French Revolutions

sturdy
housewives. A driver delivering dustbins to a hardware shop sat in one of the
wheelbarrows on display outside and his mate gave him a quick and noisy ride
round the square. After another dozen housewives, a man cycled past one-handed,
guiding a second bike with his right hand, which still impresses me now, though
probably not as much as it did then if a hazy memory of open applause has any
basis in reality. As bobble hat was ordering his second Lucifer, two pairs of
purple cycling shorts swooshed in through the door, and when after a few more
fistfuls of chips I realised that the heads above these shorts were issuing
English voices I looked behind me to see a young couple, as fresh-faced as Blue
Peter presenters, helmets on the table, writing postcards and drinking hot
chocolate. Without thinking I rose and approached.
    ‘Sorry,’ I said, apologising for my
appearance as well as for the fact that I hadn’t decided what I was about to
say, ‘but I noticed your legs there and I just need to know what you’re doing.’
    As conversational icebreakers go this
was rather a Titanic , but it is a tribute to the overlooked good manners
of England’s youth, or at least its hearty, active Home Counties subset, that
the pair looked up with eager, open faces rather than the wary, sod-off glowers
demanded by the situation.
    ‘Yuh — well, we’re just doing a bit
of a tour,’ began the male, who I have no choice but to describe as a boy. ‘Ten
days. We flew into Geneva last night and just got down here. It’s great — you
can take your bikes for free on BA. What about you?’
    ‘Well — you could call it a bit of a
tour. The Tour. The Tour de France.’
    ‘Cool,’ said the girl in neutral
tones, scratching a shoulder blade through her grey fleece top. Minimal
departures in the bump department aside, she could quite easily have passed for
her boyfriend. ‘It’s a shame the weather’s so awful — the scenery’s supposed to
be amazing. Dad used to come skiing here in his bachelor days.’
    ‘I suppose that would have been in
the Seventies,’ I said with a small, wry snort she clearly missed.
    ‘...Er, yuh, well, he met Mum in ’79
so... yuh. Seventies.’ Oh, children, children. A solemn and ruminative silence
fell over us, and to break it the boy said, ‘Yuh — we’re off to Morzine next.’
    ‘Mmmm? Oh. Yeah. Me too. How you
getting there?’
    ‘Only the one way, I think. The
Joux-Plane.’
    ‘Well, there we go. That’s my route.
Because it’s part of the Tour de France, which I’m doing. All of.’
    ‘Cool. Well, in that case maybe we
could all...’ and here he exchanged very quick but very eloquent glances with
his girlfriend, ‘Well... good luck. Pretty grim up there, by the looks of it.’
    Almost immediately they clattered out
into the wet wooden street with brisk waves, postcards half-written and hot
chocolates half-drunk. I could understand their reluctance to accompany me up
the Joux-Plane, or rather I couldn’t, the heartless little bastards. Did I
really look that grisly? I suppose they just wanted to ride up hand-in-hand and
have a celebratory wholesome snog at the top. Ten minutes later, feeling very,
very tired, I was zipping up my rain top and remounting without enthusiasm.
    As befitted what was, after all, the
steepest climb in the 2000 Tour — 8.4 per cent for 12 kilometres — the road out
of Samoens thinned and rose almost immediately. Soon I was out of the saddle
and into the mist. Farms as messy and hopeless as hillbilly homesteads were
left behind and now there was nothing but fir trees and pot-holes and my breath
piping seamlessly into the fog. The non-functioning speedometer had been
getting on my tit end all day, but now that blank, unaccusing display was a
solitary source of comfort.
    ‘Hey!’
    Almost asleep in the saddle, I
clumsily uncleated a foot and looked up in bleary alarm. It was the two
cyclists.
    ‘Hey!’ Having been descending towards
me at speed, they brought their matching green tourers to a squeaky, unsteady
halt alongside. ‘It’s closed. The pass. “Route barrée”.’
    I looked at them like a kindly old
country parson being informed by heavenly messengers that God despises him, and
always has done. ‘Closed? But... closed why? Why closed?’
    ‘No idea. Big gates across the road
with a no-entry sign. Closed. Route barrée.’
    I tried to come to terms with the
situation, but immediately knew that in the absence of opiate drugs such