The Homing Dogeon

Miserable morning and I drew the short straw of taking the dog for a walk in the drizzle. We trudged to the local rec where the 9 o’clock club hang out – but only on clement days – and where dogs are free to run off the lead. The same rec where Jasper was scouted for the local flyball team because he’s a) fast and b) small (gets lower fences). Where he’s known by name by most other regular dog walkers owing to his excellent, friendly disposition.

But today, for some reason, was different. Hardly any other dogs, owing to the weather, so we trudged round in somewhat bedraggled fashion – past the memory trees, round by the immaculate bowling greens with their sprinkling of hardy all weather bowlers.

And then it happened. Jasper started to bounce and growl and yap. He’d clearly got the scent of something he wasn’t keen on – fox, I assumed. A shaggy, sort of labrador dog made a beeline for him to play, or so I thought.

And that’s when he bolted.

Yapping with fear he went flat out round the rec with the black dog in pursuit. Hell for leather he ran – I know he’s fast but he went off like a small brown and white guided missile, low to the ground, he’d have outpaced the fastest greyhound. The other dog was nabbed as he sped past but not Jasper. He was well and truly spooked and he wasn’t stopping for anybody. I pounded after him, boots clanging on the path, breath ragged, heart rat a tatting and then leaping into my mouth. Because Jasper ran straight past every other dog and hurtled out through the entrance to the rec. And across the road.

So I’m hurtling after him, heart pounding, breath rasping etc etc. And there’s another dog walker by the gate. I stop and wheeze the words “Have you seen seen my dog?

“Yeah,” he drawls “He went out the gate”. Like he could give a shit about my dog.

I think of my fellow dog walkers as confreres, compagnons – a fraternity of dog lovers who will pass the time of day, feed treats, share balls AND TRY AND CATCH MY FUCKING DOG IF HE RUNS PAST YOU LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL, YOU GORMLESS IDIOT! “Did you see which way he went?”

“Nope”

So I did my stumbly half run/half walk in my big winter boots about as made for running as a pair of concrete overshoes out into the road. Relief. No small brown and white carcass. Of my 3 options – home, park, beach – I pick park, we always walk home through the park. And as I pound down the path I see him, I’m yelling his name “Jasper!!!” and then I see the lead and the hand and the owner attached.

“Have (gasp) you (pant) seen (puff) my dog?”

No. No dogs had come running through the park that she’d seen. So I went to the beach and had a full blown Fenton moment screaming “Jasper, cooommmmeeeeee bbbbaaaaaaaaccccccckkkkkkk!!!” like a demented, on the point of being grief stricken, prat.

Which was when I discovered I’d left my phone at home. Bugger. Still charging aimlessly from beach to prom, teetering on the very edge of a nervous breakdown, I finally thought to ask at the Sovereign Light Cafe (as made famous by Keane etc etc) if anyone had a phone I could borrow. 3 were produced but a kindly old fellah pointed out that I might like to use his “idiot proof old persons phone – just big buttons” and he was right. I fumbled out the number, my mum answered.

“Have you seen Jasper?

“OH MY GOD YOU LOST THE DOG”

(Yeah, thanks mum, this is precisely why I hate phoning you in these kinds of circumstances because you always assume it’s all my fault)

“He got away from me…spooked…run off…can you just check if he’s at home?”

(door clicks, sounds of jingling dog tags and excited snuffling and “you good little dog!”)

“Yes he’s here, he was on the doorstep”.

I trudged home, counting the number of roads he would have had to negotiate to get home, wondering how long he’d been on the doorstep. I had a quick chat to one of the taxi drivers who adores him. We figured 5 or 6 roads, most of them busy in the way of small towns, grey haired tootlers and boy racers, each knowing he wouldn’t have stopped for a green light and crossed sensibly but had had the luck of the Irish in getting home in one piece.

“It doesn’t bear thinking about” he muttered with a shake of the head.

 

 

 

And The Winner Is….

Trawling through property pron is definitely a) my top favourite time waster b) absolutely essential and c) horribly confusing.

Therefore, in the spirit of research and a commitment to the democratic process, I invite you to let me know which of the following properties should be top of my ‘go see’ list (NOTE: obviously this is entirely spurious as I’ll be going to see anything and everything I can but I thought it would be fun to find out your thoughts):

THE OLD TOWN HOUSE

PROS

Medieval town location

Mentioned in ‘The Blue Bicycle’ – obviously I can see it spruced up with an old bike painted blue with geraniums in the basket (a bit too twee, you think?) propped outside, discreetly noting our establishment

Near the river – how beautiful to see the Gartempe flow past with your morning coffee

8 bedrooms – 8! Including a self contained studio we could rent all year round and a separate wing with 2 bedrooms and a bathroom for visitors

CONS

Over budget, therefore not mortgage free

That riverside location – damp, damp, damp + the garden looks interesting (read: odd) + the courtyard looks like the sun might only peek in for about 5 minutes a day

It’s not in the country and I think we’d like the country, near a village/small town

THE FARMHOUSE

PROS

Countryside location on edge of a village – yay!

Sooo much potential – attached barn, separate field with piggeries that are begging to be a shower block

Under budget

CONS

Work, work work – some is habitable but there’s a lot to be done

Money – barn conversations and the rest take finance and good workmen

THE SMALL HOUSE WITH ATTACHED COTTAGE

PROS

Good location – see farmhouse above

Under budget – again, this works – don’t we all dream of being mortgage free?

Potential, especially for letting long term

CONS

Not the prettiest place in the world – I know, I know, it’s cosmetic but first impressions and all that

Is there a market for long term lets i.e. students year round, gite business in the summer?

Can we do the work ourselves

How much land??

So these are the current front runners, pros and cons, warts and beauty spots. I like them all, even the ugly duckling house/cottage. I love/adore/desire the town house but its age and location murmur one tiny, terrifying word in my

“Do You Or Your Partner….”

So, I’ve just completed my JSA application.

Not sure whether online was any better than the old days of endless paper forms – and I did wonder about the number of people who really need benefits who don’t have access to a computer to apply for them. Here’s a little ‘did you know’: benefit fraud £1 billion (and most of that is overpayment caused by clerical error), unclaimed benefit £12.3 billion. Seems like the uninformed/unconnected far outnumber the so called ‘scroungers’. But I digress.

It’s always dispiriting filling out that form – whether its paper based or on a screen. It also seems even more hugely invasive than ever – the list of documents to take to interview is like a snooper’s charter: bank statements, mortgage statements, pay slips and on and on. I’m considering taking the results of my last smear test and a dental x-ray. Seriously, I feel probed, kinda dirty. Think I need a shower. OK, I’m digressing again.

It was when I got to the section asking me for my partner’s NI number that I got pissed off. I’ve known my husband for 13 years and never once has it crossed my mind to ask him what his NI number is, or vice versa. Guess we just don’t have the kind of marriage the DWP would approve of, where every nook and cranny of each other’s financial dealings are an open book. Perhaps this should be a mandatory question for a first date?

HIM/HER: I’ve had a really great time (moves in for a kiss)

ME/YOU: (deftly sidestepping) Yes, me too – by the way, what’s your National Insurance number? Just on the off chance that we should end up cohabiting and I might find myself in the position of claiming benefits…

I remember claiming benefits in the long summer holidays when I was a student (ah, heady days) and having to undergo a household inspection because I was living with 3 other students, all male (like I say, heady days…). Yes, I was ‘cohabiting’ with one of them and so was seen as his ‘dependent’ and he claimed for both of us. I was livid. Apart from the fact I was far more dependent on my parents for cash handouts and food parcels it was the principle of the thing. What kind of outmoded system sees a woman as a man’s ‘dependent’?

Fast forward to 2013 and I’m filling out a form asking me endless questions about my husband’s income because, guess, what? I’m seen as his dependent now, even though for the last 4 years I’ve been the major breadwinner (by about £2.50) in our house.

I’m that rare beast – someone who doesn’t object to paying taxes, to paying into the National Insurance system. I believe in there being a safety net. I believe that cooperation is far better than competition to provide services that we can all benefit from and be proud of. I believe in supporting and protecting the most vulnerable in our society (like all the people who don’t claim what they might be entitled to). But I have a huge, massive, major objection to being told that I’m my husband’s ‘dependent’ when it comes time to take something out of the pot I paid into. We aren’t taxed together, we don’t pay NI together, so why do I suddenly become a chattel when it comes to giving back time?

The worst bit of it all is that I really, really, really, really, REALLY don’t want to have to be claiming it at all.

Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life

  Don’t you hate that expression? I loathe it, for all that it contains more than its little grain of truth – especially today.

Today I was made redundant.

I don’t feel any different. I’m not any different. Except that I’m no longer the mum who turns up at the school gate in make up and decent clothes a couple of times a week because I’m on my way into the office. I’m one of them now. A statistic. A number. On the big unemployed scrap heap.

And time is ticking.

I should be able to eke out my redundancy for about 6 months. Which means I have 6 months in which to a) sell the house b) get a decentish job or c) both.

This is the point where the dream and the reality meet. Where I have to be careful with the pennies, tighten the belt, cut my cloth according to my means.

And I have to fight the entropy, the comfort of being at home, the desire to do nothing but the things I’m comfortable with – a bit of blogging, a spot of candy crush, a tad of property pron and a sprinkle of head in the air dreaming. I need to look for jobs, grind out the applications, clean the house top to bottom, find a buyer quick. But where will I find the time when I could be tweeting, or walking the dog, or indulging in any of a hundred thousand little displacement activities?

I’m naturally a sloth – a sloth with a big dream and a minuscule budget to achieve it. A budget that doesn’t actually exist until the house is sold and converted into capital and the housing market is crawling and….

STOP

Focus. There are always enough hours in the day. You can write when the kid’s at school and in bed. You need to browse property websites and make appointments to view. Research English businesses in the area and approach them to meet and discuss. Keep on top of twitter. Start getting the house straight one room at a time. Make some lists – lists are good. You have a deadline for the Tour Tales and some exciting possibilities because of it. You love writing this blog and getting your thoughts straight and dreaming about the Big Idea and how it’s going to be when you welcome your first guests and pour some drinks on a warm summer’s evening and you can properly, genuinely relax…

So today is the first day of the rest of my life – and so is tomorrow and the day after. But the future is only important if you can do what you need to do in the now.

Love It When A Plan Comes Together…

Over the next few weeks I shall mostly be a) blogging about the Tour de France 100tours100tales.wordpress.com and b) making plans for our research mission in La Belle France and c) browsing French property prawn (but when don’t I find myself spending an hour or two sighing over properties that I know I could make gorgeous with a lick of fake Farrow & Ball?)

Obviously with redundancy and tightened belts we’ll be fact finding on the cheap – no overnight stays but I’ll be contacting B&B/gite owners in the Montmorillon area to try and arrange to have a chat with them and get a flavour not just of the commercial possibilities but the lie of the land in the area. I’ll be making appointments to view (of course!) and sounding out the possibilities for doing estate agency work (did I mention I absolutely adore nebbing at houses?). And we’ll be having a holiday – visiting Snake Island and Monkey Valley and Eagle Chateau and all the other cool tourist stuff – especially Futuroscope.

I still can’t believe I lived 1 hour away from the ‘French theme park of the moving image’ and never visited. I drove a thousand times through the park itself, a collection of extraordinary buildings united loosely by the brief ‘space age as imagined in the 1970s’. I watched a Tour de France prologue there. I had summer visitors who went and raved about it, especially the evening show that featured a gigantic projection of Gene Kelly singing in the rain, his phantom tap shoes exploding fountains of water wherever they touched. So I’m stupidly excited about spending a day there (budget be damned – at least for a day).

But more, much more, I’m stupidly excited about taking our first concrete steps to shifting the big idea from page to paysage. To standing inside a building and saying ‘you know what…’ To finding the right place in just the right spot. To talking to other Brits out there about the detail stuff – the schools and the doctors and the amenities. To establish the sense of community and the place we might take in it.

So we have the tent (we’re confirmed Glampers now), the Big Idea, and the freedom (summer holidays, redundancy) – I love it when a plan comes together and I’m more excited by this plan than anything for a very long time. The feeling of knowing you’re close to sloughing off the dead dullness of the 9 to 5 in favour of a driving your own destiny is euphoric, like being just nicely pissed on the very best champagne/great G&T/Belgian beers (delete as applicable – or not), like feeling your shoulders drop and the knots in your muscles that you didn’t even know you carried unravelling. I am so incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to do this – for all the uncertainty about our financial future, I know for certain that the road ahead will take us into the heart of la France profonde, to a lovely farmhouse/townhouse/barn conversion with fake Farrow & Ball on the walls and 4 very happy and contented people waiting to greet you at the door.

Country Living

I sat in my brother’s garden this morning, drinking coffee, listening to the birdsong and watching the friendly robin bob in and out of the back door picking up crumbs.

I love the country – I grew up in a little village in Bedfordshire where we’d go and feed the donkey after school and spend our weekends and those endless summer holidays making dens in the spinney and the abandoned quarry over the fields and far away. We’d picnic by the oak that John Bunyan used as a pulpit and climb through and round it’s hollow trunk. We were always outside, up to no good, living charmed lives. One afternoon we had a ride in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – no joke, friends of my friend’s parents had acquired one of the cars used for the film and were kind enough to ferry hoardes of giggling, over excited 7 and 8 year olds around the village. Later, my son was christened in the old village church on the day a stained glass window was dedicated to the grandfather he’ll never know.

I vowed that any child of mine would have a similar childhood – little village school, fresh air, part of a gang of tousle headed boys making dens. If we’d stayed at La Croix Haute he might have had that – and been a fluent French speaker by now – but stuff happens and you find yourself in Warminster on sea with the dog shit on the pavemetys and the ongoing battle for supremacybetween the buggies and the mobility scooters and a secret cache of middle class chums who couldn’t quite afford Brighton and pretend otherwise and salt of the earth working class school run mums who’d do anything for you. It’s not a bad place to live but it aint the country, Because in the South you can’t afford the country.

It’s another thread in the tapestry of reasons why France is the attractive option – we can trade our big old Victorian semi for a farmhouse, with land, and barns and have cash in the bank to create something special – for ourselves, for our guests. Where you can have coffee in the morning and hear nothing but birdsong.

Displacement Activity

Well, it’s happened.

Just as I feared, the energy I had several weeks ago when I first lost my job has dissipated. I’ve stopped looking for jobs – let lone applying for them – too many rejections for stuff I know I could do standing on my head. And I like not working – at least, not having to go into an office and deal with all that that entails. I’ve lost some weight, started doing yoga again (thank you pocket yoga), seen friends, been camping, had time for my family, made plans, looked for tents, blogged – classic displacement activity behaviour. And I love it.

The thing about the ‘big idea’ is that I can coast on my local knowledge and previous experience of living in France. I’m so super confident that the plan will just work that all I need to do now is put it into operation because, you know, all those loose ends and pesky niggles like, um, earning money will just sort themselves out when we get there…I keep telling myself to be sensible, that this is no ‘magic bullet’, that times will be tough but I am so damned excited at the prospect of going and never having to work for anyone else again that heart is not just ruling head but pummelling it into acquiescence. It steamrollers all doubts and gives me the falsest sense of security possible – and hallelujah for that. I need some sense of certainty, however wobbly the foundations.

But where was I? Oh, yes, thinking about displacement activity – see how easy it was for me to slack off from my main subject? I used to think of blogging in those terms – something to take my mind of the yawning chasm of ohshitIhavenojobness that occasionally opens up beneath me and threatens to swallow me up in its big black maw. But now I’m not so sure. Now I spend my days either thinking of things it might be fun/interesting to blog about and then actually doing it. Scarily enough, blogging seems to have become the job….

And I love it. It makes me realise that writing is what I really wanted to do all along, just like when I was 7 and stayed in the classroom at break so I could fill exercise book after exercise book with my sloping, untidy scrawl and my inspirational, wonderful, brilliant teacher Mrs Briggs (wherever you are, I salute you – you were the real deal and I was lucky to know you and be taught by you) would tell my parents ‘it’s not how she writes it’s what she writes that’s important’. I won a Whitbread Prize for poetry in my teens (haha, offered by the local brewery, £25 and a tour of the facility). I was always scribbling stuff. And then I stopped because life took over and that’s the thing with life, isn’t it? The habit it has of just taking over and making the important ephemeral, peripheral, inconsequential.

When my dad died I made a promise to him. I sat next to his body on the bed. It was Christmas Day, his favourite day of the year. I found the soft place on the crook of his arm – the part of him that still felt human, that could be warmed by my touch. I told him I’d write for him.

Sorry it’s taken such a while, dad – but I’m glad I finally kept my promise.

Into the Great Wide Open

Last week we bought a ‘new to us’ tent. It’s a behemoth, a sprawling octagon of whatever tents are made of these days and guy ropes and tent poles. It won’t fit in our garden so we’ve never put it up – we tried and managed to splinter a tent pole. Still, it was useful practice in seeing whether we could fold it up and ever make it fit in what suddenly looked like a quite pathetically small bag again.

I don’t know why we own a tent – actually we own two tents, the other is on the growing pile of ‘stuff I’m going to put on ebay/flog at a car boot sale/put in Friday Ad’ – I can’t stand camping. Ever since a formative pre-teen experience when camping with my parents I’ve loathed it. So I’ve watched the rise of glamping with the deep scepticism reserved for those who have pumped up an airbed in a thunderstorm.

But I reckoned without E, one of my school run mums, whose personal mantra “it’ll be a good laugh” has gradually wheedled its way through my natural suspicion of anything outdoorsy. E claims she only does glamping – her tent has a carpet FFS – and so I’m part owner of not one but two tents and am about to go camping for the May Bank Holiday.

To be fair, my first experience of adult camping wasn’t half bad owing to E and her husband supplying everything and the kitchen sink.  It was freezing, yes, and our tent was draughty – first rule of buying a tent GET A SEWN IN GROUNDSHEET – and taking a table lamp for lighting was a trifle camp (not to mention the unwitting burlesque display I gave the neighbours getting ready for bed) – but our son absolutely adored it. He was running around with a headtorch on shouting “this is the best night of my life – EVER!!!”. Faced with the choice of being good, nice parents and letting him repeat the experience or being miserable bastards only concerned with our own creature comforts, we’ve reluctantly chosen the former.

So we’ll be spending our bank holiday weekend in a field at Knockhatch – predicted temperatures: high of 11, low of 8 (I’m packing thermals and insulated walking boots). We don’t know how to put up the tent and we haven’t fixed the splintered pole because we don’t know how. We do have an electric pump for the airbeds – second rule of buying camping equipment GET AN ELECTRIC PUMP BECAUSE FOOTPUMPS ARE USELESS – and 2 gas stoves on the rationale that we can cook bacon and eggs on one and brew coffee on the other (I’m checking the nearest takeaways). We now have LED camping lights. Everything for our 2 night stay will just fit in the car – just. But only if we don’t take any clothes.

Actually this is a trial run for a little idea I have of slinging the tent in the car come the summer holidays and meandering down through France to take a look at Montmorillon and surrounds. In my dream, the weather is balmy and the tent is a breeze to pitch, we find nice, cheap restaurants and picnic on baguettes and rilletes and wine, the air is fresh and we wake with the lark. Of course we don’t need to book into a hotel because the rain has been widdling down for 3 days straight and we’re cold and dirty and miserable. Of course we find our dream property at the end of it. Well, there’s a first time for everything.

This has never, ever been my experience of camping. I know that everything – let alone clothes – will not fit in the car. I know we’ll be blowing up airbeds in a thunderstorm and trying in vain to secure the flysheet in hurricane force winds. I know there’ll be arguments and sulks and storming offs (and that’s just the adults).

But there’ll also be a 7 year old who has the “best holiday of my life – EVER!!!”

What I Won’t Miss About England

I won’t miss the thoughtful dog owner who allowed their hound to crap on our driveway so my husband stepped in it as we were corralling the kid into the car for Saturday swim lesson.

I won’t miss the dogshit strewn pavements and the fact that, owing to cuts, the street sweepers no longer follow the refuse lorries and I’m constantly picking the detritus of junk food out of my front garden.

I won’t miss the seagulls – those filthy flying rats and their assault on any untended rubbish bag, stray duckling or car in their vicinity (and everything is in their vicinity in this town).

I won’t miss the old git who told me to keep my dog under control and threatened me with his stick when the dog tried to make friends with him a little too enthusiastically.

I won’t miss the bullying at school and the parents kicking off in the playground.

I wont’t miss the daily battle for pavement space between the buggies and the mobility scooters.

I won’t miss a Government that has launched a full on attack on the most vulnerable on society whilst it allows money to filter upwards to its cronies – and I won’t miss the way that most of my neighbours simply don’t seem to care.

I won’t miss working for an employer that chronically undervalues me.

I won’t miss being a little bit cash rich and chronically time poor.

And yet, and yet…

This morning I took the dog for a walk to the local recreation ground. The sky was brightest blue, the sun warm and the sea breeze welcome not arctic. The groundskeepers were out mowing the wicket, the boundary marked, the nets out ready for the cricket season. Old men were playing bowls on beautifully tended greens. The blossom trees were laden with blooms like a go go dancer’s frilly knickers (thanks for the simile 5 year old me) and the dog was bounding around joyfully with his doggy pals – Gucci and Minky and Smudge. I exchanged pleasantries with fellow dog walkers on the wonderful remodelling of the park. We strolled to the beach and walked down to the wide strand of sand that unveils itself at low tide. The sea sparkled as I threw stones for the dog to chase. That gorgeous Modernist masterpiece that is the De La Warr Pavilion sat proud and gracefully monochrome. It was a beautiful morning, a beautiful walk. ‘Glad to be alive’ was the descriptive cliche of choice.

This is actually a rather nice place to live – we have the Pavilion of course, the Lighthouse Cafe so beloved of Keane (you can walk the Keane trail and visit Strangeland if that’s your thing), an independent record shop (they have some pretty good CDs at the moment – I know, I sold them), a great butcher just round the corner. If I want to cook Hungarian or Afro-Caribbean/Asian food I can visit two local specialist food stores. There are plenty of great charity shops (let’s call them retro shall we?) and a greengrocers and two decent bakers and a fishmonger. We have a farmer’s market every Friday and a French market twice a year. We still have a local library. The new play park and the fountains on the prom are brilliant for kids. There’s a beach (we even have sand at low tide) and a train station that let’s you get out to Eastbourne or Hastings or the fleshpots of Brighton. London is accessible. Heck you even get from our front door to Paris in under 4 hours or take the Tunnel to France that’s 30 miles down the road.

So, taking redundancy and the lack of opportunities and our dissatisfaction with our lives here out of the equation, why on earth would we want to go anywhere else?

It’s not just the better education and health service, not even the better (and cheaper) quality of life. It’s not just the cleaner pavements or the fact that you can take a dog just about anywhere. It’s not even the sense of unfinished business that has nagged at me for the last 8 years, calling me ‘home’.It’s the opportunity to enjoy the good things together, to have a proper balance to our lives. For our son to know his father as more than a 5 minutes before bedtime dad. To sit down and eat together as a family more than once a week. If we could do those things in this house, in this town, perhaps we’d stay. But to keep our heads above water, we both need to work – and that’s no family life for any of us.

Moving to France won’t be a magic bullet – it would be stupid and dangerous to think so – but it might just be what my son calls a ‘magic plaster’ – something to soothe the little hurts of never having enough time together.

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1903 STARS & HANDLEBARS

Garin aka the Little Sweep aka le Sanglier (wild boar) aka le Bouldouge Blanc (the shite bulldog for the distinctive white jersey he wore) rocking an extaordinary piece of facial furniture

The facial hair! The African hunters outfit! Marecl Kerff, we salute you

Josef Fischer, the 38 year old German with a liking for cigars and cocaine – Boum Boum!

The Belgian, known as Samson, working the tubes and tache to perfection

The ‘Flying Builder’ – the little tramp of the 1903 peloton complete with the requisite facial hair

Pothier, the ‘boy butcher’ of Sens was only 19 when he rode the 1903 Tour – hence the lack of facial hair I imagine

 109 years before the Sun newspaper gave away cut out and stick on Wiggo sideburns, the riders of the 1903 Tour de France were collectively rocking the finest facial hair seen in the peloton.

The history of that first race is told well here but here’s something to ponder: the average speed for the 2,428 km was 25.679 km/h – that’s like me riding from my house to Beachy Head in an hour (yeah, right) and then maintaining that same speed for another 94 hours. Like riding 6 Classics back to back, and not the 200+ kilometres of today’s races but the 400+ km of Bordeaux-Paris.

The first lanterne rouge was Arsene Millocheau who finished 64 hours behind Garin. That’s nearly 3 days slower – and remains, incontestably, the biggest margin between the winner and the last placed man in the race.

But just imagine it – getting on your bike outside the Au Reveil Matin one early July morning and riding into the unknown…

1904 THE TOUR DE SCANDALE

15 years before the Black Sox scandal rocked Baseball, the Tour de France was hit by a scandal of its own – the first of many (starting as it meant to go on, perhaps). But whilst the Chicago White Sox cynically colluded with organised crime to fix the 1919 World Series, the cheating in the second Tour was far more prosaic. Hot favourite – and defending champion – Maurice Garin takes the train and is stripped of the win in December 1904. In fact, the top 4 finishers on GC are all investigated and banned, handing victory to the Tour’s youngest ever winner, 19 year old Henri Cornet (race rule 3 stated that all minors needed written permission from their parents to ride).

Lucien Pothier had finished 2nd to Garin again but now received a lifetime ban – at the age of 21 he was out of the sport for good. But why? The official communique of the Federation Velocipedique de France  states contravention of rules 5,6,7 & 8 of the Tour which state:

5) All types of bicycles are allowed on the condition that they are driven solely by muscular force

6) Trainers, soigneurs and other followers are forbidden

7) No support cars of any type – any rider with a service car will be disqualified

8) The rider must stay with his bike and cannot receive assistance of any type

In these days of ‘sticky bottles’ and ‘magic spanners’, where bikes are scanned on the start line in the wake of the does he, doesn’t he ‘Cancellara has a silent motor in his bike’ rumour and there’s a flotilla of following vehicles and an armada of support personnel, these rules seem absurd. But that view reckons without the steely will of the ‘Father of the Tour’ Henri Desgranges.

Desgranges believed that the ideal Tour would finish with only one rider, the coureur supreme. He believed in the self sufficiency and discipline of sport – suffer and sweat! – he most emphatically did not believe in collusion or team work. Desgranges would look at the 2013 Tour and despair at the rest days, the massages, the team support – though perhaps not the caravan. He invented a sport – bike stage racing – to find a solitary superman. Instead, he set in train the event that would lead to the development of that most curious of sportsmen – the domestique, with little hope of individual glory, his job only to support his leader.

And what of Lucien Pothier who would be that superman? He was banned for life for being paced back to the peloton by a team car (a piece of tricherie for which he was fined 500 francs). The ban was later limited to 3 years and he was at the start of the 1907 Tour, but he abandoned on stage 4.  He would never win the Tour de France.

1905 HIGHS AND LOWS

Bref, les ris, et l’amour

Et la toute-puissance,

Les plaisirs les moins courts,

Plaisirs de la science,

Tout ca ne vaut pas le Tour

(Franc-Nohain L’Auto, 19 July, 1905)

Highs: the Tour discovers the mountains – Ballon d’Alsace, cote de Laffrey, col Bayard; at 17 years and 3 months Martin Soulie becomes the youngest rider ever to finish the Tour (he was 12th)

Lows: the infamous stage 1 tack attack – 125 kilos of nails were spread across the roads between Nancy and Besancon causing widespread chaos – Dortignacq punctured no fewer than 15 times. Police traced the purchase of the nails to a Parisian shop but the culprits were never found. Some things never change – remember similar scenes in the 2012 Tour?

The tacks may have punctured tyres but they couldn’t puncture the race. Desgranges may have declared “The Tour de France is finished and it’s second running will also be its last” but changed his mind and decided to start a crusade to rescue cycling – fast forward to 1999 and another “Tour of Renewal” in the wake of the Festina affair. Scandal and rebirth, the endless cycle on which the soap opera of the Tour is firmly based.

The 1905 winner was 24 year old Louis Trousselier – Troutrou to his friends and ‘le fleuriste’ to the cycling press on account of his parents owning a Parisian florists. Troutrou was supposed to be doing his military service – instead, he was pedalling round France en route to winning the race. It’s rumoured that he gambled away all his prizes and lucrative post Tour contracts in a game of dice, declaring that he could always win them back next year. He never rode as well again.

 1906 RIDING WITH THE BLACK DOG

“When champions stop, there’s no one to be with them, so it’s particularly hard to go from climbing a podium to facing the grind of daily life. It’s not surprising that they go into the abyss.”

The list of professional cyclists with depression is a long and largely tragic one. Some, like Obree and Wiggins, have overcome and gone on to greater things but many – Pantani, Vandenbroucke, Claveyrolat and Jimenez to name a handful – never escaped the black dog and ended their days as suicides.

Rene Pottier, the ‘first king of the climbers’, was the only rider in the 05 Tour to pass the summit of the Ballon d’Alsace without having to get off and push his bike. In 1906 his domination was complete – he again won on the Ballon d’Alsace (by 48 minutes), took 5 of the 13 stages (4 on the trot including a 220km solo breakaway into Dijon) and secured the overall victory with a win on the final stage into Paris. Troutrou fought manfully to retain his title – “il petait le feu” – he was farting fire but it was Pottier’s race. The unofficial ‘King of the Mountains’ had slaughtered the opposition and stood triumphant on the top step of the podium in the Parc des Princes.

6 months later he was dead.

His mechanic found him hanging from the hook used to store his bike. His brother spoke of his being unlucky in love. There were whispers that his wife had started an affair while he was away riding the Tour. The real reasons for his suicide were never established. Perhaps, like so many others after him, he simply got tired of riding with the black dog always on his wheel.

1907 /8 THE MARK OF THE LION

We used to have a family friend who insisted on pronouncing Peugeot ‘Pegwatt’. Drove me up the wall. But regardless of how you pronounce it, Peugeot le marque au lion dominated the early years of the Tour de France.

1905 the Double with Trousselier and Aucouturier

1906 the first 4 riders were on Peugeot bikes

1907 The domination continues – the first 5 riders on GC rode Peugeot

1908 The domination of Peugeot- Petit-Breton is complete as he becomes the first rider to win the Tour twice (and the first 4 riders are again on Peugeot bikes)

All in all, Peugeot won the race 10 times – not bad for a manufacturer who made their first bike, a penny farthing Le Grand Bi, in 1882.

Lucien Petit-Breton ‘the best routier in the world’ became the first rider to win the race twice – though Maurice Garin maintained to the end of his days that he deserved his 1904 victory.

1908 was the last in an unbroken run of French victories – les jours de gloire were at an end. 1909 would see the end of the French stranglehold on the race and the rise of a new manufacturer to challenge the mighty Peugeot.

Turns out Peugeot was founded by  Jean Pequignot Peugeot – and Pequignot does sound awfully like ‘Pegwatt’