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haemoglobin-boosting drug) — the
relish was unavoidable. The race was still over a month off and already the
expatriate youth of Gaul were on amber alert.
    ZR3000 was propped by the front door,
and on the way back in I squeezed round it, wondering how I felt about my
bicycle now and how those feelings would have changed after 2,256 miles. Bowed
down with baggage, the machine’s lean, hungry look was gone: it was like
putting a roof-rack on a Lotus. My children had fulsomely decorated the
saddle’s diminutive surface area with Cinderella stickers (you shall go
to the balls, Cinders); there were already long scratches and an ugly dent
where my trailing cleat had failed to clear the crossbar when I repeatedly
dismounted in clumsy agony en route to Harrow.
    Was I really going to cock my leg
over that crossbar and not uncock it for a month and a bit? As a perennially
shiftless slacker I had been urged more than once to get on my bike. To think that it should come to this.

Two

    Cycling is the national sport of France, so I’m slightly annoyed with myself for failing to predict that it is consequently
impossible to take bicycles on French trains. Or, even more appropriately, that
it is possible, but only on randomly selected local services, and then on
condition that the bicycle is dismantled, boxed, put on a freight train
scheduled to show up seventy-two hours after your own before being thrown into
the canal by a mob of opticians protesting about biscuit subsidies.
    Newly acquainted with this reality
brief hours before departure at least gave me something else to think about as
my family pushed me out through the door into a glorious morning. Seven stages
began some distance from where the previous one had ended; I’d hoped to take
trains between these points. More immediately — in fact in, um, six hours’ time
— I’d hoped to be on a train from Calais to Futuroscope, the technological theme
park near Poitiers where the Tour was to start.
    Organisation is not my strongest
suit. When I look down from aeroplane windows at the complex urban landscapes
below it is in slack-jawed admiration for the people who create and maintain
them, with a parallel gut-punching terror at the thought of the cack-handed,
jerry-built anarchy that would reign if I myself had been involved at anything
approaching an executive level. It had been an overwhelming enough task just to
gather together the equipment for my tour (I’d give that a capital T at the
same time as I felt I’d earned the right to wear the shorts and jersey); here I
was, loaded up like a camel, and the news about the French trains was the straw
that broke my back.
    My sons’ classmates were being taken
to school, and as I cycled laboriously by, trying to haul all those panniers up
to some sort of cruising speed, a couple of mothers recognised me and waved in
a manic, give-’em-hell sort of way. I wasn’t about to lift any part of my hand
from the unsteady bars to return the greeting, and in any case lacked the
spiritual wherewithal.
    Fussing fretfulness about the
transport situation, compounded by Birna’s failed last-minute attempts to drum
up a volunteer force to accompany me, had left me vulnerable to more elemental
fears: I was beginning to feel like a blithe young conscript being sent off for
a brutal, filthy death at the front; a butterfly to be broken upon two wheels.
Even people who knew nothing about cycling, nothing about sport, seemed to be
aware that the Tour de France was a grim and vicious ordeal. The reality had
been postponed and ignored for as long as possible, but now there it was,
staring in spiteful digits from the little multi-function odometer at the front
of the crossbar. 0.97... 0.98... are my shoulder blades supposed to be feeling
like this already?... 0.99... Jesus, that van just missed my elbow with its
wing mirror... 1.0. Pain and danger in one kilometre. Three thousand six
hundred and twenty-nine to go.
    Battered and clattered about in