French Revolutions

pants,
spreadeagled in the Leonardo da Vinci /Man Alive position with the telly
on, when my family walked in. ‘Baron Austin von Powers, I presume?’ said Birna,
and glancing blearily from face to happy face as the host of the Austrian
edition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? barked and spat from the end
of the bed I understood that they had enjoyed their day and that, more than
this, they were relieved that it had been their last. Much of their afternoon,
I was breathlessly informed, had been spent in a water-slide park, and I
realised that this was the sort of thing they should have been doing all along.
Birna’s gesture in bringing the children out was one of the nicest things
anyone had done for me in many years, but, in the final analysis, when Cliff Richard
sang about going on a summer holiday, it is surely no accident that his lyrical
inspiration was drawn from jaunty shoreline entertainment rather than the
tortured suffering of a parent.
    The restaurant prepared a small and
expensive supper, brought to our table by a nice girl from Norwich who had been
in Switzerland just long enough to acquire an Australian accent. In the last
day and a half not a soul we’d asked had been aware that the Tour would shortly
be passing their front door, and the waitress did not break this duck. ‘Well,
it’ll be nice to see all those well-toned legs,’ she said, wiggling a wrinkled
nose cheekily at Paul, then turning to look me up and down, haughtily intoned,
‘Of course, they’re all on drugs’
    If there is any group more fond than
our children of creating unproductive noise at the crack of dawn it must surely
be the world’s German-speakers. No sooner had I drowsily entombed Valdis in a
soundproof chamber of eiderdown and leatherette than a huge and ugly symphony
of human and mechanical activity struck up in the cobbled street outside. I
raised a rusted eyelid and whimpered at the clock under the telly: it was 6.49.
A short time later Kristjan folded back our diamond-painted shutters and peered
outside. Had the medieval high street been transformed into a glittering steel
and glass mall? Was there a shiny new aircraft carrier in the car park? No. ‘I
think there’s a man painting the dustbins,’ and he was right.
    The family farewells were fond but
frenzied — if Birna hadn’t put her foot down she might easily have missed out
on one of Eurostar’s four-hour cancellation festivals in Paris — with Paul
turning in another flawless performance in his final cameo as gooseberry. At
the risk of being beaten about the face and neck with a narrow-heeled shoe, I
wish to state that one of the very saddest aspects of their departure was the
ceremonial return of the panniers. I managed to offload some of the spare
clothes and binned a couple of procyclings , but saddling up ZR was still
a dockside experience of depressing proportions.
    ‘This would have been fun up the Alps,’ I said to Paul, testing the weight with a laborious hoist of the back wheel. He
wandered over and gave it a tentative heave before pedalling off down the
cobbles.
    ‘Swap if you like,’ he said, after I
rolled alongside.
    ‘OK,’ I replied. ‘We’ll do it when we
stop next.’
    Idling out of Murten, we paused at a
grocer’s and Paul went in to buy water. Sitting with the bikes under an awning,
the displays outside every other bank and chemist telling me it was already
28°C, I wondered what he’d meant by this. I placed a hand under his pannier
rack and lifted, or rather didn’t. Jesus. His bike loudly identified itself as
a Saracen, and those wheezed uphill comments about it being built like a tank suddenly
acquired a more resonant significance.
    ‘Shall we change over here, then?’
Paul breezed towards ZR and started eyeing its svelte alloy bits greedily.
    Without actually pushing him away, I
abruptly clamped both arms on the bars and began to blather about the
difficulty of adjusting the saddle.
    ‘No problem,’ said Paul, with a wry
smile. ‘We’ll do it at lunch.’
    On a pendulous cycle-path route to
Solothurn I took the lead, and soon established that not only did Paul’s
bicycle strain leadenly up hills, but even downhill, even in my slipstream, he
had to pedal to keep up as I freewheeled. Our whole cycling relationship had
been founded on the unspoken assumption that I was much better than he was. Now
we both saw that this was not the case.
    Feeling the same sense of exposed
inadequacy that I had when Kristjan