French Revolutions

by Tim Moore

  Murten itself was the front line, and the German-speakers had dug in deep. Along its meticulously preserved medieval streets, a chevron-shuttered shop-front stood out between the witch-hat towers and Gothic script and flagstoned fish shops, ‘BOUCHERIE/CHARCUTERIE’ read the gilded glass sign above, but decades of rust crusted the shutter padlocks and the upstairs windows were cobwebbed and flaky. The butcher had clearly been Murten’s final Frenchman, and it was tempting to picture him being drummed out of town by a baying Teutonic lynch mob. But this was not the Swiss way. All that day I’d been surprised to notice that the French-Swiss villages welcomed visitors with one of those blue ‘Commune d’Europe’ signs ringed with the EU’s stars. I would have thought Switzerland was about as likely to apply for EU membership as to host the start of the next round-the-world yacht race, but there these signs were, presumably a symptom of some fundamental socio-political split cleaving the French community from its dominant German-speaking counterpart. In almost any other country this would have expressed itself in an ugly orgy of ethnic cleansing; here, they’d settled for a light dab with the cultural duster.

  The hotel was excellent, partly because of the turrets and stone staircases and terrace overlooking a watery sunset, but mainly because my room had a huge circular bed with a headboard stereo encased in a sort of limestone and leatherette inglenook. So proud were the proprietors of this splendidly misplaced feature that they’d put a huge photograph of it outside their dungeon-style front door. ‘Something is missing from this picture …’ teased the multilingual caption beneath it, following up with a strident ‘YOU!’ that conjured images of Lord Kitchener frogmarching alarmed honeymooners up the stairs.

  I was asleep in my 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 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 stoutly, 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 quietly 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 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 Côte 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 indecision-making 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 Châteaubriand, 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 place in the breakfast room, where a waitress was barking ‘Jacques! Deux oeufs!’ into an intercom, although I couldn’t see who they might be for as my only fellow guest was a giant ceramic rabbit. I’m not quite sure what it is with the Swiss, but seeing this conspicuous item in the corner of the room I was reminded that both the hotels we had previously patronised featured similar menageries: a porcelain St Bernard by the reception desk in Château d’Oex; a glazed Alsatian guarding a stairwell in Murten. The rabbit, however, was in a different league. As well as being surreally oversized, easily as large as a well-fed circus seal, it was arrestingly decorated with a huge floral garland hung in a flamboyant Hawaiian ruff about its glossy beige neck. A frozen glower of frustration demonstrated that it was aware not only of this humiliating accessory, but also of its own inability to remove it.

  The rabbit was, in essence, the kind of object that demanded an act of fatuousness from all passers-by, and before Paul arrived I had attempted to negotiate its purchase.

  ‘I must have him,’ I muttered to the waitress, staring at her with the pallid intensity of the hungover and aiming a rigid but unsteady finger at the beast. ‘If I were to tell you,’ I continued as she began to smile with difficulty, wheeling out my favourite Antiques Roadshow catchphrase, ‘that an inferior example was recently sold at auction to a rival collector for 68,000 …’ but then I stopped, understanding from the waitress’s expression that although this was by no means the first time that the rabbit’s transfixing presence had obliged her to deal with an unfunny guest, never before had she been required to do so in English, and in a louder, clearer voice I said, ‘Deux oeufs, s’il vous pl
aît.’

  Paul arrived and with patchy enthusiasm we dispatched Jacques’ oeufs. Our bikes had spent the night in a skittle alley in the hotel basement, and as I carried ZR back upstairs Paul called out, ‘We could swap bikes here – the airport’s just down the road.’

  ‘Sorry?’ I shouted, much too loudly, and hastily pedalled off without even clearing myself in.

  The airport was in France, which meant ninety minutes of roadside filth and fond farewells before I rolled over the Rhine and into Germany, alone for the first time since the Pyrenees. As we’d crudely mummified Paul’s bike with airport baggage tape and cardboard, I had suddenly become mired in the deep melancholy that is the wine drinker’s morning-after lot.

  ‘You’ve only got 500k left,’ said Paul encouragingly, seeing my head drop as we reached the head of the check-in queue.

  I nodded but could manage only an upside-down smile. We shook hands and I thanked him again; then as he heaved his entombed Saracen across to the oversized luggage gate I called out in a small voice, ‘Hey – swap bikes with you now.’

  Fifteen

  Germany did its best to comfort me, with blue skies and cherry trees and unbelievably cheap groceries, though I’d have traded them all for a tailwind. Along the westernmost edge of the Black Forest – the road went straight through the ‘S’ of Schwarzwald – it wasn’t too bad, with the trees and hills shielding me, but the last 35k to Freiburg-im-Breisgau were attritional. Freiburg is the home town of Jan Ullrich, Germany’s premier cyclist and effectively the world number two after Lance Armstrong, and after the ignorance and apathy of Switzerland it was good to be back among the converted. A home-made billboard bellowed ‘Hier kommt sie durch! TOUR DE FRANCE am 20 Juli 2000 ab 11 Uhr!’ across a field of maize, and all afternoon a succession of serious cyclists sped towards me with the wind in their wheels.