French Revolutions

names. Then, abruptly inspired, I crouched and clasped
the friction-heated wheel-rims, enjoying up to two seconds of relief before the
surprisingly enormous temperatures started to melt my fingerprints off.
    I hopped and stamped and slapped
myself like a bereaved Iranian, but it didn’t help. My rouged wrists were still
festively dew-dropped, my feet pulsed with hot pain like recently de-toed
stumps, and had Crystal Gayle not wanted a worldwide hit she could have done a
lot worse than recording the touching homage ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Knees
Blue’. I forced myself to take a swig from the bidon and when the contents hit
my teeth I thought they’d all fall out. It distantly occurred to me that, as
the road was closed, third-party assistance would only be available when it
opened, and then in the form of a desultory search for my clenched corpse.
    The blasphemy had gone, replaced by
less mentally demanding wet-throated, guttural bull noises, when I remembered
what lay at the bottom of the bar-bag, beneath pills and pump and plastic
spoon. Our friend Emma had given it to me, at least partly as a joke, and I had
just got the punchline. I very much doubt that anyone, except perhaps an
unusually jaded sexual pervert, has ever unscrewed the cap of a tube of Deep
Heat with such a graphic display of lurid glee. In one clumsy splurt I
liberated the entire contents, then smeared all exposed flesh and gasped in
masochistic ecstasy as the fiery white cream penetrated my brittle carapace.
    It didn’t last long, but then it
didn’t need to. Four bends later, again beginning to clamp my shrieking fists
around the liniment-lubricated levers with all the dextrous precision of a wino
at dawn, I came upon a huge mound of smouldering hay piled up in a layby.
Untroubled by the scant respect this smoking apparition paid to both logic and
meteorology, I sat on it and, upon discovering that to do so was lovely, stayed
sitting on it for perhaps fifteen minutes. Then I remounted, and moments later
found myself swishing out of the fog, around the facing set of Route Barrée
gates and into the predictably architectured ski town of Morzine. The first
human I’d encountered since the gesticulating gendarme, an Alpine executive
digging his ornamental log pile out of a landslide, surveyed me with excusable
wariness: pit ponies, surely, weren’t meant to cycle, particularly not fatally
neglected specimens slathered in shaving foam. And why was this one smiling?
    Down the wide main street I cruised,
able at last to stoke up the inner fires with frenzied pedalling. Leaving the
pine cladding and treble glazing to absorb a looming night of incestuous
outrage, I whisked down the valley to Lake Geneva.
    Rolling into Evian I saw a
primary-school teacher up a ladder in her classroom, struggling to affix some
jolly mural, and then I realised it was gone seven o’clock, and that this must
mean that the people of Evian were good people. It was exactly what I wanted,
undemanding and comfortable, with a ponced-up, casino-cluttered promenade along
the lake that could wait until tomorrow. We’d booked a hotel in advance, and
the family had already checked in. ‘Good God,’ said Birna, exiting the lift and
seeing the receptionist grinning desperately at The Amphibian Formerly Known as
Tim. She wouldn’t let the children see me until I’d been hosed down in the
bath, but when after two changes of water they all rather sweetly filed in with
offerings of chocolate and lollipops I felt like one of those black-and-white
Tour legends being interviewed in the tub. It was beginning to look as if I
might be becoming rather great.

Fourteen
     

     
     
    The Tour de France invariably makes a
foray into neighbouring countries, usually for commercial purposes or the less
rational motivation referred to earlier, the one that says: ‘Hey: look at all
these sexy guys on bikes and stuff! Don’t you wish you were French?’ The Tour
has even been to Britain a couple of times, most entertainingly in 1974, when
for six hours the riders pedalled disconsolately up and down an unopened bypass
outside Plymouth in a stage intended to promote the export potential of French
artichokes. The Tour director forgot his passport and was shadowed by
undercover Customs officers all day; hardly anyone else turned up and the
following morning’s Daily Mirror rhetorically enquired: ‘Tour de France: can 40
million Frenchmen be wrong?’
    Anyway, the
2000 Tour had embraced the raw