of the impatient revving of engines, no I’m-bigger-than-you cutting
up or jeers of the ‘Get off and milk it, you dozy twat’ variety that make
cycling in Britain such a high-octane experience.
But despite their best intentions,
the huge articulated vehicles that are a universal feature of the French
landscape couldn’t help but scare your cleats off when they passed. First the
huge bow-wave of air they displaced would shove you forcefully towards the
gravelly verge; then, a powerful vacuum suck of slipstream pulled you violently
back towards the centre of the road. It was horrible. I’d read that, as a boy,
Bernard Hinault used to train by racing lorries up hills, and remembering this
as a sixteen-wheeler buffeted me into the fag packets and roadkill I realised
he must have been even madder than he looked.
Richelieu was splendid, a proper walled town with moats
and gates and a beautifully proportioned square. The whole lot was built by the
famously horrid cardinal, bane of Porthos, D’Artagnan and Oliver Reed and one
of history’s moustache-twirling baddies. There were plenty of Tabac le
Cardinal-style reminders of this, though I’m not entirely sure he would have
approved of the huge branch of Intermarché, a supermarket chain that oddly
styles itself ‘The Musketeers’ (check out their ‘all-for-one’ offers).
It was, in fact, a bit of a
seventeenth-century day. A majestic classical façade facing the N10 at Les
Ormes, fronting nothing, as deceitful as a film set; huge timber-beamed
marketplaces reinvented as pétanque courts in almost every village. Pedalling
over the first old Tour graffiti — fading emulsioned exhortations to French
favourites Jalabert and Virenque, more general war cries of ‘Vive le Tour!’ — I
breezed into Descartes, another Renaissance town with pyramid-roofed turrets
(it changed its name from La Haye in honour of its most famous son, the man who
thought and therefore was). Lunch was taken at an outside brasserie table, ZR
locked to one of the many statues of the famous philosopher with his
Sweet-style hairdo, both of us watching the farmers’ wives putter home in their
odd little two-stroke microcars, baguettes poking up over the passenger seat.
Understanding that Loudun had been an aberration, I thought how lucky the
French were to be able to take all this history and grandeur for granted. In
almost any other country Richelieu and Descartes would have been sightseeing
meccas; in a land spoiled for choice they were also-rans. The Rough Guide had nothing to say about either.
Lunch could be considered the
highlight of the day and by far the most important meal, and that afternoon I
patented the formula. The breadbasket was emptied before the patron arrived to
take my order, invariably the plat du jour (in this instance a
plate-overhanging ham omelette) with a side order of French-fried carbohydrates
and a salad. Even on a tepid, windy day like this, fluid was ingested with
reckless lust: half a litre of Badoit, and another, then a Coke to satisfy what
was to become a habitual craving for sugar. More bread. Pudding where
applicable (which is to say, when included as part of the menu deal). I’d been
yawning almost uncontrollably for most of the previous twenty-four waking
hours, which reminded me of the importance of double espresso as part of a
balanced cycling diet.
Odd as it may seem, caffeine is on
the International Cycling Union’s list of controlled substances: a limit of six
cups a day is apparently the rough guideline. All riders, even Chris Boardman,
start a race day with two big coffees; Paul Kimmage, nodding off in the saddle
during a debilitating stage of the Tour of Italy, had to shove up a caffeine
suppository to keep going (that was bad enough, but you should have seen his
face when the Coffeemate and sugar lumps went in). I had a picture of Eddy
Merckx in one of my issues of procycling that was to become something of
an iconic image for me in times of crisis.
up or jeers of the ‘Get off and milk it, you dozy twat’ variety that make
cycling in Britain such a high-octane experience.
But despite their best intentions,
the huge articulated vehicles that are a universal feature of the French
landscape couldn’t help but scare your cleats off when they passed. First the
huge bow-wave of air they displaced would shove you forcefully towards the
gravelly verge; then, a powerful vacuum suck of slipstream pulled you violently
back towards the centre of the road. It was horrible. I’d read that, as a boy,
Bernard Hinault used to train by racing lorries up hills, and remembering this
as a sixteen-wheeler buffeted me into the fag packets and roadkill I realised
he must have been even madder than he looked.
Richelieu was splendid, a proper walled town with moats
and gates and a beautifully proportioned square. The whole lot was built by the
famously horrid cardinal, bane of Porthos, D’Artagnan and Oliver Reed and one
of history’s moustache-twirling baddies. There were plenty of Tabac le
Cardinal-style reminders of this, though I’m not entirely sure he would have
approved of the huge branch of Intermarché, a supermarket chain that oddly
styles itself ‘The Musketeers’ (check out their ‘all-for-one’ offers).
It was, in fact, a bit of a
seventeenth-century day. A majestic classical façade facing the N10 at Les
Ormes, fronting nothing, as deceitful as a film set; huge timber-beamed
marketplaces reinvented as pétanque courts in almost every village. Pedalling
over the first old Tour graffiti — fading emulsioned exhortations to French
favourites Jalabert and Virenque, more general war cries of ‘Vive le Tour!’ — I
breezed into Descartes, another Renaissance town with pyramid-roofed turrets
(it changed its name from La Haye in honour of its most famous son, the man who
thought and therefore was). Lunch was taken at an outside brasserie table, ZR
locked to one of the many statues of the famous philosopher with his
Sweet-style hairdo, both of us watching the farmers’ wives putter home in their
odd little two-stroke microcars, baguettes poking up over the passenger seat.
Understanding that Loudun had been an aberration, I thought how lucky the
French were to be able to take all this history and grandeur for granted. In
almost any other country Richelieu and Descartes would have been sightseeing
meccas; in a land spoiled for choice they were also-rans. The Rough Guide had nothing to say about either.
Lunch could be considered the
highlight of the day and by far the most important meal, and that afternoon I
patented the formula. The breadbasket was emptied before the patron arrived to
take my order, invariably the plat du jour (in this instance a
plate-overhanging ham omelette) with a side order of French-fried carbohydrates
and a salad. Even on a tepid, windy day like this, fluid was ingested with
reckless lust: half a litre of Badoit, and another, then a Coke to satisfy what
was to become a habitual craving for sugar. More bread. Pudding where
applicable (which is to say, when included as part of the menu deal). I’d been
yawning almost uncontrollably for most of the previous twenty-four waking
hours, which reminded me of the importance of double espresso as part of a
balanced cycling diet.
Odd as it may seem, caffeine is on
the International Cycling Union’s list of controlled substances: a limit of six
cups a day is apparently the rough guideline. All riders, even Chris Boardman,
start a race day with two big coffees; Paul Kimmage, nodding off in the saddle
during a debilitating stage of the Tour of Italy, had to shove up a caffeine
suppository to keep going (that was bad enough, but you should have seen his
face when the Coffeemate and sugar lumps went in). I had a picture of Eddy
Merckx in one of my issues of procycling that was to become something of
an iconic image for me in times of crisis.
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