Gurriers (70 page)

Big cheers among Pierre’s friends, who approached the boys with bottles of beer and wine. I was actually last among the pack to pull in because I had a little chat in French with Pierre before parking. Also, I wanted to stay on the path to make sure that Ollie and the boys knew where we were.

By the time I saw their lights creep onto the gravel path I had introduced myself to Pierre, who returned the compliment, telling me that every year the best party in this area was with the Irish and how delighted he was to have us beside them and how we were welcome to anything that they had - except the women, of course!

I made sure that the injured bike party saw where I was before turning left onto the grass and mud that was going to be our home for the next few days. I was giving too much attention to where I was going to park my bike and how and not what was beside me and who. The what was the back wheel of a bike with the engine still running and the who was the Gizzard, catching a glimpse in his mirrors of me lining myself up perfectly for a mud shower.

On hearing his engine rev, I actually turned to see why. What hit me full on, courtesy of his back wheel, destroyed me and my bike with mud that had been under it. By the time I scrambled my bike out of the line of fire, I was well and truly covered with mud, much to the amusement of all around who weren’t shy about pointing and laughing raucously, slapping thighs in glee and having to support themselves against bikes lest they fall over out of sheer joy. Even the French joined in!

Gizzard was still cheering with laughter as he approached me with a flat piece of wood to put under my side-stand to stop it sinking. Just as he was handing it to me I saw Ollie nurse his sick bike into position directly behind mine. Poor Ollie.

The Gizzard’s woo-hoo’s elevated to screams of laughter once more, as I gave Ollie some of what I had just received myself.

As I roared with laughter I had a wonderful feeling of truly belonging here.

Here, in this realm of madness and mayhem; this world of wildness where we were kings.

I was quite surprised at the efficiency with which everybody got camp set up. I had expected the priority to be drink and drugs as usual, as soon as we stopped, but not so. Tents were unloaded, unpacked and unravelled with a sense of purpose that I had only ever seen the lads apply to work. I was nicely surprised and only too glad to join in the activity, although at my own novice pace. I had only bought my first tent ever the previous week and had only assembled it once in the back garden under Vinno’s supervision in broad daylight, but I plodded along, in the combined light of whatever street light filtered through the trees between us and the road and my own headlight, going through each step of the procedure until help arrived.

That was another pleasant surprise about setting up camp with my friends; as soon as somebody had their own tent up they immediately assisted one of the others in setting up theirs.

Vinno was the first one over to help me. He had the Gizzard bunking with him and between them they had their tent up in
no time. Most of the lads were doubled up in their tents, thus reducing the amount of them needed. Kevin, Mad Tom and I were the only singles. Gizzard went over to Mad Tom when Vinno came over to me, mumbling something about it being my fault that he had no tent after giving his to “that stinking dog”, but I knew that even if he had bought another tent (and actually, he probably had) he would have shared with Vinno to minimise the baggage carried on his new bike.

Between all of us, we had 11 tents up and strategically placed in no time. Apart from having the entrances pointing towards each other, Vinno explained the strategy to me as we positioned my tent prior to pegging it into the ground.

“See down there towards the woods all the way across to there as far as the road an’ over the other side all the way to the edge? Come Saturday there’s goin’ to be abou’ twenty thousand people camped.”

“Twenty thousand?”

“About…guessin’ it to be roughly one fifth of the total amount of people here… y’ know tha’ this is only one side of the track an’ it’s the same all way round, don’t ye? Anyhoo, they’re all gonna be goin’ through the gate in that wall behind us, which is down there.”

“Going past us?”

“Past us if we’re clever with our camp, through us if we’re not.”

“Ye can see if ye look at the bank behind us and the ditch after tha’. They’re there to try an’ encourage people to use the roads an’gravel paths to get to the track an’ back but ye can see by the worn ou’ paths that people prefer to move in strai’ lines. We’d do the same ourselves. Wha’ we have to do is position the tents and bikes to channel the herds around us - both ways. Remember, they’re goin’ to be comin’ at us from the bank on their way back as well.”

“You make it sound as if we’re going to be under attack,
Vinno.”

“Remember most of these fuckers are also goin’ to be as drunk as fuck. They’re all our brothers on two wheels an’ all, bu’ we don’ want them trippin’ over our tent strings an’ knockin our bikes over an’ shite like tha’, do we? Now, I reckon yer tent is grand there, but ye’d want to move yer bike around to there, pointin’ tha’ way to block tha’ little gap, then all ye have te do is skin up a big one an’ crack open one of them shitty French beers ye bought in Carrefour.”

I had just managed to get the skins together on the canvas floor of the tent when, above the high volume background noise of thousands of partying bikers wrecking their bikes, I heard a huge cheer from my own comrades. I abandoned the joint and scrambled awkwardly from my tent to see that Mad Tom had been the reason for the cheer. He stood there proudly, holding in his two hands a trophy that had been talked about for years that nobody had even attempted to get before. Mad Tom had stolen the legendary giant tricolour that had been flying from the huge flagpole outside Superquinn in Walkinstown.

The flag must have been five feet by ten feet. Tom and Eamonn had to hold it over their heads as they unfurled it to make sure that it didn’t get mud on it. Macker asked the question that was on everybody’s mind.

“How the fuck did ye get tha’?”

“A big extendable ladder and a sharp hoe with an extension on the handle. The trick was to cut off the top bi’ of the rope first, so the flag kinda dropped down. Jus’ as well, ‘cos I had to grab onto the fucker to keep me balance on the top o’ the fuckin’ ladder before steadyin’ meself an’ then choppin the bottom. D’yiz wanna give us a few bars of the national anthem while we put this beauty up for the world to see?”

The street lights in France are mounted on top of moulded concrete poles that are shaped with steps about a foot apart running up either side of them. This made a lot of sense, eliminating the need for cheerypickers to change the bulbs. It also facilitated the flying of
giant stolen flags by cheeky foreign visitors.

The poles are considerably shorter than the ones at home, however and the flag dwarfed the pole, with the top being tied scarcely 20 feet from the ground, about a third the height it had been flown by its rightful owners.

We knew that we were camped beside the back strait and when we got home we found out from our friends that had been watching on Eurosport that there had been a camera focussing on the sharp bend that preceded the strait. This camera followed the bikes as they accelerated like mad out of the bend and along the fastest part of the course - past the giant Irish flag that was flying just above the height of the concrete wall. The flag got so much coverage that the commentators had to mention that there was a sizeable convention over from Ireland that apparently came every year. One commentator even recalled over the air seeing a smaller one in the same spot during previous years, surmising correctly that the Irish were to be found in that area every year. We were on the map of Le Mans.

After saluting the raising of the flag and ‘Da Da Da Da Daa’ ing the national anthem at the top of my voice with the others - much to the amusement of our French neighbours - I returned to my tent and made a huge seven skin joint crammed with the best hash money could buy in Dublin.

Those among my comrades that weren’t in tents skinning up had ambled over to Pierre and his gang to socialise around their fire as the temperature dropped steadily. I ambled over after them, firing up the joint and cracking open a can of beer on the way. I was, of course, made most welcome - even more so because of my efforts to speak to them in French. There were eight of them, five blokes that had come on their bikes (all top of the range sports bikes) and three of their girlfriends that had come together in a car, the source of some pretty poor but much appreciated French music, which belted out through the two open doors and the hatch at the back. They appeared to be a little bit stunned by our drug taking habits, but in a nice way. Less than half of them accepted the joints that were offered and when they
did they only took a couple of hurried drags before passing it on. None of them accepted any class A’s but they let us use the dash of their car for snorting lines of coke.

Gerry drew comparison between them and nerdy cousins that thought you were cool because you did the things that they weren’t allowed to.

“Where does all the wood come from, Vinno?” The question reflecting the fact that I had concerns about the cold and the amount of fuel at our disposal.

“There’s a whole fuckin’ mountain of it on the other side of the woods. They empty lorry loads in a big pile an’ people help themselves.”

“That’s a long way to carry wood!”

“That’s why we don’t bother.”

“It’s a bit cold not to have a fire.”

“Jesus, ye don’t think we’d do withou’ a fire. Have to have a bleedin’ fire, man, an’ a big one at tha’!”

“Where does the wood come from?”

“Originally from the mountain.”

“Who brings it here?”

“Mostly the neighbours.”

“The neighbours give us wood?”

“Nope.”

Finally I knew what they meant. “We steal wood from the neighbours after they bring it all the way up from the big pile?”

“The wood is there for everybody. I wouldn’t call it stealing.”

“I wouldn’t imagine the people you take it from would be
very happy after lugging it a mile or so only to have a gang of cheeky Paddys rob it on them. Was there ever any trouble over it?”

“Nah, it’s just a fun game of cat and mouse. The most important thing to do if someone comes out of a tent and catches you with your arms full o’ their wood is to run away laughing, and loudly at tha’- loads o’ big woo hoo hoos an’ all. If they run after ye jus drop the wood but keep laughin’ an runnin’. The closest to trouble we ever had was when there were a few friends of friends that came along with us one year that weren’t with the programme, hard chaws from Darndale who said tha’ they’d rather fight than run, which is bollocks when you’re in the wrong. Me an’ Shay ended up bringin’ back a load of wood to some French an’ apologisin’ about the way it was taken off them an’ then bannin’ the fuckers from wood patrol. Tonight and tomorrow night are the dodgy nights for it, ‘cos everyone stays around their tents. Saturday night is the best ‘cos wi’ the race on there does be loads of unguarded piles of flammables all over the place.”

That gave me an idea. I called to one of the French girls and asked in my terrible accent if the owner of the car would object to giving us a lift to the wood and back with a load to stock up. Pierre took it upon himself to answer. He told me in French that they had plenty for the night and were happy to share. Then in English he said, “We know for wood what the Irish are like - how you say - crack commandos. Last year they took all our wood while we were in our tents - awake!” We all laughed heartily, as Pierre built up the fire.

I don’t know how or why, but cocaine always gives me terrible diarrhoea. This affliction was surely magnified by the amount of alcohol I had consumed in the previous days coupled with the poor diet. It’s bad enough in your own home when just a few feet away from an unoccupied comfortable bowl but here, in a field in France with several thousand drunken bikers sharing a Portakabin with ten bowls in it that’s situated a quarter of a mile away from your tent, the scutters is the last thing a body needs to have to contend with.

After my first visit to the portaloo, I took off my boots and leathers to leave myself in track suit bottoms and runners, scolding myself for not doing so earlier after a very cramped episode in a tiny cubicle in which I narrowly avoided spraying the waist-band of my leathers with high pressure arse juice.

The back of the portakabin was visible from where we were camped, floodlit to highlight the fact that the amenities were there, but that was no good in determining how big the queue at the front was. There was always a queue, it was just pot luck how long it was. My strategy was simple: grab the toilet roll from the top box and high tail it down in a straight line through the many, many tents at the very first tinge to hopefully be able to bear a very long queue if that was the case.

My second visit to the camp crapper was about as short as I could have hoped for but the third was a nightmare. I was in a real state of emergency by the time I sprinted around the side of the Porakabin and I nearly shat myself when I saw a line of about 30 blokes all waiting good-humouredly chatting and singing amongst themselves. I cursed them for their pleasant attitude to being kept waiting, scoffing to myself that that was only because the service everywhere was so shite in this country. Well, that and the fact that each one of us was delighted to be here, just as I would be if I didn’t have to do regular visits to the shitter to avoid exploding in my underwear.