It's not because the Tour de France is coming through town that I am going away for the weekend, although some of my healthier friends don't believe this. They say anyone like myself who still hates putting two legs slowly past each other for a short and dreaded daily walk just couldn't bear to see the raw energy of Lycra-clad limbs as they flash past. Cruelly, they say that my only response to this challenging sight was flight.
But this is not so. I look at cyclists with huge admiration and awe just as I look at ice skaters, trapeze artists and even those lovely meerkat animals you see on National Geographic programmes. . . I look on them as something from a different world altogether.
Cyclists have different kinds of hearts beating inside them to the rest of us. They don't have hearts full of ventricles that race and pound and panic with exercise. They have different calves in their legs, you know, leather calves probably, which don't seize up with cramp after five minutes of frenzied pedalling. They have long, sinewy thighs with extra ropes in them and they also have some strange peripheral vision. They see things that no normal people could see moving at that speed with their heads bent down. They don't just see the bum of the person in front. In fact, they claim they can actually see beautiful scenery like the Alps and the Pyrenees and lovely little French towns en fete for them. Just as this year they claim they will see the Wicklow Mountains and the River Barrow and all that nice bit from Dungarvan to Youghal on the way to Cork.
I expect they see pictures of it all afterwards or watch the video and that they think they saw something other than the two shiny Lycra cheeks bobbing in front and the grey concrete or black tarmacadam beneath them.
And I'm glad for them that they think they appreciated the atmosphere of the countryside and noticed the differences as they glided from one departement or, in our case, one county, into another. I love to think of them believing they can hear the bird song and fine horses whinneying. It's honestly just great that they think they can smell newly mown hay and wild roses in the hedges, the hint of wonderful French pastry coming from small patisseries, or Irish soda bread from houses.
Of course, they can't smell any of these things. They smell sweat and rubber and feet and axle grease and they smell the real fear that their hearts will stop at the next hill - but they keep going because there's a sort of myth that this is very, very good for them.
They see what they think is admiration on the sidelines. It's actually disbelief. They hear what they think are cheers of encouragement, but in reality are roars of relief from throats that are about to go to a pub and watch the rest of the reason-defying spectacle from a position of comfort . . .
They read the acres of newsprint about them and they think they are heroes and that's very good too because, honestly, in some extraordinary way, they are heroic, and they are basically decent, too, and they can't read the small print.
As they keep their scrapbooks, they have no idea that all the thousands of words written about them are written in sheer relief that those who write them don't have to do any of this sort of thing themselves.
But fortunately, the cyclists don't know any of this. It must have been the thought that they were experiencing all of these things that has kept a race like this going since l903.
And if I were here in Dublin at the weekend, I'd go in to town on the DART to see what I could see, just as the crowds came to see Macnas's Gulliver or Earthlings assembled to gawp at E.T. when he was captured.
Because for one thing, their coming here, must bring us more tourists - and we are always bleating on about needing tourists. There are going to be millions of people looking at the cyclists saying Zut, alors! and Achtung! and Bellisima!, not at the sinewy thighs but at our gorgeous countryside, rolling hills, moo cows sent over by central casting, coasts, rivers, dressed-up towns with stone buildings, and they are all going to come over and spend their Euros making the place richer than ever.
And some of the fitter friends say that the Tour de France is a great incentive to encourage more cycling, it looks so easy, so healthy, so magical. Yes. But anyway, it appears that even watching the race on television gives people the urge to take out wheels again.
I even know a woman who was dithering about buying an exercise bike and she heard that one of the ace cyclists used to keep fit on rainy days by fixing his bike to the wall, sitting on it and pedalling backwards and she does that now in the kitchen, apparently to great avail.
But it's not just because of what the Tour de France might do for tourism or for the already lean stomachs of those who will imitate the cyclists that I would welcome them if I were in Dublin today. I'd go out and cheer them, the cyclists from Mars - as they appear to me. I'd cheer them because like lion tamers - and those are amazing folk - they deserve to be stared at and roared at for putting themselves to such trouble and putting their nerves and hearts at such risk.
Just because we wouldn't do it, doesn't mean we shouldn't admire them. And anyway, after you've seen something like the Tour de France whizz by, it sort of puts the daily walk into perspective. The saunter is not so bad when you realise that there's no one competing with you for a yellow jersey.
`After you've seen something like the Tour de France whizz by, it sort of puts the daily walk into perspective. The saunter is not so bad when you realise there's no one competing with you for a yellow jersey'