Tim Moore Fan Club

I just finished an awesome book, French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France. Author Tim Moore is a (purportedly) unathletic Brit who decides to cycle the Tour de France route. Being unathletic, British, and riotously sardonic, Moore naturally transforms his tour into one long misadventure. This is the same guy that walked the Camino de Santiago with an ass, and there too basically went looking for crazy things to happen. What he does is pretty amusing to begin with, but what he thinks about it (and what he thinks about in general) and how he says it are just wickedly funny. If I had to choose a writer-model, this would be the guy. Anyway, he’s too good to not tell you about. Here are a few of his lines that made me smile . . .

. . . Attracted perhaps by my attempt to encapsulate the works of Heronymous Bosch in a single sound, and perhaps by leaking ceiling, the proprietress had seen fit to enter my room at a moment which coincided unhappily with my wild, humid egress from the cubicle [shower].

. . . And though cycling might be the national sport of France, from what I saw that day strimming [weed-whacking] runs it a close second. Every garden and field buzzed with Canutean attempts to hold back the green tide, to keep the undergrowth from overgrowing. I even saw a couple of leather-faced fellers with scythes, which was pleasingly traditional. Death must be dreading the day when they upgrade him with a strimmer.

. . . I put the hammer down but it bounced back and smacked me in the teeth.

And also literarily pleasing but of primarily – ah . . . – “cultural” interest, Moore also makes me laugh with what he has to say about my adopted countrymates. If I were in sophisticated company and trying to be supremely diplomatic, I think I might respond to these comments with an “I can appreciate what you’re saying, Tim. More wine?” Actually, if I were in sophisticated company, I probably wouldn’t be discussing Tim Moore, and if I were somehow discussing Tim Moore, I’m quite certain I wouldn’t proffer these examples, but I think it would be cool if one could, in “sophisticated company,” discuss Tim Moore, as well as politics, sex, and religion. Furniture upholstery and regional weather peculiarities only take me so far. In any case:

. . . [He was sick to his stomach and uncomfortable all night:] As dawn prodded at the curtains I was still writhing and groaning like an ankle-tapped Italian footballer . . .

. . . They’ve never needed a Seventies revival in Italy: along with fare-dodging, drink-driving, and sexual molestation, littering is just another in the nation’s impressive roll-call of lingering period pastimes.

. . . Simon O’Brien had been at Nick and Jan’s place in the Pyrenees the night before the Tour passed their front door in 1997, and offered a stark warning of what can happen when you’re out there in the dark with a paintbrush, how your intended ALLEZ CHRIS can find itself evolving into an EVERTON FOOTBALL CLUB or a FUCK THE MANCS. The Italians, however, sated these unseemly urges in a more appropriately artistic manner. Their preferred icon was the erect penis, sometimes as an incidental prop in a scene depicting unpopular riders eagerly fellating or sodomising one another, but more commonly as a stand-alone icon, a vast, scarlet-frenumed, wispy-scrotumed deity solemnly spanning both sides of the carriageway.

And a final passage, which I think summarizes my current perspective perfectly, and explains why I am reasonably happy cleaning toilets for no money in France:

. . . Actually there was something else. Wheeling ZR [his bike] back out through the Holiday Inn’s automatic doors and into the misty sun I’d seen a roomful of sales-conference delegates staring bleakly into their Styrofoam cups as a bald man drew pie charts on an overhead projector; one of them turned to me as I cleated up and as our eyes met we both understood an important truth: however wretched my day might be, even if it meant going back to Belfort [254 km] and back, his was going to be far worse.

I think that says it! Rock trumps scissors, scissors trump paper, paper trumps rock, and toilets trump cubicles every time you play.