French Revolutions

by Tim Moore

  With my shoulders rolling from side to side and every part of my body from the tops of my feet to my wrists in some measure of discomfort, I drrr-thwicked into an abandoned picnic-area and fell flat on my back, oblivious to the under-arse pine cones, the rain and the fact that crapping by the roadside is a widely enjoyed French pastime. Yawning massively, I blinked up at the dripping fir trees before drowning out the HGVs with a bellowed chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’. The tomato/monkey/zoo version.

  It was very difficult to believe that the Tour riders were expected to do Tours–Limoges in one day. A single hill seemed to slog on for a lifetime; the previous afternoon’s incident with the mad binwoman of Obterre was like a recorded childhood memory, yet the pros would have taken only three hours to bridge Obterre and Limoges. I kept thinking about the riders who weren’t sprinters or climbers, managing to win races on determination and stamina alone. ‘Hard men’ they were called, almost officially, and if you could bully your bike and body more brutally than most you might even aspire to the ultimate accolade of ‘super-hard man’.

  The last haul to Limoges was one for the super-hard men, a lot more ups and a few more downs, though they might have skipped the bonus round of squatting under the porch of an abandoned hovel waiting for the rain to shut up.

  I can’t think of many cities that don’t look worse in a downpour, except maybe Atlantis, but by any reckoning Limoges was unappealing. ‘Not a city that calls for a long stay’ was the Rough Guide’s tart assessment, and squeaking and splashing through the rush-hour it was easy to see why. Limoges was one of those places bodged together out of a job lot of leftover drab suburbs, with the sort of city centre you passed straight through without noticing. The china that made the town famous is no longer authentically produced – the kaolin mines were exhausted long ago – though this didn’t stop a succession of souvenir shops displaying racks of plates garishly decorated by graduates of the Weeping Pierrot school.

  Without wishing to extrapolate too much from my limited contact with them, I have to report that the people of Limoges came up rather short on the awareness front. Keen to find the route of tomorrow’s stage, south to Villeneuve-sur-Lot, I popped into a bike shop to catch fifteen minutes of The Vacant Proprietor, and the over-staffed and under-customered tourist office seemed profoundly sceptical of the concept of buildings with bedrooms and restaurants that tourists could stay in.

  I did find a hotel in the end, up a loathsome wet trunk road whose gradient confirmed the unlikely truth that, flying in the face of conventional civil-defence wisdom, Limoges’s founding fathers had opted to locate their town in a huge hole in the ground. The Hôtel Belvedere was named after its attractive view of many lanes of Toulouse-bound traffic, but the restaurant looked respectable enough – at least until I’d sunk a birthday bottle of fine wine and begun to do slightly fatuous things with the little ‘Boeuf Limousin’ flag that had been speared into my steak. By the time the crème caramel arrived I was waving it happily at an elderly Dutch-sounding diner at the next table.

  Cointreau number two coincided with the arrival of half a dozen middle-aged and moustached men, who greeted the room with slight nods and a ‘Bonsoir, m’sieurs, dames’. This extravagant display of respect, coupled with their whispered but earnest gastronomic discussions – agonising over vintages, asking the waitress if the goat’s cheese was local – led me to wonder fuzzily if they weren’t a party of retired Tour pros on a reconnaissance mission, a sort of warm-up brigade of sporting ambassadors. Only after I completed the painful ascent to my room – why did I keep ending up in the flaming attic? – did I find the truth, looking out of the window to see a phalanx of France Télécom vans in the hotel car park. Phone engineers with social grace and epicurean connoisseurship – it was enough to make you forgive an entire nation of spiteful press officers and tourist-board nellies. Providing that you had then gone to bed without watching telly.

  Tuning into a late-night documentary about the Ariane rocket launch in French Guiana, my first thought was the recollection that there had been talk of staging the 2000 Tour prologue on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, a 13,000-kilometre round trip for a 20-minute bike ride. Though this was cancelled on logistical grounds, the fact that it was seriously considered served as a reminder of how colonial France remains – imagine the FA Cup final being staged in the Falklands – as well as showing the evident relish with which the nation markets the Tour as an international showcase of France’s global importance. Along the roads I’d seen regular reminders of French bitterness at the triumph of English in the battle of the world languages, advertising campaigns with English slogans – ‘APPLE – THINK DIFFERENT’ – followed by a little asterisk pointing to the indignant, sour-faced translation at the bottom of the billboard: ‘Pensez différemment’. Even a sizeable proportion of graffiti is in English, or something like it. Putting ZR to bed in the hotel garage I’d encountered ‘Fuck off the system’ and ‘Your face, your ass – what is the different?’

  France had lost the war, but, as the rocket documentary reminded me, was still fighting rearguard actions in far-flung theatres. My memory of the Ariane programme is of rockets toppling over on launch gantries, U-turning into the sea or spectacularly showering a rainforest with small, hot pieces of titanium after eleven seconds of flight. In this I was at odds with the programme-makers, who chose to overlook the previous farces, and indeed the contribution of other nations to what is a European project, while compiling a trumpetingly propagandist account of France’s technological majesty.

  It was particularly interesting to note how local protestors – understandably reluctant to risk their shanty towns being incinerated by the now-traditional mid-air apocalypse – were portrayed as brainless Luddites to be cowed into submission by mooring a couple of huge destroyers just out from the beach. When the control-room whitecoats finally pressed the button, the booming soundtrack was an orchestral celebration of the victory of progress over ignorance, the First World over the Third, France über alles. It was like watching a James Bond denouement in which Blofeldt wins: the digital countdown gets to zero, the skies above the secret jungle hideaway are pierced by a streak of smoking silver, a hundred brainwashed technicians rise from their monitors in synchronised triumph.

  Inspired partly by this quest for technical perfection and partly by my own torrid battles against gravity, I was becoming mildly obsessed with reducing my burden. Toothpaste consumption had trebled, extruded cavalierly on to brush with a wristy squirt; my hangover that morning was treated with a paracetamol overdose; complimentary toiletries were left on hotel-bathroom shelves with a thwarted sigh. I knew all this was silly – a single discarded copy of procycling would have had far more concrete significance – but it at least made me feel I was doing something. Just as well, because my invented itinerary, almost due south on the D704, flung me directly up a monstrous incline that went on until lunchtime. I’ll say this for it, though: I didn’t have a hangover by the time I got to the top.

  The landscape was too green, and there was generally too much of it. In Britain, close-packed herds of livestock nibble the grass right down to the quick; it was odd to see, through my drizzle-slitted gaze, a couple of cows marooned in a field the size of Heathrow Airport, surrounded by so much waist-high pasture that they didn’t know where to start. And the wildlife hadn’t quite adapted to the intensive nature of twenty-first-century life either, strutting gaily out of the damp fields into the path of heavy-goods vehicles. It is a surprising truth that whereas even a plump hedgehog bestows only a compact visceral legacy on the tarmac, your average skinny weasel really lets rip. I know this because one of the latter, carelessly permitting thirty-two tons of mobile machinery to compress it at speed, ejected a sizeable gobbet of gizzards that flew across the dotted white line and struck my front wheel, to be distributed piecemeal via the revolving spokes to my shoe uppers and, less acceptably, my bare shins. I did manage to eat some lunch, but somehow the usual bacchanalian intens
ity wasn’t there.

  Cleating myself wearily back into ZR – a process that was beginning to hold all the physical and mental appeal of self-crucifixion – I was passed by two old chaps on immaculate road bikes, gleaming pro-team jerseys pulled tight over their paunches. All their supplies were in little backpacks; they glanced with disdain at my panniers before swishing away up the D704. I knew that two riders relaying – taking it in turns to bear the brunt of the wind resistance at the front – could go at least 20 per cent faster than a lone cyclist, but being at least 40 per cent younger and 100 per cent less French I rashly decided to give chase.

  Interestingly, it wasn’t the ups that did for me, but the downs. The D704 was on a roll, and every time I got near enough to read the old blokes’ sponsors’ logos at the brow of a hill, they’d lean and glide and swoop nose-to-tail down the other side, leaving me to flail distantly about the wet carriageway, convulsing over the pot-holes. Whenever I tried to raise my belaboured behind from the saddle the weight of the panniers threatened to pull us all over, and above about 35 k.p.h. the wind rushing through my ears eerily replicated the sound of a motor vehicle nosing up to my rear wheel. The answer to all these problems was to grip the handlebars so tightly that the whole of my upper body would be in spasm by the time I got to the bottom. It also seemed slightly unfair that though none of us had mudguards, mine was the only jersey splattered from coccyx to nape with a healthy covering of road slurry.

  When the muscles of the arse became an issue – and frankly it was about time – I pulled over, just as one of my conquerors turned to deliver what even at 200 yards was clearly a triumphant smirk. In half an hour of buttock-punching, hamstring-yanking, chest-broiling pursuit I had boosted my average speed for the day from a pedestrian 18.9 k.p.h. to a … oh, to a pedestrian 19.1 k.p.h.

  I tried to rationalise the depressing implications of these statistics by tackling hills in a new way. The key, I decided, was to stop at the top of each and award myself a treat: a sip of water, a blow of the nose, a slow-motion cleated fall into the wet brambles. It worked until the rain reached pause-discouraging levels, and with my average speed (or ‘AVS’, as the stop-looking-at-me-like-that odometer would have it) stubbornly static I gave up and dropped back.

  One hundred and one kilometres into my day I got to Montignac, saw a sign saying ‘Alight here for the Lascaux caves’ and decided that would do. I suppose Montignac has only prospered due to its proximity to the famous palaeolithic hunters’ paintings, but it seemed a lovely place in its own right: timber-framed medieval houses with lopsided balconies overlooking a big river, a splendid pyramid-roofed, ashlar-colonnaded Napoleonic town hall and a venerable thirteenth-century hospital housing a clueless tourist office (‘Le Tour? Oui, er … par ici, et après … Périgueux? Brive?’ – both improbably located). I imagine Montignac must be completely overrun in high season – in the estate agents’ windows all the details were in English – but on a belatedly sunny mid-May evening I had the place more or less to myself.

  Just up the main drag from the tourist office I found a lovely hotel run by a lovely Mrs Robinson proprietress – white capri pants, snakeskin loafers – who ran her establishment exactly as my family would if they ran a hotel: lovely old Victorian wallpaper and high-back velvet thrones in the bedrooms; ceiling-mould and hairy plugholes in the bathrooms. Another feature of the latter was a deeply disturbing lavatory, the watery base of its bowl containing a waste-disposal grinder guarded by two rubber-starfish sphincters. It took me five minutes to find the flush button, and when I pressed it a large pink pill was mysteriously ejected by the starfishes with such force that it flew into the bath. It could have been worse. Pedal all day and there’s only the tiniest residual evidence of those 9,000 calories.

  I had a slow beer by the river, opening out the maps and watching some sort of swallowy bird swooping down to skim the ripples. On to Michelin 235 – an exciting moment, as this one, subtitled Midi-Pyrénées, revealed that I was unequivocally in the south of France. On the other hand, I was becoming progressively more weary every evening. Having spent all day looking like – and in fact being – an imbecilic two-wheeled tourist, I normally made at least some effort at camouflage in the evenings, buying the local paper and pretending to read it, nodding and tutting at the TV news in bars. That night, though, I simply couldn’t be arsed, stumbling listlessly around Montignac with an armful of badly folded maps, in skin-tight black rain leggings, white socks and black espadrilles, like a Bolshoi reject.

  I was so tired, in fact, that halfway through the second of three splendid courses of Périgord cooking at the hotel, my head sagged limply towards the riot of linen, crystal and electroplated nickel silver. Mrs Robinson’s husband roused me with a gentle cough and a sorbet; Jesus, I thought, jerking upright with an equine splutter: asleep at the table at 8 p.m., and there were still 2,300 kilometres to go.

  ‘Excusez-moi,’ he began shyly, after I had dabbed away a gossamer thread of chin drool, ‘votre nom – vous êtes apparenté à l’ancien James Bond, Roger Moore?’

  ‘Oui – il est mon père,’ I said, a little flatly, as during my visits to France over the years I had been asked this question perhaps forty times.

  ‘Votre père!’

  He was so excited I didn’t have the heart, or indeed the vocabulary, to explain that I had been making an unimaginative joke. As I trooped out through the empty dining room, past the trompe l’oeil murals and marbled panelling, I saw the Robinsons peering at me excitedly from the door that led to the kitchen. This may explain why they forgot to charge me for dinner, though not why I didn’t point this out to them. I really am very sorry.

  I went up to the Lascaux caves the next morning, in predictable rain, and trooped round a very cold recreation of the world’s oldest art gallery. The originals were sealed up in 1963 after it was noted that visitors’ breath was turning the ancient horses green, and having spent an hour in there with a couple of dozen skunk-mouthed French OAPs I can understand why. What’s really interesting about Lascaux isn’t so much the paintings – the whole reproduction scam rather takes the gloss off that – as the fact that they weren’t discovered until 1940, by four boys looking for their dog. It was a mark of rural France’s vast emptiness that such a huge place should be used by hundreds of generations of prehistoric hunters, then lost again until halfway through the twentieth century. The guide accidentally locked us in – one old man started crying when we realised it wasn’t a joke – and by the time we were released five minutes later I’d started wondering whether we’d be discovered in 17,000 years by four dogs looking for their boy. And then get breathed on and go green.

  Tour riders, of course, never really get to do much sightseeing. Paul Kimmage sourly recalls how sickening it was to be cheered through purgatory by lolly-waving sunbathers, people so patently on holiday when he was so patently not. After a day in the Alps during the 1984 Tour Laurent Fignon told reporters he had climbed like a tourist, going on to critically compare the view from each peak; but then again, with only three stages left and an unassailable nine-minute lead, he could afford to.

  Bugger the rain. The poppies were still out, but were now all wet and limp. More slug tennis, more hills, more rain – fewer restaurants. Foaming sweat into my airtight rainwear like a nobbled racehorse, I bonked alongside the Vézère river and down through lofty pine forests to the banks of the Dordogne. They liked their rivers big down here: to my addled, sugar-free brain the Dordogne looked as broad as the Nile, and the bridge I crossed to Siorac seemed like the gateway to another world. But don’t knock the bonk – in many ways it was. The sun abruptly burst through, the clouds scurried away over Siorac’s severe-looking château to the horizon and in four minutes I was getting a waitress to tilt the water off an outside table to make way for my pizza. Sorry: pizzas.

  It was indeed a day of two halves. With a hefty wind behind me I gradually picked up speed and maintained it so effectively that I only realised in the evening that the roa
d had been slightly uphill most of the way. Momentum is all, I said sagely to myself, feeling road-wise and fresh-legged as for an hour I whished along at 33 k.p.h. Before lunch I’d been wondering how the pros kept going all day, but now I didn’t want to stop. Waiting at a level crossing I heard the words ‘Astone Veelah’ leaking through an open bar door and remembered that the FA Cup final was today, in fact now; but I had bigger sporting fish to catch, to fry, to eat.

  When I finally did stop it was to strip off portentously my rainwear and long johns: by morning he is a mild-mannered transvestite ballerina, but in the afternoon he becomes … Super-hardman. As I slipped on the Oakleys and remounted, there was a dash of colour and another immaculate weekend-biker grandpa passed me. Right. One on one. Mano a mano, or anyway old mano.

  The pannier/heel thwick was constant but my front dérailleur was now issuing an extended and prodigiously amplified drrrrrrrr against the chain, so loud that I didn’t dare attack Gramps too closely in case he heard me coming. Only when he began to labour on the occasional inclines, up in the saddle, his gleaming silver machine swaying extravagantly beneath him, did I put the hammer down (and how I’d been waiting to use that most brutal of cycling clichés). I got him under a railway bridge and, though I could hear him clicking down a few gears to get the revs up, when I looked back after two minutes he was miles back. I’d left him a broken man.