‘Did you read any of this?’
Birna was studying the extensive ‘patient information’ leaflet supplied with my packet of Haymine; I was building up pain tolerance and mental resilience by showing the children how long I could hold my magma-hot mug of breakfast chocolate in both hands.
‘That? No. I didn’t think it was relevant for my … ow.’
I blew my ruby palms while she recited.
‘ “Take one tablet every twelve hours.” How many did you have?’
‘Two in six hours.’ This sounded better than four in two. Birna read on.
‘ “Ephedrine Hydrochloride will reduce nasal congestion while counteracting some of the possible drowsiness that the antihistamine Chlorpheniramine may cause … you may also experience slight giddiness, rapid heartbeats and some weakness in the muscles.” ’
I looked down at the backs of my hands, idly picking at the stigmata-like hemispheres of scabby red flesh that had formed in the gloves’ exposed ventilation area.
‘ “Alcohol will make any drowsiness worse; avoid alcohol when taking Haymine” ’
Muscle weakness, giddiness, a half-litre of rosé. The drugs don’t work, they just make it worse. It was looking as if I might have made a fearful ass of myself.
‘Well … I feel all right now.’
And somehow I did. The flaccid, doped-up invalid absently hoisting an unsteady thumbs-up out of the rear passenger window at Avignon’s late-night tarts bore no relation to the following morning’s chirpy athlete looking forward to a long day in the saddle. I’d always been astonished at how Tour riders creaked up to death’s door in the late afternoon, yet just a few hours later freewheeled gaily out of the starting gate. But here I was, a child on each knee, folding up the map with eager impatience.
It was a splendid day. Still marvelling at my new-found powers of recuperation, I agreed the usual late-afternoon rendezvous with my support crew and swished out of Avignon’s hot claustrophobia, away from the Japanese tour groups and the pee-stained alleys, away from a juvenile populace who for two nights had competed with such diligent distinction at moped polo, played in the traditional Provençal fashion with beer bottles instead of mallets.
A warm wind whipped the café awnings as I emerged with a discreet whoop of liberation through the city walls at Porte Thiers, and – bless my frothing bidons – it was behind me. Mixing it cavalierly with every caravan and coach and camion blanc homme I pedalled slickly out of town at 40 k.p.h., muttering my own respectful commentary on Moore’s smooth, effortless style as he pulls away from the peloton on this flat but sunburned thirteenth stage to the military town of Draguignan.
Fresh new tarmac shaded by poplars; garish cherry orchards edged by rustling, house-high bamboo groves; luminous vineyards with tiny, newborn grapes like bunches of broccoli. At Robion I even took the uphill, downwind sprint, standing up in the saddle along the dead-straight, tree-lined boulevard to pip a farmer dawdling along in his foolish microcar.
Like a thousand partisan spectators the wind pushed me up a fourth-category climb to the crest of the long, low Montagne du Luberon, from where tight, tall Italianate hill villages looked at each other across the plain. Nearly all were cute, Bonnieux the most painfully so just as long as you didn’t mind the bijou art galleries and estate agents and Austrian number plates, and most particularly paying three quid for a can of Coke. A huge, lorry-licking descent into a granite canyon, all dead snakes and air brakes, then a ham baguette of reckless proportions by a fountain in Lourmarin, a knot of narrow streets that opened on to a sort of oversized village green backed by one of the haughtiest châteaux I’d yet seen.
The wind was getting slightly out of hand now, spinning rotary signs outside petrol stations into a deafening turbine frenzy, sending waiters across pétanque squares in pursuit of airborne parasols. But so what? It was behind me. A mistral in full howl plays havoc with the Tour: in 1969 it blasted straight into the riders at 70 k.p.h., persuading the organisers to let everyone hide behind their team cars, and two years later blew Eddy Merckx and 200 hangers-on into Marseilles so far ahead of schedule – 250 kilometres at an average speed of over 45 k.p.h. – that no one was there to greet them. By the time mayor Gaston Deferre turned up two hours later to present the prizes, Eddy and co. were in the shower back at their hotels; Deferre could have taken this humiliation badly, but being French he merely vowed that the Tour would return to Marseilles only over his dead body. (After twenty-seven consecutive visits up to 1971 the race next visited Marseilles in 1989, three years after Gaston’s last gasp.)
More screaming fighter jets buzzing the barns, a bollock-bullying stretch of cobbles, three kids riding waywardly home from school on a moped – I flashed through villages, in and out of slow lives at glorious speed. At Pertuis, which I had only previously been aware of in an onomatopoeic context as the noise Snoopy makes when orally expelling an unloved foodstuff, I even managed to intimidate a trucker who drove me off the road. When I jumped up on to his footplate at the next set of lights, battered his window and described in detail some of the more surprising aspects of his lifestyle, he just did what I always do: stared straight ahead and clicked down the central-locking button with a discreet elbow.
I crossed the gaping river Durance at Mirabeau, the monstrous fluvial power that once sliced out the gorge around me now castrated by hydroelectric schemes and canals. At Saint-Paul-lez-Durance the Tour route veered away, perhaps to avoid doing what I now did – namely, cycling right through the middle of a nuclear-research complex the size of Berkshire. The French really are a bit funny about this sort of stuff. I still cannot quite believe that over 70 per cent of the nation’s electricity is produced by nuclear power, nor that there is almost no opposition to this state of affairs. When their secret service blows up Greenpeace boats so that France can test its nuclear bombs in the Pacific, Parisians just snigger like Muttley. Mind you, it never pays to delve too deeply into French politics – flicking through the Rough Guide I discovered that two-thirds of the adult population are in favour of deporting legal immigrants who commit any crime or are unemployed for over a year.
I’d arranged to meet Birna at Vinon-sur-Verdon, and in homage to Eddy’s break to Marseille I got there long before my reception committee. Four o’clock is always a good time to arrive in a small French town in summer: one minute everything’s all scabby and dead and shuttered, then the shop-fronts all swing down or clank up and suddenly the streets are full of garish fruit and noisy housewives. It’s like watching a chrysalis open.
Vinon wasn’t exceptional, but sitting there in the tree-dappled shadows of the huge main square, Coke in one hand, Mars Bar in the other, I was happy. One hundred and twenty-two kilometres: Moore was back. I didn’t even mind when the family turned up and Birna immediately announced that Vinon was a dump and that she’d found a nice place 10 kilometres up the road.
‘Come on, Daddy,’ said my 4-year-old, ‘you can put your bicycle in the car and go asleep on my feet like yesterday.’ But I wouldn’t hear of it. Yesterday the bicycle had been a monstrous invention, an absurdly impractical device that I’d looked at with the same amused scorn normally reserved for Reliant Robins and the wearers of platform trainers. But not now. Now it was a superlative machine, the ultimate synthesis of form and function, a part of my body. I winked at my children, cleated up, put the hammer down and got to the Hôtel le Grand Jardin in Gréoux-les-Bains ten minutes before them.
Gréoux was the sort of slightly-past-sell-by spa town that could have done with a direct hit from the Tour rather than this year’s near miss. Poodles and pearls, solitary Scrabble, Mills et Boon, a coach party of Lancastrians with noses like W. C. Fields – the arrival of our family halved the average age and doubled the decibels. When we volunteered to eat outside and so minimise the scope for Generation X scaring the frail diners into Generation-Ex, the uniformed waitress politely insisted on laying out the full silver service on our plastic pool table: thirty-five pronged and bladed instruments for the five of us, or seventy after Valdis knocked my Bloody Mary over the lot as the waitress aligned the final fish knife.
Alimentary malaise is the unacceptable face of cycling infirmity. Crossing the line with dried blood caked on your face or a winged arm pressed to the chest of a shredded jersey is heroic in a way that soiling your Savlon can never hope to be. Yet unsurprisingly, effective digestion is way down the body’s priorities during a Tour, and many a cycling swan has crossed the line as an ugly duckling, his feathers all stuffy and brown in the most unfortunately literal fashion.
If I could pin down the exact moment when I realised I might not have made it as a professional cyclist it wasn’t when I fell over at the Kew Bridge bus stop or cracked on the col de Marie-Blanque, it was when I read Paul Kimmage’s account of the 184-kilometre tenth stage of the 1986 Tour. ‘LeMond was in trouble today. He had a bout of diarrhoea. He rode by me with thirty kilometres to go … God, the smell was terrible. It was rolling down his legs.’ Oh, no, no, no. Having the physical reserves to ride by people in that state, and the mental strength to deal with a scenario from the worst public-shame nightmare … it was beyond contemplation. And Greg LeMond went on to win the Tour that year.
Such were my thoughts as I’d lain awake in our restless dormitory, wondering if that noise was my stomach or two fat women mudwrestling on slowly deflating Spacehoppers. A certain reluctance at the breakfast buffet was inevitable, and by the time I’d pedalled into a Saharan headwind to rejoin the route at Ginasservis, I was in no position to speculate on the origins of its pleasingly odd name.
It was certainly the hottest day yet. My guts were percolating horribly and, though I knew I should be eating, the mere thought of the Dried Fruits of Ventoux was enough to spark off a parched retch. My warm-grape bidons were quickly but unenthusiastically drained, and all I thought about was their refrigerated replacements: beers, carbonated beverages, anything glistening with condensation.
Crossing the river at Aups (I did it again) I found myself recalling that the title sequences of both The Goodies and The Monkees featured cyclists pedalling at speed into extensive bodies of water. I couldn’t get the thought out of mind, the delicious immersion, the baptismal sense of salvation from the hot highway to hell, the distant acceptance that having forgotten to twist out of the cleats I would quickly drown, but not caring because I would drown happy, hopefully before Mickey Dolenz tried to give me the kiss of life.
It’s always a bad sign when I can’t remember where I had lunch. No such problems, however, in recalling its constituents: beer, Badoit, Coke, Badoit, beer, and a 300-degree segment of uneaten pizza. Sitting vacantly in the restaurant garden with cold sweat dripping from my temples to dough-up the pizza flour on my shorts, I was gently approached by the concerned patron and his wife: ‘Ça va, monsieur?’ No. Not really. ‘La Tour passe … passe …’ I began automatically, but I didn’t finish. A teenager was cycling at some speed up the considerable hill next to us, a compelling sight made more notable by his below-average limb quota. Spotting my Peugeot jersey he raised his one arm from the bars as he passed, accompanying it with a defiant yell: ‘Vive le vélo!’
Having rushed away to do terrible things to le patron’s vitreous enamel, I was clambering pallidly back on to ZR when he trotted over. ‘Voilà,’ he said, pressing a postcard of his establishment into my clammy hand. ‘Pour vos amis.’ I don’t know why I did this – possibly it was a slightly delirious obsession with saving weight, more probably because the composition was dominated by a huge platter of glistening innards – but as he turned back I wearily flicked the card away.
I could never whistle with my thumb and forefinger, or catch a pile of coins dropped off a crooked elbow, or get the Pritt-Stick to adhere temporarily to the laboratory ceiling directly above the teacher’s chair just before Mr Burrows came in, but the one juvenile pastime I mastered – though, thinking about it, I can also skim stones and blow up a telephone box – was the ability to propel a playing card at high speed over some distance by means of a wristy backhand flick. In defiance of my debilitated condition the postcard left my sweaty fingers already spinning fast, curving slightly up and around in a curtailed death-star arc before striking the retreating patron sharply between the shoulder blades. He yowled in distress and messily threw his hands in the air like a stuntman picked off by a sniper; then, pressing a hand to the point of contact, turned to survey me with confused horror. His lips were starting to jabber; soon sounds would come out of them, then questions, and because I didn’t want to answer these I held up a traffic-policeman palm, saddled up and fled. It was the rudest thing I had ever done.
By announcing itself as ‘home of the artillery’ Draguignan hardly coos beguilingly at passing tourists, and though I only saw its ring-road hinterland, the usual bland, beige boxes stalked by Ronald McDonald and Monsieur Bricolage, the word ‘unprepossessing’ loomed large. In fairness, I was distracted. Despite the heavy traffic barging along my alimentary canal, I had once again allowed myself to be lured into competition, this time with a knees-out, boiler-suited mechanic on what I could only assume was his grandmother’s bicycle.
It was an unedifying contest, particularly given my reluctance to share the work at the front. In Tour argot, I was wheel-sucking: toiling in his slipstream, letting a man on a rusty sit-up-and-beg do the sitting up while I took care of the begging. Winding it up round the cork-walled Gorge de Châteaudouble, he never looked round once, not even as he rumbled off down a side track, jabbed a forefinger at the road ahead and shouted out a rut-juddered ‘Bonne chance!’
The road narrowed, carving into the sheer gorge walls, writhing round corners of sufficiently exaggerated radius to ease oncoming tourist coaches right into my path. Stage thirteen had finished in Draguignan and I’d continued seamlessly into stage fourteen, which by common consent was the most appalling, the sort of ludicrous itinerary that made substance abuse almost inevitable: 250k northwards into the cold heart of Alps, with two first-category climbs that were statistically more awful than some of the HCs, topped off with the notorious col d’Izoard whose poisoned, Martian summit stood over 1,000 feet above Ventoux.
Oh, and the second-category Côte de Canjuers which Knees-Out had presumably been indicating, an attritional, never-ending ascent of hot, red earth and unabundant scrub. The sun was still high and so, as far as I could tell on the rare occasions when I angled my gaze up from the softening tarmac, were the haze-topped peaks ahead. If those were the Alps, then these, I supposed, were their foothills. It should not have come as a surprise to discover that the Alps had very large feet.
This was a tourist route, all big gay Germans on big gay motorbikes and roof-racked British estate cars with painstakingly yellow-painted headlights. At least the Brits noticed me. Every other nationality has been brought up in a culture where pedalling some poxy bike up a cliff for no good reason is considered almost humdrum behaviour, but the looks I got from the occupants of right-hand-drive vehicles were very different: a sort of intrigued horror that had me running a hand over the top of my helmet to check for snagged roadkill.
Up through the wizened weeds I went, into an empty world of crumbled rock, one with ample disincentives to settlement even without the enormous military firing range the road now gingerly traversed. After inching pained but ecstatic over a crest, I freewheeled round the next corner to be confronted with the full horror of the term ‘false summit’. This was an awful moment. Come friendly bombs and fall on me.
As a weary nod to Chris Boardman’s training diktats, I’d been scribbling occasional contributions to a ‘performance feedback’ diary. His sample entries were along the lines ‘a hard day, but never pushed into red’ and ‘sore, no stress’. Deciphering the diseased scrawl I penned at Comps-sur-Artuby, where my attempts at refuelling were once again confounded, this time by a restaurant sign stridently recommending ‘Tripes et Daubes’, I can just make out the words ‘v. bilious/feeble’.
It’s difficult to imagine that the one-man Fanta festival I held at Comps ameliorated this state of affairs, as evidenced by the shaming scenes enacted in a lay-by just beyond it. I’d somehow grovelled through 100 kilometres, but there were still 28 to go before the arranged rendezvous with my – hollow laugh – support vehicle. If the road had not immediately lowered itself into a mammoth descent that obviated pedalling for 16 of these I cannot imagine I would have made it.
Freewheeling past hill-topping castles, almost Arabian in their ochred bulk, I eased into the Grand Canyon du Verdon, an excitable river squeezed between granite flanks. The canyon is by common consent the most spectacular in Europe, but the incredible truth is that it wasn’t discovered until 1905. It still amazed me that the caves of Lascaux had remained hidden for so long, but overlooking a 12-mile-long, half-mile-wide hole in the heart of the world’s most densely populated continent is in a different league of geographical apathy. And less than fifty years later it was almost flooded for a hydroelectric scheme, one only abandoned when the money ran out: you can still see, and I did, the side tunnels they bored out in preparation. Then I saw a sign welcoming me to Castellane, and just beyond it a parked maroon Espace, and after 128 very different kilometres from those I’d breezed through the day before I had somehow made it.
Castellane was compact and noisy and overlooked by a tiny chapel stuck terrifyingly atop a towering rock: not so much standing guard over the town as hoping someone would catch it when it fell. The other point about Castellane was that it was full, complet, no vacancy, keine zimmer. ‘Ascension Day,’ said Birna, though at the time neither of us appreciated the hilarious incline-related irony. I lacked the wherewithal to participate in the so-you-think-you’ve-had-a-bad-day post mortem, nodding limply through the support crew’s breathless catalogue of in-car vomit and vertigo. ‘I wheel-sucked a mechanic,’ was all I could whisper in reply.
I was all over the shop, but the Tour pros would just be setting their stalls out. There was a sprint scheduled at Castellane – a sprint. And then another 200 kilometres of mountains, with a combined tariff equivalent to cycling up and down the Empire State Building. Eleven times. I hated myself for dwelling on the looming awfulnesses, but at the same time couldn’t help it. Tour riders at the end of the day don’t really want to stop talking Tour – can’t, in fact. They live and breathe the event more literally than competitors in any other sporting contest, and at the end of a day all they want to talk about is tomorrow.
I had a splendid photographic history of the Tour, and of the many hotel-room après-cycle snaps only two depicted what might be described as R and R (though each was a perfect cameo of national traits: the Italian Felice Gimondi autographing a blonde’s thigh; Belgium’s Eddy Merckx looking no less exhilarated as he turns over the four of clubs in a game of patience). The rest were all either winding down – a pin-pupilled Anquetil being forcefully massaged; Ottavio Bottecchia letting off a soda siphon into his aviator-goggled face; two Frenchmen being interviewed in the bath; Coppi with his feet in the bidet – or psyching up: Gino Bartali poring over tomorrow’s maps; three Spaniards squinting myopically at the sports pages. No time or energy for the sort of endlessly inventive after-hours horseplay practised by Switzerland’s Oscar Plattner: had the 1955 world sprint champion been a Tour rider, procycling might never have been able to reminisce on an endowment so extravagant that ‘in the right circumstances he could accommodate seven budgerigars, provided the last stood on one leg’.
The only bed in town was within a cardboard-walled chalet at a campsite, which was fine with me but less of a hit with Birna. Apparently intrigued by our dual-format holiday transport, the crisply-shirted Portuguese proprietor drove over in his little golf buggy for a chat as we corralled the children up to our plywood veranda. I’d long since given up on impressing a Frenchman with my endeavours, but because Portugal has no real cycling tradition, and also because his English was accomplished enough to decode my feverish ramblings, he was soon engrossed. ‘You do the whole, entire race?’ he asked, knitting his well-developed eyebrows in justifiable concern. I nodded gauntly, then indicating my fetid kit asked where I could get a laundrette token. ‘No, no,’ he said, and raising both hands by way of reproach insisted on laundering it all in his own machine. On any day this would have been a kindness, but I only appreciated its especial selflessness on that particular day just after he hummed away in his buggy. I’m so very sorry, sir.
I’d hardly describe it as my strongest suit in any circumstances, but in a campsite suffering in silence is never an option for the unwell. Our wobbling walls offered minimal sonic resistance to the traditional canvas lullaby of Teutonic snores, but I still cringe at the catastrophic voidances I shared with my fellow campers throughout that night. I could have suffered no greater shame if I’d strolled between the tents in broad daylight asking for a hand with my seventh budgie.
You may gather that I am not a good patient. Half my childhood was spent crawling round my mother’s feet dismally moaning ‘I think it’s my spleen’, and I made such a fuss about a teenage tummy ache that they took my appendix out to shut me up. (Mind you, the investigatory probings were by any standards rigorous. I’d like to meet the man who doesn’t scream the glass out of the surgery windows when a greased-up doctor is in him up to his elbow. Actually, perhaps I wouldn’t.) As dawn prodded at the curtains I was still writhing and groaning like an ankle-tapped Italian footballer, and with the roused children already holding a rowdy bedside vigil Birna blearily yawned that holiday tummy didn’t normally last more than a day.
‘Holiday tummy?’ I creaked, trying to muster up some shrillness. ‘This is a serious digestive disorder. I think …’ and here I was momentarily drowned out by an extended fizzing wheeze from somewhere within my knotted innards, ‘I think it might be dysentery.’ Kristjan looked at me with innocent concern; I placed a moist hand on his shoulder and rasped, ‘Daddy has The Bloody Flux.’
I went through the motions, so to speak, tottering half-heartedly about with maps and gloves waiting for Birna to stop me. It didn’t take her long. ‘Don’t tell me you’re getting on that bike today.’
‘Oh, OK then,’ I said, slightly too quickly, staring at my flaking, hollow features in the mirror above the little kitchen sink. From Castellane the stage profile peaked and troughed like a frightened rodent’s heartbeat, and there I was, French-fried, sundried, thin ’n’ crispy. Swilling my bidons out I noticed that even my ears looked ill.
Birna watched this negligent operation with interest. ‘Aren’t you going to wash them up properly?’
‘No point if I’m not cycling today.’
‘What do you normally use?’
After the washing powder’s insecticidal contamination, there had been only one all-purpose emulsifying surfactant in my life, used for laundering shorts, socks and jersey, cleansing bidons and – applied directly to a pilfered hotel flannel – to bring an occasional shine to ZR’s filthy flanks. ‘Wash ’n’ Go,’ I said.
‘That isn’t very good,’ she replied, and it wasn’t. Apart from anything else, whatever I poured into the bidons now came out tasting of perfumed paint. ‘And when did you last boil them?’
When did I last … If this moment had been filmed, the camera would have careered towards me on rails as I slapped palms to cheeks in a wide-eyed, round-mouthed epiphany of painfully abrupt realisation. Nick and Jan had asked me that same question; had in fact offered to do it for me. ‘Whenever we get a big party here, we always boil all the bidons once when they arrive and once before they leave.’
I just thought they were being … well, British. You know: fussy. Driven by a mindlessly slavish adherence to routine. You were supposed to pump your tyres and wipe your chain and brush the crap off your dérailleurs every night, but my progress didn’t seem to have been adversely affected by not doing any of these things even once. In my book – and what a smelly little pamphlet that is – bidon-boiling was on a par with the checklists headed ‘Preparing for a long journey’ that they always put in car manuals, which you flick through while you’re on a double-yellow waiting for your wife and kids to come back from Clark’s, and then think, Jesus, I’m sitting here in a Volvo estate reading the owner’s handbook while my children are having the width of their feet measured, which may mean that I am already one of Europe’s dullest men, and if anyone thinks I’m now going to start inspecting wiper-blades and hosing loose chippings out of my wheel-arches every time we breach the M25 they’ve got another think coming.
But Birna is not British. Birna is, in fact, the answer to the riddle of what you get if you cross an Icelandic virologist with an Icelandic immunologist. The agenda of her life was forthright: the global eradication of filth. Tough on grime, tough on the causes of grime. Adopting a tone and rationale normally employed against children who don’t wash their hands after going to the loo, she railed, ‘You’ve been putting fruit juice and God knows what in those bottles, and they’ve been fermenting away in the sun all day mixed up with your saliva and …’ Appalled at this toxicological scenario, the rant tailed off into a little quiver of revulsion.
I had imagined that my condition was stress-related, not so much mental as the physical strain of Herculean effort: I had made myself ill by trying too hard, pushing myself beyond the limit. ‘He destroyed himself – he had the ability to do that.’ Now I saw that it was none of these things. I was sick because I was dirty. I was a dirty boy.
I sent Kristjan into the campsite office to retrieve my laundered kit and with ZR dismantled in the boot we drove into the centre of Castellane. A day of campsite convalescence had been on the cards before I calculated that Birna and the family had to be back in five days, and that on current form the Alps would be occupying me for at least that length of time. A reluctance to attract public attention to my modest rate of progress had inspired me to spurn the support vehicle the day before, but in the ghostly light of the ensuing travails I wanted to see out the mountains with a back-up crew in close contact. A lost day was off the agenda, and cheating was back on it.
Before leaving Castellane, however, there was something I had to do. Birna pulled up outside a pharmacy, I clambered wanly out and hobbled in. Water purification tablets were what I wanted, though as I saw the silver-haired chemist listening in some alarm to my request for ‘pills to sterilise myself’ I clumsily effected additional explanations to ensure I didn’t end up with a very different sort of medication. Henceforth, the content of my bidons would have all the zesty refreshment of a lusty swig from the municipal paddling pool, but at least I wouldn’t die. It was awful to think that up Ventoux and the Alpine foothills – and, who knows, all through the Pyrenees – my bottles had been nurturing contagion, that with every parched sip I’d been slowly poisoning myself.
There’d been a chastening broom-wagon finality about stowing the bike in the boot. Today I’d be the one making rueful faces at cyclists from behind a windscreen, trying to gauge gradients, empathise with their labours and offer encouragement, but knowing that, whatever I did, to them I’d be just another gloating wanker in a car. We looped round the Lac de Castillon, its almost chemically turquoise surface dotted with pedalos, the surrounding hills all cedars and smooth granite, more Mediterranean than Alpine. The col d’Allos was the first proper Alp, a sprawl of off-season, shingle-roofed ski hotels at its base, the hairpins stacked up those Heidi-sided cowbell pastures. As the road twisted and rose we squeezed past the occasional cyclist, all pained, some traumatised, and one – a really very old man on a panniered tourer – engaged in such a rotary frenzy he looked as though he might spontaneously combust.
We’d just left him thrashing about in our wake when Birna stalled the car, yanked at the handbrake and in a voice destabilised with brittle fear formally renounced tenure of the driver’s seat. ‘That – there,’ she quavered, waving an explanatory finger at the view as she roughly parted my knees and hunkered awkwardly into the passenger footwell. An altitude-related spiritual collapse had always been on the cards for Birna, and following her finger down to the distant valley floor I remembered that at 2,250 metres, this was the highest point of the Tour to date.
Perhaps due to medical jealousy, I must confess to a propensity for contracting sympathetic phobias from those around me. I was never troubled by spiders before that first infantile experience of my father’s distinctive arachnid-encountering shriek, and now I can’t go into the garden shed alone. Slasher movies were routinely dismissed with hilarity until a girlfriend dug her nails into my arm once too often during Friday the 13th; that night I ended up having to sleep on the floor next to my parents’ bed, which is no place for any 20-year-old. And another unfortunate truth is that after years of intimate contact with Birna’s vertigo, I have inevitably been infected with the disease. A milder form, perhaps, although you might not have said that if you’d seen the pair of us inching across Clifton Suspension Bridge on our hands and knees.
Plunging off mountain sides is a regularly indulged Tour pastime, but without the Pavlovian stimulus of Birna’s keening wails I hadn’t yet got the old height-fright on the bike. Now, positioning myself behind the wheel, I realised only a supreme effort would stop the hysteria spreading to the rear seat with wretched consequences for all, most particularly the old bloke who was wobbling back past us into a position where any get-me-outta-here flung-open nearside doors would neatly dispatch him to eternity.
A throat-stripping nursery-rhyme session drowned out the incoherent death preparations ululating up from the footwell and so carried us to the top, but the descent was worse, a lonely cliff-clinger with regular ominous gaps in the rusty railings. Birna finally raised her head above the dashboard at Barcelonette, one of those gravelly, moraine-slopped mountain-plateau towns that cry out for a covering of snow. Here we waited an eternity for the shopkeepers to arise wearily from a well-earned three-hour lunch nap, then devoured most of their wares by the frothing mud of a swollen glacial river up the road. This allowed plenty of scope for juvenile tomfoolery of the near-fatal variety, and not wanting to be left out I forgot to close the boot when we drove off, causing tennis balls, flip-flops and other loose pieces of holiday to bounce excitingly into the path of following traffic. The number of drivers returning to their native Italy – I realised later that the border was just a couple of miles to the right – ensured an expressive reception to the incident-packed retrieval of these items.
I felt better physically – the unwieldy baguette assemblage I wedged painfully down my gullet represented my first meaningful calories for twenty-four hours – but at the same time there was a bleak sadness. This peaked as we drove through the cheerily named village of La Condamine, where we gawped solemnly at haphazard ranks of what could only be prison cells hewn perilously high into the granite cliffs behind. Why is the French penal system so melodramatic? They were still sending people to Devil’s Island after the war. And what could you possibly do to deserve being locked up in a mountain? I’d recently been struck by the related histrionics of their language, how you can never be sorry, only ‘desolated’, never bothered, only ‘deranged’. We might think of ‘yours sincerely’ as archly pedantic, but how would you fancy signing off to your bank manager with ‘I beg you to accept the expression of my distinguished sentiments’? I suppose it’s all part of the overwrought romanticism that so endears the Tour to the nation’s destiny-oscillators. (Actually, I found out later that they weren’t prison cells at all, but old gun emplacements. But that’s OK: this is known as the exception that proves the rule.)
Something caught my eye near the foot of the col de Vars. Propped against one of those ‘Beware of enormous falling boulders’ signs whose practical purpose always eludes me (‘Attention: one of these might land on your car in a minute, and if it does, you are all going to die’) was a deceased bicycle. I got out to inspect it. The tyres had rotted away, the saddle was a sprung skeleton and every spoke and crank and lever was lavishly ochred with flaking rust. I pulled it upright – an astonishing weight. As the family rushed out to commandeer the machine as chief prop in an extended session of madcap photography that would have graced any early Beatles film, I suddenly felt affronted by its presence. The col’s first hairpin loomed around the corner, backed by a huge retaining wall professionally embellished with the word ‘Hinault’. He flew up there fifteen years ago, said the dead bike, and a lot longer ago than that even I made it this far. And look at you, you old woman, pootling up the hills with your bike in the boot.
For 11 kilometres the road coiled uncertainly, back-tracking and switch-backing but always going upwards, a disorderly ascent through the trees and into a bare and rather messy wilderness of boulders, sheep crap and wind-whipped tussocks. At the unassuming summit – no wife-worrying precipices here – was a café. ‘You can get a certificate there for cycling up,’ read Birna from a guidebook as we wiped chocolate off our children’s faces in a car park crowded with more of what was an apparently inexhaustible supply of gay German motorcyclists. I gave no audible response to this information. My necessarily curt entry in that day’s training diary simply reads: ‘The shame’.
You may have gathered by now that the Moore household economy is run very much according to the model sketched out by Jack Sprat and his wife, only with obsessive frugality in the role of lean-eater and the fat-consumption duties assumed by profligate recklessness – oh, and that serendipitous platter-licking denouement substituted with an endless series of ill-tempered debates. Hotel lobbies are the usual battlefield, and a good example of this genre was held in the reception area of Les Barnières, jewel in Guillestre’s tourist-fleecing crown.
‘Look,’ said Birna, attempting to drum up some unlikely reinforcements from the starched-linen restaurant’s bill of fare, ‘they’ve got rosé wine from the slopes of Mont Ventoux.’ I pulled the sort of face with which Oliver Hardy delivered his catch-phrase. Birna persevered. ‘It’s the second cheapest on the menu.’
A small pause; a glance at the sunlit pool outside the window; a sigh of surrender. ‘I’ll unload the car.’
I was beginning to learn that the dolled-up pensioner is an integral feature of the Alpine summer, and the prominent ubiquity of the medical centre’s telephone number throughout the establishment suggested that Les Barnières, to paraphrase Basil Fawlty, might more accurately have styled itself the Hotel for People with a Less Than Fifty Per Cent Chance of Making it Through the Night. Or, in my case, through the next day. But despite the unseemly griping, it was of course a splendid evening. I ponced about the pool in my cycling shorts, flaunting my ludicrous tidemark arm tan before an elderly audience more preoccupied with large-print fiction. The children dive-bombed and screeched; it was very much like the home-movie scenes of Tom Simpson’s family Corsican holidays, only with a hairier-legged Daddy. I stuck away all my supper and half the kids’, and afterwards sat out on our top-floor balcony beneath the chalet eaves, the glass-muffled carousing of infancy behind me and dotage beneath.
Draining the last pink mouthful of Côtes du Ventoux straight from the bottle I squinted at the darkness, tracing the black outlines of that formidable Gothic backdrop, those murderous granite claws scratching at the stars. ‘Mon mari – avec son bicyclette,’ Birna had joshed the fat wine waiter, or anyway the fat waiter who brought us our wine, pointing at the Giant of Provence’s silhouette on the label. ‘Ah oui,’ he’d winked, in a rather silly way that indicated a forthcoming joke, ‘et demain, l’lzoard!’
Was the concept of me even tackling such a mountain really so chortlingly improbable? Yes, so I had yet to make it up an HC or even a category one without pushing and, the one-off conquest of the col de Saraillé aside, my climbing experience could be encapsulated as one of hills, pills and bellyaches. But Simpson, Kimmage and Boardman had all implied that one’s worst form often heralds the arrival of one’s best, that after you’ve cracked one day it takes a much harder bonk to break you the next. Certainly I felt infinitely better, even allowing for the rosé-tinted spectacles. A small cluster of lights that I’d initially mistaken for a constellation winked off into blackness. A village? Up there? Jesus. But I’d have to go that high and higher tomorrow. Not much further up, the blinking red dot of a plane moved smoothly across the Alps. That was modern travel: rapid, painless, humdrum.
Being rather drunk, I found myself tapping into the Tour’s spiritual root. A celebration of mankind’s arduous history, of our forefathers’ heroic efforts to triumph over adversity. The cavemen of Lascaux lanced bulls; we threw javelins. Spear-chucking was no longer a matter of life and death, assuming the stadium officials kept their eyes open, but somehow it seemed important to honour a time when it had been. And though the people of France could now hop on to trains or planes and zip across their nation in an hour, for their grandfathers this hadn’t been an option. The bicycle was originally sold to rural France as ‘the horse that needs no hay’: a means of everyday transport, often the only one in what is still, by European standards, a large and empty land. Farmers would think nothing of pedalling huge distances over huge hills – or, rather, they probably thought plenty, but had no choice. What about that dead bike on the col de Vars? The Tour paid tribute to these men and the tough times they lived through, times when you might fall into an undiscovered gorge the size of Belgium and wait half a century to be found. We didn’t have to do this shit any more, but watching 180 men in funny shorts forcing their punished bodies up hill and down dale gave us a vicarious taste of what we’d all have been doing in days now mercifully gone by.
In the middle of the night, I drifted gently out of a deep slumber with an inspiring warmth in my chest, a comforting glow that was soon spreading along my arms to caress the scorched flesh of my fingertips. This was it, I pondered dozily, the fire in my belly: this was what it felt like when the good form kicked in. Let the destiny-oscillation commence; I was ready now. Either that or a small girl had just peed all over me in her sleep.