Allos was the first proper Alp, a sprawl
of off-season, shingle-roofed ski hotels at its base, the hairpins stacked up
those Heidi-sided cowbell pastures. As the road twisted and rose we squeezed
past the occasional cyclist, all pained, some traumatised, and one — a really
very old man on a panniered tourer — engaged in such a rotary frenzy he looked
as though he might spontaneously combust.
    We’d just left him thrashing about in
our wake when Birna stalled the car, yanked at the handbrake and in a voice
destabilised with brittle fear formally renounced tenure of the driver’s seat.
‘That — there,’ she quavered, waving an explanatory finger at the view as she
roughly parted my knees and hunkered awkwardly into the passenger footwell. An
altitude-related spiritual collapse had always been on the cards for Birna, and
following her finger down to the distant valley floor I remembered that at
2,250 metres, this was the highest point of the Tour to date.
    Perhaps due to medical jealousy, I
must confess to a propensity for contracting sympathetic phobias from those
around me. I was never troubled by spiders before that first infantile
experience of my father’s distinctive arachnid-encountering shriek, and now I
can’t go into the garden shed alone. Slasher movies were routinely dismissed
with hilarity until a girlfriend dug her nails into my arm once too often
during Friday the 13th-, that night I ended up having to sleep on the
floor next to my parents’ bed, which is no place for any 20-year-old. And
another unfortunate truth is that after years of intimate contact with Birna’s
vertigo, I have inevitably been infected with the disease. A milder form,
perhaps, although you might not have said that if you’d seen the pair of us
inching across Clifton Suspension Bridge on our hands and knees.
    Plunging off mountain sides is a
regularly indulged Tour pastime, but without the Pavlovian stimulus of Birna’s
keening wails I hadn’t yet got the old height-fright on the bike. Now,
positioning myself behind the wheel, I realised only a supreme effort would
stop the hysteria spreading to the rear seat with wretched consequences for
all, most particularly the old bloke who was wobbling back past us into a
position where any get-me-outta-here flung-open nearside doors would neatly
dispatch him to eternity.
    A throat-stripping nursery-rhyme
session drowned out the incoherent death preparations ululating up from the
footwell and so carried us to the top, but the descent was worse, a lonely
cliff-clinger with regular ominous gaps in the rusty railings. Birna finally
raised her head above the dashboard at Barcelonette, one of those gravelly,
moraine-slopped mountain-plateau towns that cry out for a covering of snow.
Here we waited an eternity for the shopkeepers to arise wearily from a
well-earned three-hour lunch nap, then devoured most of their wares by the
frothing mud of a swollen glacial river up the road. This allowed plenty of
scope for juvenile tomfoolery of the near-fatal variety, and not wanting to be
left out I forgot to close the boot when we drove off, causing tennis balls,
flip-flops and other loose pieces of holiday to bounce excitingly into the path
of following traffic. The number of drivers returning to their native Italy — I
realised later that the border was just a couple of miles to the right —
ensured an expressive reception to the incident-packed retrieval of these
items.
    I felt better physically — the
unwieldy baguette assemblage I wedged painfully down my gullet represented my
first meaningful calories for twenty-four hours — but at the same time there
was a bleak sadness. This peaked as we drove through the cheerily named village of La Condamine, where we gawped solemnly at haphazard ranks of what could only be
prison cells hewn perilously high into the granite cliffs behind. Why is the
French penal system so