French Revolutions

had managed in any single afternoon, but I
wasn’t about to tell Paul that, any more than I was about to remind him about
swapping bikes.
    The road turned to face the Jura’s
foothills, but mercifully only went over their big toe. The Cote de Oberer was
just a category-three hill, yet still proved steep and hot enough for us to be
overtaken by three teenage girls whom we only managed to reel in via an
idiotically menopausal effort. But the descent was a cracker: barrelling down
towards a wheat-sown plain of almost prairie-like dimensions we slipstreamed a
moped, waited till his buzzing engine began to sputter, and then gloriously
forced our way past, whipping his two-stroke arse at 60 k.p.h.
    I was probably going almost as fast
when some sort of insect somehow flapped unscathed into my undone neck zip, and
before succumbing to a frenzied tattoo of slaps and scratches managed to pierce
flesh in two places. Having screeched to a messy halt in a petrol-station
forecourt, I tore off almost all of my clothes while continuing to flay my
torso like the Incredible Hulk’s agonised alter ego in the very early stages of
transformation. When, at length, Paul’s hilarity subsided just enough to permit
intelligible speech, he was able to give a detailed account of the memorable
facial expressions this spectacle had elicited from passing motorists.
    At the top of the category-three
climb I’d phoned a hotel near Basel airport, speaking with a shifty little
Beavis who began each sentence with a sotto voce snigger so repellent
that I couldn’t face asking him for directions. The folly of this omission
became clear as we wound through Basel’s unending industrial suburbs in an 8
p.m. sunset. We’d put a bellyful of kilometres under our belts — 125, with
clearly more to come — and it had stopped being fun some time ago. Through
underpasses, around gyratory systems, alongside marshalling yards — there
wasn’t much to see, and there wasn’t much to say.
    Jostled by tram and hassled by truck
we were soon lost. Having established a rapport with the hotel, no matter how
unsatisfactory, it was down to me to sort this out, and reluctantly taking
Paul’s mobile I called on all my long experience of the indecisionmaking
process. ‘Huhmmmhuh-huh,’ cackled Beavis almost silently as we stood at a
roaring intersection. ‘Church... hmm-huh... tram... huh-hmmm.’
    ‘Listen,’ I shouted above the
Friday-night roar of a thousand Golf Bon Jovis, ‘we’re at the junction of...’ —
a hopeless glance at eight lanes of traffic ‘... we’re at a big road wi...
hello? Hello?’
    Paul looked at me expectantly.
‘Church-tram,’ I announced confidently, in a way that explained I’d done my bit
and that it was now up to him to make sense of this runic statement.
    I sort of knew he would, but it might
have been nice if he’d taken a bit more time about it. Six minutes later
Beavis’s shoulders were shuddering soundlessly over our passport photos. Twenty
more and we were settling down to the first of many glasses of red wine and
awaiting a Chateaubriand, en route to waiter-winking levels of inebriated
jocularity.
    We drank to the 313 kilometres we’d
done in three days, we drank to the sunset gilding the half-timbered toytown
around our terrace table, to the shiny green trams gently clanking around the
flower-filled roundabout and the well-scrubbed burghers of Basel queuing up
neatly to board them. We drank to each other’s lower legs, Paul to my
knife-sculpted calves and I to his hawser-like Achilles tendons, and we drank
to our resilient buttocks. ‘I forgot to tell you to smear Savlon all over your
perineum,’ I said, and to this oversight we drank the heartiest draught of all.
     
    One of the few good things about
cycling all day is that even if you consume an unwise surfeit of alcohol at the
end of it, it seems to be very difficult to generate a hangover. One of the
very many bad things is that it is not impossible.
    The night before, belatedly rinsing
my kit, I had comprehensively flooded the bathroom while failing to discover
how to drain the washbasin. In the morning I found that this operation was
effected by a sturdy under-sink wand, and that the way to locate this wand was
inadvertently to snag one’s scrotum against it. The family had gone off with my
toothpaste, obliging me to improvise unsatisfactorily with crushed Rennies, and
the gusset of my shorts was still dripping wet.
    Damp and hunched I’d taken my