French Revolutions

then that’s their lookout. As retribution goes, a slight
dose of hiccups was a bit of a let-off.
    Up the bikeless, lifeless last
stretch, past shuttered-up shepherd shacks and broad green pistes, I struggled
to keep the bad thoughts at bay. I’d been in twenty-seven almost all the way
and sweat was being forced out of places with no previous history of
perspiration, glistening on both forearms and bubbling out of my knees. The
summit had none of the drama of the previous HCs — no monuments, no mist, just
a boarded-up snack bar and a gravelly car park where half a dozen children were
redistributing the last patches of granular slush to their parents’
windscreens. But the view was nothing if not epic: what I proudly recognised as
yesterday’s peaks savaging the horizon to the south, and what I sincerely hoped
weren’t tomorrow’s doing the same to the northeast.
    The bonk was knocking at my door but
as I laboriously focused on the plummeting stage profile I knew it didn’t
matter: the day’s pedalling was all but done. The tin-roofed Savoyard villages
I plunged through were a frail last bastion of Alpine life without tourism,
those vast-planked hovels perching lowing livestock and wheelless Citroëns over
the most fearful gorge yet. Sighing into the valley floor I purchased many
inappropriate foodstuffs at a petrol station and ate them all on the forecourt;
within the hour I was rolling into Brides-les-Bains, our nominated afternoon
meeting point.
    Brides-les-Bains was another spa
resort that had grown out of nothing when the railway arrived, then been slowly
starved of tourists as cheap flights made foreign travel an affordable and more
glamorous option. But, as proven by its perennial presence on the Tour route,
it wasn’t going down without a fight, and judging by the number of doddering
jaywalkers dicing with vehicular euthanasia its efforts to reinvent itself as
an OAPs’ health-spa playground were clearly paying off. Regrettably, one aspect
of this diligent pursuit of the grey franc was the systematic alienation of the
pre-pubescent pound.
    As Birna had discovered on the train
to Avignon, genteel French society demands that children be seen but not heard.
Because Lilja’s default vocal response to any thwarted whim is of a pitch and
volume that recalls a hospital surgery of the preanaesthetic age, we correctly
anticipated ours might fall foul of this maxim. Even locking them in the car
didn’t work: hotel receptionists, detecting a muffled commotion, would contrive
ever more ludicrous deterrents. Positioning themselves so as to conceal a
well-stocked rack of keys, they would brazenly claim to be full; or not to have
any cots or highchairs; or to own a ‘beeg dergue’ who might ‘play too strong’.
    In the end I parked the car half a
mile from any hotel and stayed there with the children while Birna found us a
room in a place with swan-neck taps and a slimmers’ menu. The Ruth Ellis
receptionist didn’t look too pleased when the rest of us piled into her lobby,
but of course she had nothing to worry about. It’s not as if we peed in both saunas, or dive-bombed every last pensioner out of the swimming pool.
    ‘This is exactly the kind of
place where people go completely mad,’ said Birna later, breathless after a
hurried nocturnal outing to retrieve her eye-varnish or hair-liner or something
from the car. Though I’d probably have opted for ‘senile’, there was something
undeniably disturbing about Brides-les-Bains and not just because we had
immediately dubbed it ‘Brides in the Bath’. As well as the stroppily daunting
scenery, we blamed the noise, that endless thrash of melted Alp roaring a final
farewell to its birthplace as it headed off to the Mediterranean. No wonder
there weren’t any other children in town — with a watery lullaby like that they’d
be in nappies until puberty. Just as well that most of the current residents
were back in them.
    Three weeks were up; the real racers
would be rolling up the Champs-Elysées today. Because I was still a very long
way from Paris, over breakfast I made the very easy decision not to proceed
from Brides-les-Bains to Courchevel, the category-one eminence 20k up (and up
and up) the road where stage fifteen ended and stage sixteen began. No, I would
go straight back down the Isère valley, then straight up the next category one,
swiftly followed by a not inconsiderable category two. ‘I’m not doing those
squiggly bits,’ said