SCIENCE FACT
NED’S LIGHT READING CONFIRMS HIS FIRST CHOICE OF TRANSPORT – THE BIKE
This summer, after completing my 16th Tour de France, commentating for ITV, I decided to take a holiday.
The Tour de France is a giant road trip. The thousands of kilometres the actual riders are tasked with racing pale into insignificance when set against the billions of kilometres the rest of the Tour entourage has to negotiate as they wend their chaotic way from the Vendée to Paris via Everywhere Else In France. I am not complaining, of course… Well, actually I am.
You see, I detest motor cars with a growing passion. As I age, my intolerance for these End of Days inventions increases commensurately with the middle-aged affliction of unfettered hair growth in my ears; unstoppable and uncontrollable.
Having given up my motorised vehicle for good last summer, I now see cars for what they really are. Strip away all the marketing hyperbole and luxurious interiors, lose that tempting sense of isolation, wellbeing, power and authority that the simple, yet intoxicating, combustion engine imparts and cars are heaps of carcinogenic junk, whose arse-ends have been busily belching out enough crap to end the planet six times over. And for what? So that we can all park at the supermarket on a Saturday afternoon.
Unfortunately, for the Tour de France, they appear to be a necessary evil, and will continue to be so until the day the entire race goes online and happens exclusively on Zwift, in which case there will be no need to actually leave our bedrooms to either spectate, commentate or compete. But don’t worry, this won’t happen soon. Well, not until 2020, anyway.
Having spent a month in a car, when I wasn’t in a rubbish hotel or sitting next to David Millar in a windowless torture chamber, I decided that, for my holiday, I would go on a road trip. In a car, in France.
In fact, because I have very little imagination, we basically retraced the route of the final few stages of the Tour, leaving Paris and heading for the Basque Country and eventually the Pyrenees. It was while I was sitting at a café in the stifling heat, next to a beautiful harbour on a tributary of the Gironde, that I picked up a book from a little lending library. It was in French. It had been years since I’d read a book in French, so I ordered another Leffe and settled in.
Ravage, by René Bajaval, is widely recognised as being the first work of science fiction in the French language. Published in 1942, it tells the story of Paris in the year 2052. Technology has evolved to the point where everyone has their own personal aeroplane (obvs), cars are even more clever (whatevs), TV is somehow holographic (yawn) and every home has a giant transparent refrigerator in which the family’s ancestors are kept (weird).
Suddenly, and for reasons unexplained, at the stroke of midnight, electricity stops working. Planes fall out of the sky, everything stops. The food supply is halted since it is all factory-produced, not grown. Within days Paris has become a cholera-ridden, riotous hell hole.
Bavajal invites us to follow the fortunes of a few souls whose bravery and ingenuity allow them to escape the apocalypse. Francois, a strong, silent messianic type, has the idea of contacting his old friend Henri, who happens to be an aged, retired racing cyclist, with a neglected old bicycle shop. Together, the band of fugitives escape Paris on antique bikes; the only form of mechanised transport fit for purpose, and one which, unlike horses, does not require feeding and watering. On these bicycles, they set off for safety and salvation in distant Provence.
Well, if that’s not a wonderful story, I thought, as I ordered my ninth Leffe, I don’t know what is.
If truth be told, its heart is determinedly right. For the bicycle is a faithful friend, and has a wonderfully healing, redemptive spirit, which almost at once puts the soul at rest, and transports us figuratively, and sometimes even literally, to a happier place.
There is nothing I enjoy more, after a month of suffering the Tour de France in a car, than to pick up my old town bike, turn the pedals and remind myself of an imagined past when these old rusty beasts ruled the world.
The bicycle is a faithful friend, and has a wonderfully healing spirit