French Revolutions

through the ticket
barrier, chased and chivvied by taunting voiceover whispers of ‘Bickerton!
Bickerton!’
    Nevertheless, as it became difficult
to affect the piping tenor necessary to procure a child ticket from ever more
sceptical bus conductors, so the Bickerton’s social utility increased. I began
riding it to pubs and parties, generally returning well-lit and yet, in a
hilarious twist of irony, without lights. I crashed into road works and garden
fences, and finally broke the Bickerton’s back in the grand manner, careering
into a parked car with such force that I snapped his number plate in half and
ended up on the roof.
    It was long years before I cycled
again, so long that I almost forgot how to ride. Attending an auction of
unclaimed stolen property I felt sorry for a conspicuously pre-teenage girl’s
bicycle and acquired it for three quid; after a stimulating exchange of views
with my wife Birna concerning the practical worth of this item I committed
myself to riding it to and from my place of work, the offices of Teletext Ltd.
    Six months on, a commuter’s
familiarity with my route was beginning to breed contempt, and one bright
summer’s morning I spectacularly overcooked it coming into the Old Ship
chicane. Arriving at work with the coagulation process still very much an
ongoing one, I was summoned to an impromptu meeting with senior management.
Bleeding without permission was added to a catalogue of similar outrages
against corporate discipline and four minutes later I was being escorted from
the premises. This was a shame, for as well as stymieing a well-developed plan
to substitute the main Teletext menu with an animated graphic of an ejaculating
penis on 24.7 million television screens across the land, it meant I also faced
the demanding challenge of storming furiously past the assembled terminators of
my contract on a little pink bicycle.
    When the girl’s bike was stolen from
outside my house, probably by Birna, it had already decayed into a state that
would have made for a drawn-out round of Animal, Vegetable or Mineral; its
eventual replacement, a brakeless old Peugeot touring bike bought from a man
who I’m fairly certain hadn’t paid for it, was used only as occasional urban
transport for the slightly drunk. I’d hit 30 and had never successfully
repaired a puncture, overtaken anything faster than a milk float or ridden
hands-off without eating kerb. The faint, arthritic squiggle that was my career
path as a cyclist had slipped unnoticed off the bottom axis.
    That is until I arrived in the north
Icelandic town of Blönduós at 9.32 p.m. on 28 June 1997. It’s difficult to
imagine cycling across Europe’s second-largest desert by mistake, but this
seemed the only fair description of the events of that day and its three
predecessors. In the company of Birna’s brother Dilli I emerged from
two-wheeled retirement in glorious fashion, traversing the land of my in-laws
on a day-trip that somehow ran out of control into a critic-confounding
odyssey. During those long, lonely hours watching Dilli on my forward horizon
as he squinted around to locate me on his hindward one, I had found myself
mumbling an epic commentary, a tale of water-carriers and wheel-suckers, of
bonks and breakaways, a vocabulary learned from ten years of seasonal obsession
with the world’s largest annual sporting event.
    In fact, I’d first become aware of
the Tour de France during the home leg of my elder brother’s 1976 French
exchange. Our house guest Denis spent almost every waking hour of those three
weeks with his conspicuous facial features pressed up against a transistor
radio on which he had managed to locate faint medium-wave coverage of the
event. It was a display of stamina and dedication to parallel that of the
riders themselves — clearly, here was an event which gripped a nation like no
other, and didn’t relax its grasp for twenty-one whole days.
    Sadly, Denis was an awful boy who
cheated at Monopoly and avenged yet another Belgian victory in that year’s race
by running amok in our flower-beds with the big lawnmower, so I did not at the
time ascribe positive attributes to the focus of his obsession. My own interest
lay dormant until the late Eighties, when Channel 4 began covering the event at
a time when my lifestyle made getting up to switch channels after Countdown an onerous task beyond contemplation. By default I became one of the billion
people who watch the Tour de France on telly.
    It