French Revolutions

artichoke of cross-border co-operation more
fondly than any of its predecessors. On this basis it was a slight shame for my
friend Paul Ruddle, who had abruptly arranged with Birna just before she left
to meet up with us in Evian and cycle with me for three days, that his Tour de
France would take place almost exclusively in Switzerland.
    Not that this or much else seemed to
be troubling him when he arrived with Birna from the airport. He’d been up
until 3 a.m. crating his bike to British Airways’ exacting standards, but you’d
never have guessed it from the greedy eagerness with which he surveyed the
hills on Lake Geneva’s eastern flank as we set off to the multi-storey to
unload and assemble his bicycle, a hybrid mountain bike/tourer.
    I wouldn’t wish to embarrass Paul by
mentioning his scarily successful career as a City high-flyer, but there we go:
I just have. A man who had made his name with flawless judgement and an
associated reluctance to suffer fools gladly was an unlikely volunteer for my
tour; as he had also just completed his first marathon in three hours, and was
still running up to a hundred miles a week, it was difficult to see what Paul
hoped to achieve in my company. It really was astonishingly kind of him to
sacrifice what for a City man is probably an entire decade’s holiday allowance,
but having thanked him in these terms I began to see that my worst fears were
being trumped. As well as being the physical apotheosis of the adjective
‘toned’, he also knew what he was doing.
    ‘You’re pretty good at that,’ I said,
watching in the harsh carpark light as Paul slipped wheels into axles and
bolted on pedals, handling the spanners and hex keys with a juggler’s flourish.
    ‘Used to work the odd weekend in a
bike shop when I was a kid,’ he said, closing an eye and chewing a lip as he
assessed the alignment of his front brakes. Here was further evidence of the
many-siblinged upbringing in Northern Ireland that had prepared Paul for most
of life’s challenges.
    ‘How many odd weekends?’
    ‘About four years’ worth.’
    On the plus side, this meant at least
three drrr-thwick less days; on the minus, my self-styled status as team
leader was already looking tenuous. Having treated the subterranean parkers of
Evian to an unexpected buttock festival, we slipped into Lycra, threw anything
unwanted into the Espace and prepared to depart.
    ‘Actually, sod this,’ blurted Paul,
tearing off the maroon helmet which he’d promised his wife he’d wear and
flinging it into the car as I was about to close the boot. ‘I just can’t be
doing with that.’
    ‘Because it looks stupid?’ I asked,
running a self-conscious finger around the even more conspicuous circumference
of my own headwear.
    ‘That’s right,’ said Paul, and off we
went.
    I understood that Paul was not the
sort of person who fell off bicycles. Mentally spooling through a montage of my
own experiences of horizontal cycling, in particular the many featuring
slow-motion topples in a variety of urban and rural settings, I accepted the
different logic of our parallel situations. Although Paul had no interest
whatsoever in watching sport, I recalled that he was always good at doing it.
He couldn’t tell you who the England manager was but could wipe the floor with
me at keepie-uppie. The name Tiger Woods would ring only the faintest bell in
Paul’s mind, but in his hands a golf club could propel a ball with prodigious
accuracy and distance. And though I now understood that the words ‘team jersey’
made sense to him only in terms of Channel Island offshore-banking consortiums,
it was no surprise to look behind and see Paul pedalling lazily past Evian’s
relentlessly manicured ornamental lakeside gardens with both hands behind his
head.
    It got worse when we met up with
Birna and the kids. ‘Did Paul tell you what happened to him in Singapore last week?’ I didn’t think this story would involve a fine for destroying a bus
shelter, and I was right. Apparently, Birna told me as Paul coughed with
embarrassed modesty, he had been working out on a hotel exercise bike with such
devastating potency that the machine had exploded. ‘It didn’t explode ,’
said Paul quietly. ‘Just sort of... caught fire and melted a bit.’
    ‘Oh, come on,’ said Birna with a
distasteful leer, looking as if she might be about to grab part of Paul’s leg
between her thumb and forefinger.
    We’d gone about 15k up the busy
lakeside