French Revolutions

discovered Daddy was not battling for
yellow with Lance Armstrong, I knew insubordination was inevitable. As a low
range of mountains petered out to our left beyond the wide and lazy River Aare,
I called back, ‘Those must be the foothills of the Jura.’ There was a small
noise from behind, the kind of brief, desolate hum I make when someone tells me
something about horse-racing.
    We were now deep in the sort of rural
suburbia that the nation seemed to specialise in, all hoovered lawns and
remote-control garage doors. ‘The word “Jurassic” is derived from Jura,’ I
continued stoudy, ignoring another bleak whimper, ‘on account of the... well,
the old stones.’
    A middle-aged man in a shellsuit was
carefully threading chevroned hazard tape round a newly weeded flower-bed,
which struck me as unnecessarily Swiss of him. Schoolchildren and mothers were
all striding along quiedy and correctly, and I realised that the whole scene
was like something from an architect’s model: the unnaturally green grass and
brutally marshalled vegetation, the gleaming, geometrically parked BMWs, the
orderly people and orderly houses. The architect Le Corbusier had been born in Switzerland, I remembered, and so could perhaps be forgiven for failing to predict that the
real-life global inhabitants of his fatefully influential modular concrete
estates would not behave in this fashion, choosing instead to interact with
their environment by weeing in lifts and throwing tellies off the roof.
    The same sort of thing had regularly
occurred to me while indulging my fascination with Swiss breakfast television,
which consisted of a scrolling roster of live, fixed-camera broadcasts from
mountain-top weather stations, devoid of humanity and soundtracked with yodelly
accordion. Try that in Britain and after two days you’d have trouserless
students sidling into shot. Mind you, after three you’d have a bloody civil
uprising.
    ‘The architect Le Corbusier...’
    ‘Why do you keep doing that?’
    ‘Sorry, I’m just trying to be... to
sound as if...’
    ‘No — that. You just did it
again.’
    ‘What?’
    I looked back and Paul gave me a
pained look, then, like Joyce Grenfell being compelled to utter a foully racist
epithet, whispered, ‘Spitting.’
    How awful, and how true. After the
first hour of cycling I was always seized with an urgent physiological need to
expectorate, and though in the initial days I would check for witnesses before
stringily anointing the hedgerows, repeated contact with flobbing Frenchmen and
televisual evidence of the Giro peloton in full phlegm had together inspired
complacency. Three weeks on I didn’t even know I was doing it.
    ‘But every sportsman...’ I began, and
ended, then began again. ‘OK, I mean I know it’s not great , but it’s
like... well, like, I wouldn’t want to sit on a French loo seat, but in Switzerland...’ I had absolutely no idea what I was trying to say, but whatever it was it
certainly hadn’t helped.
    ‘Oh, Tim,’ said Paul, genuinely
upset, ‘you’ve got to hover .’
    We lunched in Solothurn, outdoors by
the Baroque cathedral, watching student cyclists judder over the cobbles as we
waited for beer and pasta. Both took an age to arrive and proved sadly
insufficient, so having quickly dispatched them we went to the restaurant next
door and ordered them all over again, watched with interest by our first
waitress.
    By the time we’d finished Paul had
developed an obsession with a topless man wearing denim shorts of a type more
generally associated with garage-calendar blondes, sporting the facial hair
ensemble of Magnum PI. For twenty minutes he strolled about the stalls opposite
us, speculatively appraising plastic sandals and running his hands over his
torso.
    ‘Who the fuck does he think he is?’
said Paul. Susceptible as I am to contracting the emotional neuroses of others,
I was soon leading the vile mutters. When the man bunched fists on hips and
fixed the sky above the cathedral with a lingering, blinkless stare, I knew it
was very important that we leave Switzerland quite quickly.
    We had to anyway. I’d felt rather a
bully during the previous day and a half, chivvying Paul along when he stopped
to take photos, driven by a kilometre-clocking restlessness borne of three
weeks of almost constant daylight pedalling. But he had a plane to catch from Basel tomorrow morning, which meant getting there tonight, which meant another 90
kilometres. This was more than I