How Cav Won the Green Jersey by Ned Boulting Page B

a wonderful activity designed to hedge against the inevitable onset of adulthood. His son had sent Chris the most amazing email detailing with finicky precision the best techniques for efficient berry harvesting.
    I think Chris valued Carno’s initiative. I think we all did, particularly because, as the weeks ground on, he would never arrive empty-handed. Opening his increasingly grimy and over-stuffed rucksack, he would hand out the goodies he had scavenged from the Caravane Publicitaire. Salty little biscuits. Tubs of cream cheese. Mini sausages. Cakes and washing powder. Hats. Hats and hats. And of course, Haribo. For us, these things were an amusing frippery – something of a quaint diversion. For him, they were subsistence. He had consumed his body weight in Haribo, and he had lived to tell the tale. The margins of his physiology had started to wobble gently. We respected him. He had become our gelatine friend.
    One day we were filming in a start village.
    ‘Carno!’
    We looked over to where Liam had spotted him. He had plonked his giant rucksack down on the ground to the side, and was standing at a sponsor’s stand chatting up an implausibly glamorous, well-manicured and tall French lady whose job it was to hawk her employer’s wares (wine, in this case, I seem to remember) to visiting dignitaries. I don’t imagine for a second that it was in her job description to fawn over a grubby English gap-year kid who had a precocious talent for stuffing fruit, bread, and yes, wine, into the pockets of his beige trousers. But the look on both their faces suggested that they were enjoying each other’s company more than was decent, let alone explicable.
    Blimey, he was a player. We watched on, highly amused. Our respect for Simon grew by the day.
    Weeks later: ‘Carno!’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘There! Holy shit!’
    He wasn’t hard to spot, actually, despite the fact that he was surrounded by a seething, beery, orange-clad, pissed mass of loosely cycling-related revellers pumping out the phattest sub-woofer mayhem into the Alpe d’Huez night air. Obviously, Simon Carnochan had made it to Dutch Corner, the epicentre of the Tour’s wildest excess, and he was
right
in the thick of the action. What else did we honestly expect?
    As we forced our car through the crowd of intoxicated international zombies, Carno came leering out towards us. We were concerned on his behalf. It was obvious what had happened to our lad. He’d clearly been kidnapped by a highly boisterous posse of drunken oafs from the Low Countries, dragged backwards along a ditch, force-fed a giant frankfurter, and then made to gyrate wildly in the middle of the road in order to slow traffic down to walking pace. We vowed that we would make representations the very next day on his behalf to the British Consulate in Grenoble.
    Actually, we just roared with laughter. He’d almost made it. Alpe d’Huez was the penultimate stage before Paris, and he had an epic journey behind him. He’d slept rough, spent a string of nights in the back of the van belonging to some Norwegian tourists who he had found particularly useful to his cause, and most memorably, he’d befriended a priest in the town of Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux who, in a spirit of biblical literalism, had invited the traveller in, and washed and fed him. Carno had blagged redemption, which, metaphysically, takes some doing.
    At another point, he’d fallen in with the accredited organisation known as ‘Les Jeunes Reporters du Tour’, which trains journalistically minded French teenagers in the art of being Gary Imlach. Simon, presumably lying about his age by knocking off a good four years, was given free transport and lunches galore, and then sent out with a microphone to interview some of the English-speaking riders. He found it quite an eye-opener.
    ‘Cav’s a bit difficult,’ he confessed to me one day, as he lolloped around in our production area.
    ‘Hmm,’ was my reply. ‘Pass us a Haribo,