French Revolutions

melodramatic? They were still sending people to Devil’s Island after the war. And what could you possibly do to deserve being locked up in
a mountain? I’d recently been struck by the related histrionics of their
language, how you can never be sorry, only ‘desolated’, never bothered, only
‘deranged’. We might think of ‘yours sincerely’ as archly pedantic, but how
would you fancy signing off to your bank manager with ‘I beg you to accept the
expression of my distinguished sentiments’? I suppose it’s all part of the
overwrought romanticism that so endears the Tour to the nation’s
destiny-oscillators. (Actually, I found out later that they weren’t prison
cells at all, but old gun emplacements. But that’s OK: this is known as the exception
that proves the rule.)
    Something caught my eye near the foot
of the col de Vars. Propped against one of those ‘Beware of enormous falling
boulders’ signs whose practical purpose always eludes me (‘Attention: one of
these might land on your car in a minute, and if it does, you are all going to
die’) was a deceased bicycle. I got out to inspect it. The tyres had rotted
away, the saddle was a sprung skeleton and every spoke and crank and lever was
lavishly ochred with flaking rust. I pulled it upright — an astonishing weight.
As the family rushed out to commandeer the machine as chief prop in an extended
session of madcap photography that would have graced any early Beades film, I
suddenly felt affronted by its presence. The col’s first hairpin loomed around
the corner, backed by a huge retaining wall professionally embellished with the
word ‘Hinault’. He flew up there fifteen years ago, said the dead bike, and a
lot longer ago than that even I made it this far. And look at you, you old
woman, pootling up the hills with your bike in the boot.
    For 11 kilometres the road coiled
uncertainly, back-tracking and switch-backing but always going upwards, a
disorderly ascent through the trees and into a bare and rather messy wilderness
of boulders, sheep crap and wind-whipped tussocks. At the unassuming summit —
no wife-worrying precipices here — was a café. ‘You can get a certificate there
for cycling up,’ read Birna from a guidebook as we wiped chocolate off our
children’s faces in a car park crowded with more of what was an apparently
inexhaustible supply of gay German motorcyclists. I gave no audible response to
this information. My necessarily curt entry in that day’s training diary simply
reads: ‘The shame’.
    You may have gathered by now that the
Moore household economy is run very much according to the model sketched out
by Jack Sprat and his wife, only with obsessive frugality in the role of
lean-eater and the fat-consumption duties assumed by profligate recklessness —
oh, and that serendipitous platter-licking denouement substituted with an
endless series of ill-tempered debates. Hotel lobbies are the usual
battlefield, and a good example of this genre was held in the reception area of
Les Barniéres, jewel in Guillestre’s tourist-fleecing crown.
    ‘Look,’ said Birna, attempting to
drum up some unlikely reinforcements from the starched-linen restaurant’s bill
of fare, ‘they’ve got rosé wine from the slopes of Mont Ventoux.’ I pulled the
sort of face with which Oliver Hardy delivered his catch-phrase. Birna persevered.
‘It’s the second cheapest on the menu.’
    A small pause; a glance at the sunlit
pool outside the window; a sigh of surrender. ‘I’ll unload the car.’
    I was beginning to learn that the
dolled-up pensioner is an integral feature of the Alpine summer, and the
prominent ubiquity of the medical centre’s telephone number throughout the
establishment suggested that Les Barniéres, to paraphrase Basil Fawlty, might
more accurately have styled itself the Hotel for People with a Less Than Fifty
Per Cent Chance of Making it Through the Night. Or, in my case, through the
next day. But despite the unseemly griping, it was of course a splendid
evening. I ponced about the pool in my cycling shorts, flaunting my ludicrous
tidemark arm tan before an elderly audience more preoccupied with large-print
fiction. The children dive-bombed and screeched; it was very much like the
home-movie scenes of Tom Simpson’s family Corsican holidays, only with a
hairier-legged Daddy. I stuck away all my supper and half the kids’, and afterwards
sat out on our top-floor balcony beneath the chalet eaves, the