Gironimo! by Tim Moore

Author:Tim Moore [Tim Moore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

I will never forget the day I climbed the Puy Mary. There were two of us on a fine day in May. We started in the sunshine and stripped to the waist. Halfway, clouds enveloped us and the temperature tumbled. Gradually it got colder and wetter, but we did not notice it. In fact, it heightened our pleasure. We did not bother to put on our jackets or our capes, and we arrived at the little hotel at the top with rain and sweat streaming down our sides. I tingled from top to bottom. What a wonderful tonic!

WHAT A DERANGED freak! Paul de Vivie might have invented gears, but it was difficult to admire a cyclist who harboured such wrongheaded perversions. Would Paul have tingled from top to bottom to find his kit still heavy with yesterday’s filthy moisture when he put it on the morning? To find his sodden shoes warped and thickened, his bike’s every moving part shrieking with corrosion? Yes, Paul, cycling is often great. But there really is no point denying that sometimes it’s shit.

I sloshed on down the Via Cassia, a major Roman artery enjoying a new lease of life with lorry drivers who don’t like paying autostrada tolls. What a lot of them there were! Soon I was forced hard up against the calf-slashing roadside brush, where the fraying tarmac was cleaved with long crevasses comfortably broad enough to swallow my front wheel. Doing my Tour thing I’d been regularly appalled by French road surfaces; they were hugely worse here yet so far I’d barely noticed. Reason: in the intervening twelve years, Britain’s roads have deteriorated to a condition some way below most of our Continental rivals. Cluster-bombed tarmac is now the British cyclist’s daily lot. It’s a dull but damning indicator of national decline: in the pothole chart, we’re now duking it out with the Mediterraneans.

Crevasse-monitoring vigilance restricted my scenic appreciation, and when I did snatch a glance around I usually regretted it. Drizzle fuzzed out the background, and the foreground was filled with fields of withered sunflowers awaiting harvest execution, their crusty, black heads bent down to the mud. Yesterday’s chirruping blackbird was today’s malevolent cawing crow; the broiling pre-Siena sun was now an 11-degree mist, so frigid I had to pedal hard to get some warmth in. It was an extraordinary about-face, as if somebody had just pulled a big lever and turned summer off.

The going was heavy, uphill into an insolent headwind that flung handfuls of chilled drizzle in my face. I couldn’t believe I would ever rue posting my fleece home from Lucca, and already here I was, rueing it bad. The road steepened. The Hirondelle shrieked through its rust like Laurel and Hardy’s railroad handcart. I slumped heavily into the handlebar drops and ground on towards one of cycling’s definitive tribulations: that cook-chill marriage of rain and sweat.

I turned left off the Via Cassia; the lorries vanished but the gradient pitched up yet again. We were soon pushing 700m across blasted moorlands flanked by shadowy peaks.

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