Every July, my flat fills up with scattered Post-its, torn envelope corners, scribbles in the margins of handwritten race notes. All are marked with often-obscure place names copied from the Tour de France broadcast, where they’re picked out in a yellow box over a ponderous helicopter shot – usually a particularly beautiful town or mountain pass, and nearly always somewhere with a tantalising history.
I’m rarely able to keep up with my own haphazard list-making, most of which find a new home in the recycling rather than organised records, but a lifetime of passion for modern European history and a decade and a half of following the Tour has filled my head with the frayed edges of meaning for most parts of France.
This past weekend, completely by accident, I found myself finishing a book about a British pilot’s escape from occupied France in World War Two just as the Tour peloton arrived in the precise area his ordeal began. Of course, you can’t really go anywhere in that part of Europe without stumbling upon a monument, an information board, or even a street name that memorialises an individual or event from either World War, so there’s a great deal of crossover between my preferred reading genre and European pro cycling, the Tour especially. But the story author Adam Hart tells in Operation Pimento made me look forward to the stages to come with renewed enthusiasm.
Did we do a good job with this story?
