French Revolutions

montagnes. I préfère ze, uh,
sliding sports: snowboard, wakeboarding.’ Still savouring this last word —
there is something wonderful about hearing a recalcitrant French mouth bully
itself round a many-syllabled English word — I took another messy mouthful of
croissant and asked if anyone would be watching the Tour when it passed down
the road. ‘Yes, of course, I watch it always — but I do not ’ave ze...’ and
here he thumped a fist dramatically to his chest... ‘ze art for vélo.
It’s very... difficult, very ’ard sport.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said, toying vaingloriously
with my jersey zip and gazing through the French windows as a thick mist
squatted down on to the mountains. ‘Yes, it is. And you prefer the wakeb...
what was it again?’
    Tiny drops of cloud were already
clinging to exposed flesh when the family waved me off at la Clusaz. It wasn’t
going to be easy. Between here and our scheduled meeting at Evian lay 130k of
badness, up and down a 5,000-foot mountain before the Alps went out with a wet
and lonely bang up the hors catégorie col de Joux-Plane. This name had always
sounded like something out of a nursery rhyme, conjuring gay images of bunting
and maypoles, but the chanting children were all bundled over an echoing
precipice when I unfolded the Michelin. The frail white line that traced its
circuitous path on the map had a messy, doodled look, one that suggested
Friday-afternoon cartography, a sort of that’ll-do approach to a road no one
would seriously consider following. Three small hands waved sadly through the
drizzled windows, and I realised for the first time what a rubbish holiday this
was for my children: thrown around the back seat all day in a Dramamined
stupor, then being kissed awake in the late afternoon by a filthy, tearful
cripple.
    La Clusaz, le Grand-Bornand: what
made one village masculine and another feminine? Maybe it was the legacy of my
own gentler-related tower/tour travails, but I was starting to become genuinely
angered by this linguistic imbecility. At la Clusaz the night before I’d asked
for ‘un bière’, only for the fat-faced patron to chide, ‘une bière’.
With my tongue loosened by pastis and fatigue I’d leant back in my slatted
chair and muttered, ‘Tell you what, René, bring one of each: maybe they’ll get
it together and make me lots of little baby bières.’
    My experiment in town-sexing was made
more difficult by the thickening fog. The last haul up to the category-one col
de la Colombière was so lonely that slugs were making it all the way across the
road; the bleak, cloud-hazed patches of browned snow and muddy moorland were
the sorry remnants of a majestic panorama that I only got to see on the postcards
in the col-topping café. Here I drank a double espresso and dripped sweat and
mist on to the table, then briefly caught my craw in the zip again before
heading off for the descent, followed into the fog by the amazed gaze of the
patron’s young daughter holding a vigil at the window.
    Clenched with cold I almost died on
the way down, my approximate, frost-fisted control of the handlebars edging me
on to the wrong side of the road just as an oncoming car ghosted out of the
fog. Only when the pine-shingled hovels gave way to all-weather tennis courts
was I sure I’d made it; when I glanced back up, the mist-swirled peaks looked
ablaze, and if they had been I’d have gone back up there to thaw. Pedalling
desperately to try and generate some body heat I sped through Cluses, a jarring
outbreak of dark satanic mills, then hurled myself at the third-category hill
outside. It started to rain and my speedometer stopped working; a
learner-driver side-swiped me and the two slices of fruitcake I’d nicked at
breakfast had somehow vanished from my jersey pocket. A closed bridge, a
dispiriting detour, cuckoo-clock balconies and then, running on empty and with
the first bonk-of-England madnesses marching over the horizon, I was in
Samoëns, looking for lunch, the road to the Joux-Plane and any mislaid parts of
my brain.
    There wasn’t a lot to do in Samoëns,
not at 3.30 on a wet Wednesday in June, and while sitting in a pine-panelled
bar dispatching a parade of fried and fatty foods I watched a lot of people not
doing it. Sturdy housewives waddled aimlessly past. A pouchy-eyed man with a
low brow and a bobble hat came in and gruffly ordered a Lucifer Flambée, which
I saw described in my bill of fare as ‘bière et alcool’. More