pining

My good woman has done amazingly well to learn English from nothing in 18 years. She asks me what is the difference between pining and yearning. I know there’s a subtle difference but have never tried to put it in words a non-native speaker might understand. I give it my best.

I’ve been pining myself over the past three weeks, for France, to stand on a mountain roadside with thousands of enthusiasts as the peloton whooshes past. I’d go every year if I had the time and money. It’s not the race so much as the event, and the great metaphor, the struggle to overcome insuperable odds, to ride a bicycle where no bicycle should go.

Despite the pining, I give this year’s Tour de France less attention than I have for 12 years. I don’t stay up late, watch only two stages to their conclusions. Some days I miss the half-hour highlights on SBS because my job absorbs my time and energy, gets me home long after dark.

This year’s race lacks all the charisma of the 2011 edition. It’s over before it begins, Wiggins a Monty to win the GC, Cadel little chance of repeating last year’s heroics. No great battles are fought, the British Sky team snuffs every challenge before it takes hold. They are clinical, efficient, and boring.

Great rivalries capture the imagination—Armstrong and Ulrich, Armstrong and Belocki—but none eventuates here. The green jersey competition fizzles early. Opportunists win stages because they pose no threat to any contender. Half-hearted champions save their energy for the Olympic road race a week away.

Yet I want to be there. Perhaps not riding the Tourmalet, the Peyresourde, the Aspin, the Galibier. They’re behind me. Maybe one last tilt at the great climbs is left in me. I fancy a crack at the Madeleine, perhaps the Tourmalet from the east, Mont Ventoux. Mostly I want to sit next to my bike in towns like Arreau, Argelès-Gazost, Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Luchon.

I want to wander round Paris with my good woman, speed through the green in a TGV, buy cheese at an intermarché. I want to eat petit déjeuner at 7 Résidence Lestival in Langeac as I did twelve months ago, pump up my tyres and pedal off into the French countryside.  

Rock on.