French Revolutions

glass-muffled
carousing of infancy behind me and dotage beneath.
    Draining the last pink mouthful of
Cotes du Ventoux straight from the bottle I squinted at the darkness, tracing
the black outlines of that formidable Gothic backdrop, those murderous granite
claws scratching at the stars. ‘Mon mari — avec son bicyclette,’ Birna had
joshed the fat wine waiter, or anyway the fat waiter who brought us our wine,
pointing at the Giant of Provence’s silhouette on the label. ‘Ah oui,’ he’d
winked, in a rather silly way that indicated a forthcoming joke, ‘et demain,
l’Izoard!’
    Was the concept of me even tackling
such a mountain really so chortlingly improbable? Yes, so I had yet to make it
up an HC or even a category one without pushing and, the one-off conquest of
the col de Saraillé aside, my climbing experience could be encapsulated as one
of hills, pills and bellyaches. But Simpson, Kimmage and Boardman had all
implied that one’s worst form often heralds the arrival of one’s best, that
after you’ve cracked one day it takes a much harder bonk to break you the next.
Certainly I felt infinitely better, even allowing for the rosé-tinted
spectacles. A small cluster of lights that I’d initially mistaken for a
constellation winked off into blackness. A village? Up there? Jesus. But I’d
have to go that high and higher tomorrow. Not much further up, the blinking red
dot of a plane moved smoothly across the Alps. That was modern travel: rapid,
painless, humdrum.
    Being rather drunk, I found myself
tapping into the Tour’s spiritual root. A celebration of mankind’s arduous
history, of our forefathers’ heroic efforts to triumph over adversity. The
cavemen of Lascaux lanced bulls; we threw javelins. Spear-chucking was no
longer a matter of life and death, assuming the stadium officials kept their
eyes open, but somehow it seemed important to honour a time when it had been.
And though the people of France could now hop on to trains or planes and zip
across their nation in an hour, for their grandfathers this hadn’t been an
option. The bicycle was originally sold to rural France as ‘the horse that
needs no hay’: a means of everyday transport, often the only one in what is
still, by European standards, a large and empty land. Farmers would think
nothing of pedalling huge distances over huge hills — or, rather, they probably
thought plenty, but had no choice. What about that dead bike on the col de
Vars? The Tour paid tribute to these men and the tough times they lived through,
times when you might fall into an undiscovered gorge the size of Belgium and
wait half a century to be found. We didn’t have to do this shit any more, but
watching 180 men in fanny shorts forcing their punished bodies up hill and down
dale gave us a vicarious taste of what we’d all have been doing in days now
mercifully gone by.
    In the middle of the night, I drifted
gently out of a deep slumber with an inspiring warmth in my chest, a comforting
glow that was soon spreading along my arms to caress the scorched flesh of my
fingertips. This was it, I pondered dozily, the fire in my belly: this was what
it felt like when the good form kicked in. Let the destiny-oscillation
commence; I was ready now. Either that or a small girl had just peed all over
me in her sleep.

Twelve

     
     
    Vertigo 1, Dysentery 0. ‘I really
just can’t,’ announced Birna as I brushed croissant flakes off the maps. My
support vehicle would not be following me up the Izoard, owing to the driver
being a big girly weed. ‘We’ll take the valley road and meet you at Briançon.
I’m sorry.’
    She’d lost her sense of humour, and
so had the Alps. Yesterday we’d passed through Les Prats and enjoyed distant
views of the col d’Urine, but looking at the intestinal coils through which the
route knotted and twisted for the next day and a half was a sombre experience.
The Casse Deserte and Terre Rouge on the Izoard; a peak called Crève Tête —
Punctured Head — en route to the Tour’s penultimate hors catégorie climb, the
col de la Madeleine. It was a cast list that spoke eloquently of the coming
challenges, and what it said most clearly was, Don’t fuck with us, bike-boy.
    But the weather was glorious again,
and because in both spiritual and alimentary terms I had nothing left to lose I
rolled off into another blindingly bright Alpine day with a light heart and a
sprightliness of bearing. Where before the sight of huge Flintstone