The day le Tour came to town ...

The plans for the start of this summer's Pyrénéan stroll came to a sudden halt in Pierrefitt-Nestalas, as the bus driver announced the road ahead to my start point, Luz Saint Sauveur, was blocked. It remained a mystery to me why the route ahead was blocked until I started to see growing numbers of people camping along the side, various professional cycle team banners, and the iconic green livery of a Tour de France sprint marker across the road. Initial irritation turned into a small puja to the gods of cyclists and, by default, Tour de France lovers everywhere.

As there was nowhere to go until the road opened later that evening, I joined all the other residents, groupies and stranded, finding a spot  to settle in for a long wait until the Tour arrived later that afternoon. Sporadic team vehicles, officials, sponsors, media and merchandise cars, passing at varying proximity and speeds, from breakneck to 'buy a t-shirt' languid, kept us vaguely amused until 2pm ish when activity picked up and the tannoy announced the arrival of 'le Caravan'.

Le Caravan is the bit you never see on TV and probably never will because what people are really waiting for is to have things thrown at them by giant chickens and fromage on wheels. Floats representing each of the major sponsors toss key rings, fridge magnets, car window sun shades, haribos, biscuits, cheese, sausage, stickers, pens, water, newspapers, hats, and pennants (I got one of those). Children and grown up humans scrambled in the air and on the ground for the bread and circuses. 'Eye of the Tiger' and bubble machines pumped up the energy and a general feeling of surrealism.


After an hour of giddiness the caravan disappeared and again we were left with a mix of boredom and anticipation until close to 4pm when the sound of five helicopters overhead signalled that something was about to happen. In seconds, a lead group of cyclists, spotted jersey in front, blurred past. Then the peloton clattered through with glimpses of recognisable team colours; Moviestar and Ineos among them. Around them, between them, motorbikes and cars sped by with centimetres to spare. Another group passed to more cheers from the crowd; then a few stragglers; and finally just one, the cyclist no-one wants to be at the back of the field.

After waiting five hours in minutes it was over, and I realised that I was still stuck in Pierrefitt-Nestalas. It was too late for the evening bus and I tried hitching with no luck, so a €40 taxi fare finally got me to Luz. But seeing the hundreds of amateur cyclists freewheeling back down from the Col Du Tournelet, the end of the day's stage, and sitting with every woman, man and dog in lycra, from France, Spain, Italy, the UK, Australia and the USA, dissecting the result over a rosé while holding my hard won pennant, it was worth it.

 

All hail Newton’s sheep ...

Long have knitters suffered the mockery of others; scorned for our love of slightly out of fashion hand made sweaters waiting for the next Scandi noir to make them fashionable again; stereotyped as sad, lonely, most likely to be eaten by their cats when they die unloved and unnoticed in a cold apartment.

The sound of ridicule would only get louder if such people knew that, under the cover of winter's cold and dark, six of us gathered at the local yarn store for a 'yarn tasting' evening, to learn about the different properties of some of the 76 breeds of sheep in this country (plus a few foreign ones). As we  knitted up sample swatches, we analysed staple (how long), micron (how thick), crimp (how curly), lustre (how shiny), plie (how many strands spun together) and spin (a smooth worsted or a rustic woollen).

And all those qualities make wool, for which farmers in this country are paid 0.84p a kilo, miraculous. Sheep fibre does no less than explain the foundational laws of physics and maths. 

Want to get your head around topology ... any knitter knows that when you accidentally twist your joining row to knit in the round you are about to embark on making a Mobius strip ... and that's Topology 101. The Mobius strip has the mathematical property of being 'unorientable', which in a time of hardening identities seems a radical thing to be making. 

Spinners will refer to 'crimp energy’; the properties of yarn that cause it to twist and curl and fight back if you try to plie it in the wrong direction. ‘You can’t fight the crimp’, thus demonstrating Newton’s 3rd law of motion: 'for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction'. 

I'd argue wool also illustrates the laws of thermodynamics. The Conservation of Energy states that  energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another, i.e., from sheep to fibre to yarn to sweater. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that natural processes only run in one direction, and are not reversible. Once it's spun, there's no going back. Once it's steeked, there's definitely no going back.

So go ahead, mock as much as you want. Come the apocalypse, we're the ones you will be coming to for warm clothing and to be reminded about the underlying mechanics of reality.

Building walls ....

Trump is clearly not the first autocratic man to want to build a wall to protect his sand pit. China's Emperor Qin had a good crack at it. Berlin and Belfast's walls were not so visible from space but created their fair share of suffering. And in Britain ... Hadrian built 73 miles of symbolic power to delimit Empire from Barbarian (and judging by current politics I'm sure there's a few Scots who wished the wall was now a bit higher). With Hadrian's Wall came all the ingenuity that the Roman military industrial complex had to offer, including early renditions of blast barriers embedded in fort entrances to stop low wheeled enemy chariots rushing the gates.

Populating the forts along the course of the wall were some of the 56,000 soldiers in England at a time when the population as a whole was only four to five million. Troops came from Spain, Syria, Germany, North Africa with some attempting to serve out the 25 years it took to get Roman citizenship. Some stayed in the North, marrying into local communities and messing with the BNPs claim for some ancient, pure Britishness.

But not only did the Romans mix up the gene pool. According to our guide Colin, at Chester's Museum, Northumbria, they also bequested bits of the English language: 'fort' night (the amount of time you spent in the fort before returning to the main Roman camp); decimation (where every tenth man in a cohort was executed by his fellow soldiers when the cohort had done something naughty, like mutiny); 'you scratch my back' (after the need to get someone to scrape down your back to clean it in the communal baths); 'wrong end of the stick' (from the sticks with sponges on them used in the loo, and with the spongy bit obviously the wrong end you didn't want to get hold of).

The locals living around the excavated remnants have made an art of naming things after the wall: Hadrian's Haulage; Ale Ceasar; Hadrian Hotel etc. If Trump ever does get his border wall in the ground, I shudder to think that one day in the future, after it has crumbled like all walls and all empires governed by narcissists that think they will live forever, it will be excavated and put on show for tourists with a little gift shop nearby selling Trump lager, Trump chutney, and Trump fudge. As his wall is broken up and used in someone else's fence or road or sand pit, he will be reduced to a benign face on a tea towel.

Perhaps then, in the case of Trump's America, it is better to think of his wall as necessary for keeping his Barbarians in so they do as little damage as possible to the rest of the world.