Cigarettes and Cycling

The grey ViaRhôna cycle path of Southern France snaked onwards as I spun my pedals looking for signs of Bowie. After my 26km detour to learn of Bowie’s ‘Picasso, ’ the iconic make up artist Pierre La Roche I needed some sprucing up myself, mostly with food. As I moved through the tiny village of Baix with it’s cobbled side roads and unassuming rock homes, I found a village store amongst them. I dutifully did my little shop: baguette, ham, cheese - mountain of sugary crap; before my eyes widened at a pack of blue cigarettes behind the counter. Gitanes - Bowie’s favourite.

After it was established I was indeed horrible at French, but pretty good at repeatedly jabbing a finger at cigarette packets behind a counter, I was furnished with the cigs/tabs/fags/smokes that Bowie favoured in the 60s and 70s in everything from interviews, to photoshoots and stage performances as his Thin White Duke character. Smoking ‘French’ was de rigueur for young Londoners flitting around Soho wanting to fit in with the bohemian and ever diverse crowds. As Bowie became enhanced by the cosmopolitan scene, they became his brand until he quit in the early noughties.

Purported to be a self-portrait Bowie drew on a pack of Gitanes.

Of course, supporting local business is worthwhile in the era of mega retailers, but the purchase of Bowie’s cigs/tabs/fags/smokes wiped out my daily budget and meant I’d have to find somehow cheap to sleep. And by cheap, I meant hedge.

To be fair, it was a rather idyllic hedge until the chill of the night ensured a dew-drenched morning. In fact, the biggest stink about it all, seemed to be me. Without access to a sink, my wardrobe of two t-shirts and two pairs of cycling shorts had begun to kick up an irksome pong. As I packed up, hopped on my bike and tried to outrun the stench of me, I was dismayed to learn that cycling up mountains had played havoc with my knee. It felt like someone had used it as a snare drum, but playing with a sledgehammer rather than drumsticks. It made for a whiny soundtrack as I groaned and yelped into Valence around 40kms later where I slumped against this dainty bandstand and lit up a Gitanes.

But bandstands are great. After all, David Bowie wrote Life on Mars? whilst sat on the steps of one in Beckenham (below), just outside London. “This song was so easy. Being young was easy…'“ he said. “I started working it out on the piano and had the whole lyric and melody finished by late afternoon. Nice.” Nice indeed.

I was now 135 miles due north of the Mediterranean with an awful lot of land ahead. But how much Bowie? As my knee creaked like a rusty shed door hinge, it dawned on me; France is big, the weather is hot and I’m not invincible. Alongside the cigs, my food choices were becoming erratic. After eating an entire block of questionable looking French cheese and mixing that with eight hours of sunny riding, questionable noises began to emerge from my stomach, followed by a series of unquestionably violent toilet incidents.

With my stomach taught and cramped, my knee throbbing, I found I could barely ride. I slumped in front of a church and got attacked by wasps. Fortunately two lovely French campsite owners come to my rescue and feed me tea, crisps and half the tinned goods in France.

And so, as I sat at a picnic bench in middle France, the pitch black broken only by my head torch and the sound of a man warily scoffing down crisps, it dawned on me; cycling a David Bowie song lyric fuelled only on cigarettes and cheese was never going to be easy (or wise).