Читать книгу One More Croissant for the Road - Felicity Cloake - Страница 8

If the reactions of my friends and family are anything to go by, anyone who hasn’t ridden a bike since childhood finds the idea of weeks doing nothing but this a bit daunting. In fact, as I always breezily explain, cycling is much easier than running, especially when your feet are actually stuck to the bike. Once you’ve got going, momentum will keep your legs spinning round with surprisingly little effort on your part, and on good roads with a forgiving gradient, you can cover a decent distance without much expertise: it’s not for nothing that 100 miles is said to be the cycling equivalent of running a marathon, though having done both (preens), I can confirm a marathon is a lot more unpleasant.

Cyclists tend to measure distances in kilometres rather than miles, just like they tend to drink espressos rather than tea, and call their silly hats casquettes rather than caps. It’s Rule 24 in the Velominati handbook (the Velominati being a half-jokey online cult to the two-wheeled god) and one of the few that I obey, mostly because 50km sounds a lot more impressive than 31 miles (though they’re also right that all shorts should be black – ‘wet, dirty white Lycra is basically transparent; enough said on that matter’).

I’ve found that, when riding all day, it’s reasonable to cover between 70 and 150km depending on the terrain, weather and how much of interest is along the way, with an average speed of about 15km/h. That said, not everyone falls easily into sitting in the saddle for six hours on the trot, so 50–70km feels like a more manageable distance with company desirous of a nice holiday rather than a wholesale reconfiguration of their nether regions.

My recommendation for anyone thinking of embarking on anything similar for the first time is to make sure you have a bike that’s both light and sturdy: dedicated touring bikes will never be as featherlight as racers, but you can stick a rack on most things, and if you’re staying on tarmac, a robust road bike has always been my choice.

Other things you’ll need, apart from all the obvious stuff you’d take on holiday if you had to carry it round with you:

Panniers and rack. A bar or frame bag is also useful for your wallet, etc., though I like to keep my phone attached to my handlebars to help with navigation/show those all-important Instagram alerts on the go.

Basic toolkit: inner tube, patches, pump, multitool, tyre levers, chain lube. France in particular is well supplied with bike shops; if you’re going somewhere that isn’t, you might want to consider spare brake pads, etc.

Padded shorts and gloves: trust me, you won’t regret these if you’re doing more than a day in the saddle.

Decent lights – naive urban cyclists (me) may be startled at how dark it is on country roads.

Water bottles – I took two and ran out several times. Get big ones.

Chunky but not too heavy bike lock.

Portable phone charger – or actual maps, given that’s mostly what you’ll be using it for.

Tent, sleeping bag, rollmat (only if planning to camp, obviously).

Wet wipes. They hide a multitude of bike-oil-based sins.

Trains or not, it’s still a daunting prospect as I gaze at the little map, stuck with flags like a ham studded with cloves. Yet just the names involved make my heart leap, bringing back happy memories of summers past and journeys taken, squashed sandwiches scoffed on ski lifts and arguments in the hot, sticky back seat of a Vauxhall Cavalier.

These places might sound familiar, but I know they’ll look different from a bike. A cyclist’s pace is swift enough to make satisfying progress, yet slow enough to enjoy it, to notice the landscape changing before and, of course, under the tyres – it’s hard to get a sense of the terrain when it’s flashing past you in the car, or on the train, but when you’re forced to really feel it in your legs, it’s hard to ignore. Places seem to stamp themselves on your consciousness with startling firmness, as Graham Robb writes in his book The Discovery of France, which is to be my only constant companion, despite his admission that it’s ‘too large to justify its inclusion in the panniers’ (yep, thanks, Graham, I noticed): ‘A bicycle unrolls a 360-degree panorama of the land, allows the rider to register its gradual changes in gear ratios and muscle tension, and makes it hard to miss a single inch of it, from the tyre-lacerating suburbs of Paris to the Mistral-blasted plains of Provence.’

A cyclist can embrace the leisurely passage of time on the smaller roads, weaving as they do through hamlets on the way to nowhere, past tumbledown chateaux and fields of somnambulant cattle, and then stop for refreshments in a prosperous little town, watching the world go by at some bustling café in the soothing company of small dogs.

A bike also, of course, offers a unique opportunity to plod miserably through Zones Industrielles in the rain, and dodge lorries on a road that turns out to be bigger and scarier than Google Maps is prepared to admit, to say nothing of the ever-present and exciting possibility of eating lunch outside a Total garage because nowhere else will let you in dressed like that. They’re pretty good at both highs and lows, bikes, and that’s what makes them fun. I can’t wait.

Robb describes the actual Tour de France as ‘a joyful beating of the bounds that millions of people with no interest in sport still enjoy every summer’. Mine feels rather like that, too: a way to see how the country fits together, how the Wild West of craggy Atlantic granite and wide ocean beaches becomes the south-west of duck fat and complicated Basque consonants, to get a feeling for the state of regional French cooking, so long lauded around the world, yet as vulnerable to the very 21st-century pressures of time and convenience as anywhere else.

Is it still possible, I wonder, to find roadside places full of what the redoubtable Fanny Cradock described as ‘heavily tattooed, burly camion drivers … where the soap is attached to a string in the communal loo and the tablecloths may be of paper, but where an excellent five-course meal can be found for well under a pound’? Will I eat better in France than I would at home, and come back two stone heavier, with incipient scurvy?

My tour will have several, not insignificant diversions from its more famous namesake. For a start, as described above in luxuriant detail, my route is going to be based solely around the greatest hits of French cuisine, rather than its landscapes and local politics. Secondly, though there will be a rag-tag peloton for the most scenic bits, I’ll be mostly on my own, as it seems most of my friends, very inconsiderately, have proper jobs that preclude going away for five weeks. Thirdly, I’m going to have to lug everything with me, including a tent and sleeping bag, to leave me more to spend on food (pro teams sleep in hotels where they don’t even carry their bags upstairs themselves). And lastly … I’m a 35-year-old food writer who spends most of her working week testing recipes – and when I say testing, I mean eating them all up and licking the plate while the dog looks on with jealous eyes. Tour riders start off with about 4–5 per cent body fat. I suspect mine, though mercifully unmeasured, is more akin to a pot of clotted cream.

The problem with this last point, of course, is that it means my power-to-weight ratio – that most vital of statistics in modern sport – is sub-optimal. I’m going to be hauling a lot of unnecessary baggage round France, which is unfortunate when, according to British Cycling, ‘one of the best ways to get quicker on the bike, especially on hills, is to drop a few pounds’. I have a go, I really do, but there’s the small matter of six weeks’ worth of recipes to write and perfect before I go, and eventually I concede defeat, which is unfortunate, because the rather chi-chi cycling outfitters Café du Cycliste, based in Nice but with a smart little shop in East London, are kind enough to step in at the last minute with the offer of some gear. I’m not quite sure that I’m exactly the clothes horse they had in mind to sport the two elegant outfits they’ve picked out. ‘Does … does this come in large?’ I ask tentatively, stepping from the changing room in something so skintight you’d be able to count my ribs if they hadn’t disappeared some time in the late 1980s.

More pressingly, I don’t have a proper bike. My last true love was trashed by couriers on the way back from Marseille last summer and my first reserve, the Pashley, which weighs over 20kg even without a dog on board, is clearly not up to the task. I seek expert advice from friends like Rich, who’s into long, long rides and recommends various bikes that are eminently practical and reasonably priced, Jon, who’s into spending money on really sexy-looking bikes, and Max, who’s into cycling up mountains with the minimum of kit, and then I ignore it all in favour of one that makes my heart flutter when I look at it, and my accountant weep, despite my parents’ generous contribution in lieu of all future Christmas and birthday gifts.

Eddy (named for the pastry-loving Merckx) is a steel-framed (more flexible than aluminium on bumpy terrain, less risky than the pricy but delicate carbon frames used by the pros) Condor touring bike in Paris Green, a colour which feels auspicious. I spend an expensive afternoon in a basement on the Grays Inn Road being measured up (‘your arms are … really long’) and then a nervous month praying he will be ready in time for the off after discovering belatedly that delivery is scheduled for around the time I should be in the Loire Valley.

Fortunately, after I look ready to burst into tears in front of other customers, they manage to hurry things along and he arrives a week before the off, a thing of rare and lustrous beauty, though unfortunately I’m so hungover after a work party the night before that I fail to listen when they explain technical points about how to trim the chain, on the basis I have no idea what this means and am in no state to learn. Instead, I have a vivid flashback to telling a completely sober Nigel Slater that I loved him, over and over, and clench my fists around the handlebars in hot shame.

So I’ve got the bike and the kit and the rudimentary vocab, having enrolled in a panic cramming course at the French Institute in South Kensington and ploughed my way through various Inspector Maigret mysteries instead of packing. This at least means I’ll be able to discuss murder weapons with confidence on my journey, if required.

Yet such is the rush before I go that I don’t quite make time to check if all my gear will fit in my new bright yellow panniers. Sitting in the corner of the bedroom gathering dust, they look vast in comparison with the one I’ve used previously, yet I have a sneaking suspicion that once I’ve included important morale-boosting items like Marmite and sloe gin, there might not be an awful lot of room for luxuries like spare inner tubes and plasters.

Naturally, instead of dealing with the problem, I insist on throwing a Royal Wedding Party for the nuptials of Harry and Meghan, to the evident dismay of my friends, who nevertheless come and support me, because that’s what friends do. Gemma even brings me a tiny bottle of Echo Falls rosé to stick in my panniers.

‘I’m really looking forward to it,’ says Matt, who is accompanying me for the first few days and claims he’s ‘all sorted’, as the three of us – the last survivors of the Happy Event – sit outside the pub at dusk, drinking snakebite and black (it seemed funny when I ordered them).

I giddily watch the dog begging for crisps on the other side of the bar, and vaguely wonder who he belongs to. ‘Yeah, me too,’ I say. ‘Do you think I should go home and pack?’

* With the exception of breakfast, picnic food and cakes, all of which I reckon the UK has the edge on.

† Don’t get me started on the iniquities of the Women’s Tour.