French Revolutions by Moore Tim

Author:Moore, Tim [Moore, Tim]
Language: deu
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Ten

The trouble with cycling up mountains is that — panniers or, as today, no panniers — after about four minutes, as soon as that first metallic-tasting, lactic gasp rasps inward at the back of your throat, any thoughts of appreciating your surroundings, contemplating the Continental way of life or otherwise entertaining an appropriate holiday mentality have been booted out of your brain by an all-encompassing him-or-you struggle to the death with the force of gravity.

If I’d known this, of course, I might have made more of an effort to admire the view as I’d sat under a café awning in Sault, unenthusiastically ingesting two-thirds of a croque-monsieur, my usual half-litre of the old pink stuff and a Coke. A good few dozen cyclo-tourists take on Ventoux every day during the summer, and as I bounced and booted and bullied ZR’s front wheel into its carbon-fibre lugholes a trio of large, ruddy Americans freewheeled slowly by in auspicious silence, their mashed-rainbow cycling jerseys clashing with everything and themselves. If they can make it, I thought... But then I realised they probably wouldn’t.

The category two col du Notre-Dame des Abeilles was supposed to be only the warm-up act, but as I wound gingerly up its lazy, shadeless curves it soon became clear that it had fulfilled this role rather too well. Cresting it with sweat stinging my eyes and dripping hissily on to the scalded crossbar, I was beginning to feel a karmic payback for the terrible things I had done as a boy involving sunny afternoons, a magnifying glass and woodlice.

The summit took me by surprise; one second I was creaking along at a rate that permitted detailed perusal of the health warnings on discarded Gitanes packets, the next I was screaming down at terminal velocity, airborne fauna spattering my larynx; hot, thin tyres neady bisecting an unwary lizard. A sudden blast of mistral snapped back the poplars, yanked the helmet chinstrap against my windpipe and buffeted me towards a family of hard-shoulder picnickers; the bellowed warnings were ripped from my mouth and dispatched so abruptly that I never heard them. A transient whiff of roadkill, a flash of vineyard, a fleeting, wobbly glance at the speedo — Jesus: 65 k.p.h. — and then I was easing into the Provençal plain, able at last to raise a glove to my nose and restore some element of facial respectability.

Maintaining the momentum, for an hour I was eating up the kilometres rather than choking on them. There was a fourth-category hill somewhere along the way but it came and went unnoticed, and I cruised with growing confidence into Bédoin, the town at the base of Ventoux, untroubled either by the parched associations of its name or the mobile donation unit in the main square emblazoned with a banner heralding the following morning’s ‘Day of Blood’. It was here that Tom had necked that fateful cognac, and I was just wondering under which of the bar awnings he’d pegged it when I became aware of an abrupt and painfully bone-shaking decline in ride quality.

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