But he was a young man, and the song of the lark made him blissfully happy, stirring the old longing that had accompanied him from Hammont. He felt as if someone were walking behind him with light footsteps, calling his name softly and tenderly.
When he stopped and turned to listen the voice stopped calling out, but when he turned back he felt the presence behind him again, as if it were trying to play a trick on him.
Hans Grimm, “Schlump.” 1928
They turned All Quiet On The Western Front into a Netflix movie, but the year before it was published, Schlump was out in print. It’s similar but not the same, about someone a lot younger than me now, who had the misfortune to be born just before my grandfather’s time and in a different country, so ending up in a trench in France with people like my grandfather, country boys from another country, trying to kill him every day.
I don’t know how that time was. But I’ve had the same feeling sometimes, that something young and happy is looking after me, but only when you’re out of doors, alone, in the sunlight.
And as soon as you stop to think, ‘So what actually is that?’ then it’s gone. I used to know it would be back. This cold, sodden, windy Spring it’s going to be a long time coming.
“They feel that technology has got a lot to do with the forces that are trying to turn them into mass people and they don’t like it. I think their flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating.”
Last week I bought the book I’ve bought and given on twice before. Third time lucky maybe. Someone whose opinion I respected when I was 17 told me I wasn’t interested in Persig’s philosophy or his Chautauqua, his thoughts on mechanisation, alienation nor anomy, nor anything expect the motorcycle part of the title, and there’s not a whole lot of that in the book. He was wrong. I was fascinated, as Persig was, as Brautigan was, by the idea of an America that was just out of reach in the past, where people wandered to heal themselves in a huge, empty land of big skies.
I even won a competition writing about it when I was 14, or at least, writing about the movie version of it, shamelessly stealing everything I could from Kerouac and the movie Hudd. I might as well have written about England using Crossroads and Jerome K Jerome as a template.
This road is closed.
OK, nobody can see the future, let alone say how things are going to be half a century in the future, which it’s still quite a shock to have to write, given I was alive and reading when Zen And was written. The most individualist individualist goes online to say how much he hates technology these days, or none of the other individuals get to hear about him at all. And then what would the point of social media be? I’m not sure if anyone even bothers with the notion of hating technology, or not being part of a mass movement, or wondering what it means to be an individual and how you combine that with being a part of society, which whether they like it or not, everyone is, anymore.
But I’ve never understood people who don’t take at least an interest in how their vehicle works. It dates back to when I first had motorcycles and couldn’t afford for anyone else to repair or maintain them. If it was going to get done then I had to be the one who did it. There wasn’t a choice. It dates back to a conversation I had with a kid my age whose Daddy had bought him a brand new motorcycle to go with the brand new Fonz-style leather jacket that would have given about as much protection as a box of Kleenex. I’d read something about steering geometry in Bike magazine, which back then was my substitute for the Bible. And he totally couldn’t understand the concept that a longer wheelbase is going to be more stable than a short one, better on long, sweeping curves than short radius rapid changes of direction. He genuinely thought that ‘so the bike knows what kind of corner it is?’ was a snappy come-back that totally proved his point. It seemed to be that dirt bikes are dirt bikes, grand prix bikes are grand prix bikes, and apparently, some factor in their names made the difference. Apparently, I was the one who’d got it all wrong.
He desperately wanted my Triumph T25 because it looked cool, so I sold it to him. It sprang an oil leak from a loose cover on the top right-hand side of the engine. Instead of fixing it with a cardboard gasket using a biro and a Stanley knife, the way I did in fifteen minutes in the stockroom of the supermarket where we both had Saturday jobs, he scampered all the way to his Daddy to get help to get his money back before he went to the London School of Economics. I neither know nor care what happened to him after that. He would have kept his hands clean, whatever he did. Someone else I knew worked for IBM. He couldn’t understand how I could say a steam locomotive we walked past came from Eastern Europe just by the shape of it. I couldn’t understand how he couldn’t.
The past is another country. They do things differently there.
Ten years ago I worked in a hospital where they still did what they’d done to Robert Persig in a different hospital in America but the effect was the same. Electro-convulsive therapy means jolting massive voltages into someone’s brain. Predictably enough, it obliterates memory. Quite a lot of the time it’s remarkably effective at wiping-out memories of traumatic events, the kind that can ruin the rest of someone’s life. As the NHS explain, it isn’t used as often to cure severe mental illness now, because there are more drug treatments available. I remember seeing someone who’d had a drug treatment one lunchtime. When I got back from my walk an hour later he was still in exactly the same place as when I first saw him, drugged into total immobility, way overweight because he hardly moved anywhere these days, entirely consistent with what we knew about every drug-therapy inmate – they’re going to die about 15 years before people outside the hospital, because although we can stop them killing themselves or somebody else by making them immobile, we can’t translate that into making them want to live.
On one level, Zen And is about Persig’s rider character discovering and rediscovering that the Phaedrus character is him pre-ECT. It can wipe out memories of things you might reasonably want to remember. Your partner’s name, for example, or where you went to school. Stuff it might be useful to keep in mind. Such as social progess, or reproductive rights, or the ability to live and work in another country without having to pass tests and prove a level of income. Or the fact that if you have even a basic awareness of the vehicle you travel in, you can save yourself a lot of money if you can recognise when things start to go wrong, even if it’s just a feeling you can’t quite articulate.
On a motorcycle, I call that a day you shouldn’t ride anywhere. It’s a time to stop, sit down and think about what you know and what that tells you about things you don’t know. It could be a new sound you’ve never heard before or just a difference in the feeling of the ride that tells you the brakes or the suspension isn’t all it ought to be.
I didn’t know about ECT back when I read the book. I didn’t know about America and I think I know less about it now the election of a lifetime is being decided. I drove across those flyover states Persig rode decades ago, doing my very best to be the hero of my own road movie. And pretty much succeeding, for what that was worth. It was a theme that stayed with me way too long, thanks to the movies.
I loved the idea of chautauqua. I thought maybe I’d be involved in that one day, somewhere, and in the spoken word stuff I used to do maybe I was. I loved the theme of working things out for yourself, which for me is what motorcycles or boats are all about, that idea that you can do it just as well as a paid mechanic, the way John Fowles described poor Charles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, scrambling to classify the things he found on his walks around Lyme Regis, in exactly the same way and for the same reasons trained scientists did then: nobody had and you’ve got to start somewhere. It made the amateur and the professor equals, for the last time in history. Looking for the link so you can buy the book, dear reader, I found this Quora-type question and answer, which unlike most of Quora, seemed to the point.
What is the point of the French Lieutenant’s Woman?
Fowles is concerned in this novel with the effects of society on the individual’s awareness of himself or herself and how that awareness dominates and distorts his or her entire life, including relationships with other people.
The Blood Runs Like A River Through My Dreams
I didn’t write that. It was a book about being what used to be called a Red Indian, a Native American, First Nation survivor, about twenty years back, when it wasn’t tipis and pow-wows but clapped-out pickup trucks, casinos and foetal alcohol syndrome. I read that book over and over again. I felt the pain, but not as much as when I discovered that the writer was about as much Red Indian as I am. Which in case you’re wondering, isn’t much at all. This winter morning I’m still reading Zen And The Art for the countlessth time. And it makes me wonder about this book. As Meatloaf said, it was long ago and it was far away. To which Mr Persig has the ultimate reply.
There’s no traffic on this road, and we’re moving right along. It’s a travelling day.
Just before Christmas, on the shortest day, I did something I hadn’t done for thirty years and bought myself a motorcycle. The last one was a late 1980s 883cc purple metal flake Harley Sportster (Baby….!), which was low, sounded good and was nice to ride, but as every month went on and another £200 had to be spent to get it the way it should have been, I came to realise that there was more to the H-D experience than I’d imagined. It cost more, too, buying the parts to cure the faults that building down to a cost to sucker the buyers inevitably meant.
Some of the issues were weird, like how it was geared for 55mph in top, which was the US speed limit, but the speedometer was in miles per hour. Maybe the bike was some grey import as I’d bought it second-hand but with only about 1500 miles. Whether or not the inlet manifold shouldn’t have split. Being told, ‘Yeah, they all do that, mate,’ didn’t help. Why did they?
‘Metal fatigue, innit’ didn’t reassure.
Any metal failing on a fifteen-hundred-mile motorcycle ought never to have been on there in the first place. The dealership got arsey when I said that and came back with, ‘Yeah, we just take your money, don’t we?’ Which, so far as I could see, was true. Telling the guy he’d got a lot of attitude for someone who’d just had £3,500 off me didn’t seem to help, somehow.
Getting back into it.
“““““““““““““““““““““““They fixed it, but that didn’t happen again, and I chugged off over the blue horizon. But first, I had to find some decent brakes, and a four-piston Brembo sorted that out. The vibration was something else, cured by a Bar Snake, not to be confused with a lounge lizard. Essentially, it is a solid, bendy rubber hose. The idea was and probably still is to stuff it inside the handlebars where it’ll vibrate at a different frequency than the bars and cancel the vibes out. Then, you might see what’s in the mirrors at speeds over 25 mph.
The tyres lasted 3,000 miles. The spark plugs didn’t seem to. The battery box didn’t either, because there wasn’t one on there until I found a three-sided chrome box at some non-main dealer place, the rip-off artists near Greenwich, or the surprisingly pleasant Hells Angel shop down in Kent somewhere. I knew which I preferred dealing with, and it wasn’t Fred Warr’s in World’s End, one of the most unfriendly dealers I’ve ever come across. Maybe it was because I didn’t buy it there, maybe … I don’t know what it was. Maybe they were just arses. They acted like it.
It got stolen and dumped in a field. The bike, not Fred Warr’s entire shop, you understand. We found and recovered it, then I used the insurance money to bore it out to 1200, put a Mikuni injector on it to replace the carburettor, got rid of that biscuit-tin air filter and stuck Kuryakin footpads on it, despite wondering all the while why one of the Men From Uncle was messing around with motorcycle parts. I suppose a lot of people have a side hustle. New coil, new plugs, new leads, and paint the tank jet black, and it was good to go. It did, and I used the money to buy a laptop and a mono laser printer. There wasn’t much change, or not from the money I got for it, anyway.
A strange thing happened a couple of months later, though. A friend’s sister knew the person who’d bought it. She told me it had broken down and wouldn’t start. I talked to the guy on the phone because despite everything else that had happened with the little Sportster, not starting wasn’t one of the things that had happened. He’d tried everything and had no luck.
At about the same time, someone I knew went to see a medium, a descendant of Admiral Dampier, no less, although the two events were unrelated. Out of nowhere, the medium claimed she had a message about the motorcycle her client’s friend had just sold, purportedly from the father of the client. He’d been an army despatch rider in Burma, back in 1945. Tell him it’s the coil.
My friend dutifully relayed the message, and I told her she was talking out of her rear end. When was the last time you heard of a brand new, out-of-the-box coil failing these days?
Except that was what it was.
Nothing even vaguely supernatural has happened with the F650 I bought to get back into bikes, nor the R1150R that replaced that. Nothing remotely spooky has gone on with the Ducati Scrambler I bought a couple of weeks ago, either. Not unless you count the Ducati’s unearthly ability to need its cam belts replacing every five years whether you ride it or leave it in the garage, or the 1150’s habit of growing heavier the longer you don’t ride it.
I don’t know what to make of spirit messages from beyond the grave diagnosing Harley-Davidson replacement parts. I gave up on H-D a long time ago, anyway. The past is a different country, and besides, the wench’s father is dead.
Peace of mind has a price, and the Post Office hasn’t paid it.
Possibly unlike many FT readers it’s fairly unusual for me to find serious amounts of money deposited into my bank account unexpectedly. Let’s just say I’ve bought a house for less. It’s not something I expect to happen often in the future, but after my first wave of total disbelief I thought something else: it wasn’t enough.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s I was a partner in a business information company; market research, if you can separate that in your mind from someone approaching you with a clipboard in the street and asking you about nappies. Because we specialised in researching technical and IT issues, and also because we didn’t know any better at the time and thought it meant we were going places, ICL-Fujitsu became one of our clients. To be fair, we did go places. The epic time-wasting trips to New York and New England were fun, apart from the time I mixed my time-zones up and realised in a bar that I’d been looking at the wrong watch all night and now had precisely forty minutes to stop drinking, go to bed, go to sleep, get up, wash, shave and look presentable enough to meet the client to do a interview with a downtown banker about middleware. But ICL weren’t fun at all, as 800 postmasters found out when they used their Horizon accounting system and went to prison, because the company wouldn’t tell the truth about it under the guise of client confidentiality.
We already had doubts about the wisdom of taking them on because as a small research agency, cash flow was king, and while some of our nicest clients paid us within 48 hours because they valued what we did and wanted us to keep doing it, ICL demanded 90 days, not our usual 30-day terms with half on commissioning and half on completion.
Actual, verifiable lies
What we got was 90 days before the minimum of two total and utter lies about the sign-off and where the payment had got to. The record was five. Not mistakes. Actual lies, about invoices having been approved, or signed off or cheques sent.
We had more doubts when a straightforward presentation degenerated into two sides of the boardroom table hurling threats, insults and everything except chairs and laptops across it, during which we sat amazed and silent at how people who weren’t auditioning for The Sopranos actually behaved like this. But we’d been amazed earlier that day when only seven years after it had become established as a by-word for reliability one of ICL’s senior staff asked us whether we thought Linux would catch on. They weren’t joking.
Criminal fraud
When we found unarguable evidence of criminal fraud in their sales team, with a senior account manager happily billing for visits we proved never happened, to ‘regular clients’ who’d junked their ICL kit years previously, we were told we were ‘difficult to work with.’ It should have been a warning and we took it as one. After New York we didn’t pitch for any more work from ICL-Fujitsu. They clearly weren’t interested in the truth.
After we both separately became very ill indeed we wound-up the market research company. Looking for something to do I took over the Post Office in an idyllic Suffolk village, joined the Parish Council, opened a bijou little cafe-deli and looked forward to bucolic bliss at the heart of the community.
I was there when the previous Post-mistress was signed-out. Two people from the Post Office came to check the stock, the stamps, the tax discs, the money in the till and the money in the safe and to close the Horizon system down on her. They said that if the operator owed the Post Office money, it had to be paid there and then. The postmistress asked if she could check the inventory. They said yes. She asked if a cheque would be ok for the £200-odd she owed the Post Office, on the basis that Horizon said so. They said she could, and it would. She asked if that would be the full and final settlement, everything was closed, everything was accounted for, and again, they said it would be the end of it. I watched her write out the cheque, sign it and hand it over.
It doesn’t work like that
Then she reached for the roll of over a hundred tax discs and said, “So I’ll keep these, as they don’t exist.” They checked. According to Horizon, the roll of tax discs she was holding not only didn’t exist, it had never even been in the building. But the Post Office man spoke in the corporation’s true voice when he said, “Oh, I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that.”
It never did. Horizon, the Post Office and ICL-Fujitsu only ever spoke with one voice – Horizon cannot be wrong. The official view seemed to be that the post-masters and mistresses up and down the country fell into two groups: the ones who’ve fiddled the till and been convicted and the ones they hadn’t caught yet. That’s how it felt at the time.
You could spend hours after closing time trying to get Horizon to match what was in the till. Some days the error was more than we’d taken in the entire day, with Horizon and therefore the Post Office adamant that you may well say you only sold £160 worth of stamps, someone bought a £20 postal order, and someone else put £100 in their bank account, but Horizon shows there should be £400 in the till. If there isn’t, you have to put money in until there is. This reconciliation happened every day, with a big weekly session on Wednesday, which was supposed to be half-day closing. Which was nice, assuming you ever got out from behind the counter before six, trying to make Horizon balance with reality.
There was a Horizon helpline, it’s true, but it closed on the stroke of 6pm. You couldn’t trial balance until the Post Office closed, so shutting the doors and turning the little sign on the door at 5:30 on the dot, you had ten minutes after you’d failed to trial balance to call them. Then you’d be told that it must be you, that nobody had ever had any issues like this ever before going back to the days of Roland Hill and that Horizon was never wrong. It couldn’t be. It was a computer system, by a British company that went back, like their attitudes, to 1919.
You’d go home wondering where you were going to find today’s shortfall but you also knew that sometimes, quite often, the system that couldn’t be altered would show a different figure in the morning. Or in two days. Or a week. Sometimes it was worse, and mine built up to well over £1,000 once, before it simply disappeared down to a couple of hundred. It was obvious someone was fiddling the figures and it certainly wasn’t me. I don’t know how to write computer code and the Horizon terminal wasn’t exactly easily accessible to input anything except money and stock in and out. I don’t know how much I put in to make up the shortfall the Post Office insisted I had when I was closed out, at the end of 2012. I don’t know how much I had put in during the time I was there. The Post Office had said I wasn’t allowed to keep my own records.
I remember clearly being thought of as a criminal liar, someone who was obviously fiddling the till every week, thinking if I kept it small and often the all-seeing Post Office wouldn’t notice. The woman who ran the Post Office in the next village tried to kill herself because of it.
Two years ago I was offered just over £2,000 as a full and final settlement. I thought it was the least they could do, so I accepted it. Six weeks ago I had an email from the Post Office. It reminded me I’d accepted a full and final settlement. As it was from the Post Office, I assumed the rest of the email was going to tell me there was a mistake, I must have made it and they wanted the money back by return, or else.
It didn’t say that. If it wasn’t a spoof or a phishing trip to get my account number out of me, the email offered me a shed-load of money as another full and final settlement, although disappointingly it didn’t say ‘and this time we really mean it, cross my heart and hope to die.’ But presumably Paula Vennells didn’t dictate this email personally.
Confused doesn’t really sum-up how I felt. I thought win some, lose some, I thought that for a stupid scam it looked more than a bit official, with five pages and a plausible email address, and for all that it looked like a scam, asking for my bank account details, it didn’t ask for the three little numbers that would allow whoever was pretending to be the Post Office to go shopping on Amazon. I signed it anyway and waited for the up to ten working days the email said it would take to see the money in my bank.
I was online sitting through the weekly work meeting while waiting for lot 374 to come up at the Monday sale at the local auction house (‘a Henry vacuum cleaner, est. £20-£40’, property formerly hopefully of the deceased owner of a weekend home here in Suffolk, who used it once a week if that) when my phone pinged. Money in. The balance of a lot of money.
Since then it became more than slightly difficult to concentrate on my work, even if I’d liked working there in the first place. I had several first thoughts. Buy a ruin in France. Buy a field in England and a shepherd’s hut. I still quite like that idea. Give a friend some money to tide her through the cashflow issue that bothers her otherwise very nice business.
“I know nothing.”
I remember when that used to be a comedy catchphrase on Fawlty Towers, but I didn’t predict a future when the CEO of a massive national organisation felt it was all she needed to say to move things along. But I had another thought too, prompted by the memory of Paula Vennell’s pathetic sobbing, presumably because those awful men at the enquiry wouldn’t just shut up and leave her alone, because for heaven’s sake she was only the CEO of the Post Office, so how could she be expected to know what had been going on for a decade there? My other thought was that the money wasn’t enough.
I like having the money in the bank. It still feels odd to think that for all the times I’ve looked at Bentleys or Porsches and thought ‘ if I had the money I’d buy that’, well, now I could. And still have change. But it isn’t enough. No amount of money would be. Because the Horizon scandal wasn’t about the money. It was about an organisation and the people who worked for it knowing what the truth was and lying about it. It was about a one-way street, where the front-line staff who had to face the public were treated as liars and their lying seniors could be seen to do no wrong. If over 800 people had to go to prison, if some had to go bankrupt, or kill themselves, or lose their families, or have their entire community thinking they were thieves, then that was simply a price the Post Office was prepared to have their Postmasters pay.
This year, Paula Vennells had her title as Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the CBE, revoked for bringing the honours system into disrepute. She resigned as chair of the Imperial College NHS Trust in 2020, and in 2021 from her non-executive directorships at Dunelm and Morrisons. She’s even stopped being a vicar, notwithstanding the Church’s long-established practice of not asking too many questions about things that might not turn out to be true.
I’ve probably seen more pathetic and insincere things. It’s just that I can’t think of any.
In every email and letter I sent to the Post Office since 2012, I’ve told them they ought to be ashamed. I would be, if as a male CEO I thought I could get away with sobbing during my examination and seriously expected to get any job anywhere at all in future. In reality though, I’ve seen nothing that suggests anyone in charge at the Post Office or at ICL is, was, or will be ashamed. From where I sit looking at my shiny new bank account, it looks to me as if the only shame anyone at the top of the Post Office felt was the shame of being caught. I think I can safely assume it certainly won’t include the shame of a public criminal trial, a conviction or a prison sentence.
But there’s no danger, it’s a professional career
That’s why the money isn’t enough and why no amount of money could be. It’s impossible to compensate for a system which says that like the friends of government ministers who were gifted £4 billion of tax money to supply defective PPE, the people at ICL and the Post Office who made the decision to prosecute their staff when they knew their system was defective won’t suffer in any way. They won’t be arrested, charged or go to court. That’s not the way things work now.
What Horizon demonstrated above anything wasn’t that people lie; some people always have. It demonstrated a more abstract concept, that when they do, some people who didn’t do anything wrong will go to prison while the people who lied get to keep their pensions. I was only following orders wasn’t accepted as a defence at Nuremberg. It feels odd knowing that I live in a country where that’s a more than adequate defence now.
Long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile….
Just before Christmas, on the shortest day, I did something I hadn’t done for thirty years and bought myself a motorcycle. The last one was a late 1980s 883cc purple metal flake Harley Sportster (Well, howdy!), which was low, sounded good and was nice to ride, but as every month went on, another £200 had to be spent to get it the way it should have been, I came to realise that there was more to the H-D experience than I’d imagined. It cost more, too, buying the parts to cure the faults that building down to a cost to sucker the buyers inevitably meant.
Some of the issues were weird, like how it was geared for 55mph in top, which was the US speed limit, but the speedometer was in miles per hour. Maybe the bike was some grey import as I’d bought it second-hand but with only about 1500 miles. Whether or not it was, the inlet manifold shouldn’t have split. Being told, ‘Yeah, they all do that, mate,’ didn’t help. Why did they?
Metal fatigue
‘Er… metal fatigue, innit’ didn’t reassure.
Any metal getting fatigued on a fifteen-hundred-mile motorcycle ought never to have been on there in the first place. The dealership got arsey when I said that and came back with, ‘Yeah, we just take your money, don’t we?’ Which, so far as I could see, was true. Telling the guy he’d got a lot of attitude for someone who’d just had £3,500 off me didn’t seem to help, somehow.
They fixed it, and I chugged off over the blue horizon. But first, I had to find some decent brakes, and a four-piston Brembo sorted that out. The vibration was something else, cured by a Bar Snake, not to be confused with a lounge lizard. Essentially, it’s a solid, bendy rubber hose. The idea was and probably still is to stuff it inside the handlebars where it’ll vibrate at a different frequency than the bars and cancel the vibes out. Then, you might see what’s in the mirrors at speeds over 25 mph.
The tyres lasted 3,000 miles. The spark plugs didn’t seem to. The battery box didn’t either, because there wasn’t until I found one in a spare box at some non-main dealer place, the rip-off artists near Greenwich, or the surprisingly pleasant Hells Angel shop down in Kent somewhere. I knew which I preferred dealing with, and it wasn’t Fred Warr’s in World’s End, one of the most unfriendly dealers I’ve ever come across. Maybe it was because I didn’t buy it there, maybe … I don’t know what it was. Maybe they were just arses. They acted like it.
It got stolen and dumped in a field. We found and recovered it, then I used the insurance money to bore it out to 1200, put a Mikuni injector on it to replace the carburettor, got rid of that biscuit-tin air filter and stuck Kuryakin footpegs on it, despite wondering all the while why one the blond Man From Uncle was messing around with motorcycle parts. A lot of people have a side hustle. New coil, new plugs, new leads, and paint the tank jet black, and it was good to go. It did, and I used the money to buy a laptop and a mono laser printer. There wasn’t much change, or not from the money I got for it, anyway.
A message from the spirit world
A strange thing happened a couple of months later. A friend’s sister knew the person who’d bought it. She told me it had broken down and wouldn’t start. I talked to the guy on the phone because despite everything else that had happened with the little Sportster, not starting wasn’t one of them. He’d tried everything and had no luck.
At about the same time, someone I knew went to see a medium, a descendant of Admiral Dampier, no less, although the two events were unrelated. Out of nowhere, the medium claimed she had a message about the motorcycle her client’s friend had just sold, purportedly from her father. He’d been an army despatch rider in Burma back in 1945. Tell him it’s the coil.
My friend dutifully relayed the message, and I told her she was talking out of her rear end. When did you hear of a brand new, out-of-the-box coil failing these days?
Except it was.
Nothing even vaguely supernatural has happened with the F650 I bought to get back into bikes after a 30-year break, nor the R1150R that replaced that. Nothing remotely spooky has gone on with the Ducati Scrambler I bought a couple of weeks ago. Not unless you count the Ducati’s unearthly ability to need its cam belts replaced every five years, whether you ride it or leave it in the garage or the 1150’s habit of growing heavier the longer you don’t ride it.
I don’t know what to make of spirit messages from beyond the grave diagnosing Harley-Davidson replacement parts with 100% accuracy. I gave up on H-D a long time ago, anyway. The past is a different country; besides, the wench’s father was dead.
Still the only really proper colour for a motorcycle.
It was probably today, but it might have been Friday. Either way it was a long time ago and Easter. I realised years ago that there was something wrong with my hearing. I’d get things wrong, not understand what people said they’d said, be accused of not listening when in fact I was listening as best I could. But the day like today, the day I’m thinking of at Easter all that time ago, it was the silence that was the loudest thing.
It wasn’t a religious experience, or maybe it was. Back in that Easter long ago I’d gone to my school with my friend Phil. We kept two Enterprise dinghies in winter storage under the parquet floor of the solid municipal 1930s assembly room in what had been the old Girls School before the co-ed revolution. The only reason Phil and I were there was to paint the boats for the new season. It took most of the day, a lot longer than we thought it would, to sand them down in a world when 17-year-olds didn’t have power sanders. But then, we didn’t have the right colour paint either, or not the colour we’d thought we were buying.
We spent all that time working on those boats and talking about the girls we knew and our plans, our huge teenage plans, although mostly those involved the desperate difficulty of finding a venue and then possibly less difficult, removing the clothing from those same girls rather than anything more long-term advantageous or profound. I remember that day a lot though, and I remember the silence we had as well, just working together on something we wanted to do, as well as the talk about the other thing we wanted to do. We got the boats painted, at least.
I had a brilliant Easter this year. Walking around Norwich on Friday, exploring Beccles on Saturday, then trying to find breakfast on Sunday, finding the Common Room in Framlingham closed, finding we didn’t want breakfast at The Crown, driving to Aldeburgh and fish and chips there, then realising I’d left my scarf in Framlingham and having to drive all the way back there, then a glass of wine at the Easton White Horse, then a junk shop where I bought a tyre iron and on to Seckford Hall, a secret place we found where for the price of a pot of tea you can pretend Enid Blyton will be along any minute now and you really do live in the style of Downton Abbey every day. It was good in the end, but a bit unsettling and 8 hours is a long time to spend going out for breakfast. It was gone six by the time we got back, the day the clocks sprang forward. Best beloved went to make a headstart on her accounts, I went shooting.
It was ok, considering the light was going and I was having to re-focus the scope to get a clear sight-picture every few shots by the last target, which was this one, a decent card apart from the one stupid flyer.
The range I shoot at is walking distance from where I live, so that’s what I did, walk there. I left the target rest in the boot of my car and just took my best rifle and a bag of ear defenders, ammunition, my sighting target, a pen and a bronze caliper to measure the size of the group of ten shots.
Then I walked back, gone seven in the evening, the few birds singing, the air still. But what I noticed most was the silence as I walked along the lane, the same sound I’d heard that other Easter, at the other end of the span of my life.
When I was a boy I used to shoot at the local rifle club every Thursday. I tried, but I wasn’t much good. I couldn’t see very well, the light was appallingly bad with a lot of glare, we had to lie on kapok mats impregnated with sweat every Thursday since the Boar War, which since you ask was a lot of Thursdays, thanks. I got eczema on my fingers from the lubricant on the bullets and the dust and fumes in that unventilated underground range made my chest feel funny most of the next day.
I shot around 94/100, usually. I was just about good enough to go to Bisley when I was fifteen, and I qualified as an adult marksman, so I can’t have been that bad, but shooting is always about being better.
This was last Friday’s target. Where I live, I’m lucky enough to have a range literally within walking distance, so after work, I put my best gun in its bag, grabbed my shooting bag with its ear defenders and sighting target and a screwdriver just in case, and walked down the hill, along the lane, and across the little bridge over the headwaters of the Deben to the old range. Maybe it started off as a quarry, I don’t know, but I do know that during the war, it was used by the tanks stationed at Glemham Hall to sight in their machine guns, trundling and squeaking and clanking their way down what’s still called Tank Road. It accounts for the sign that’s on the bridge now, saying “No Track Laying Vehicles. The local Home Guard used it for practising when they weren’t doing that.
The Hostile Coast
About a decade ago the local airfield opened the first and so far as I know the only museum to the Auxiliary Home Guard, the real suicide squad, whose job in case of invasion was to go to ground for two weeks and then slaughter as many Germans as they could, along with a select list of people who might be useful to an invading Nazi force. We’re not even ten miles from Shingle Street. This was a hostile coast.
Back in the now, though, or anyway, last Friday, I shot my first ever possible. It was with my lovely HW 77, not the 97 I wrote on the target, the first gun I ever bought new last September. First time out I shot a ten-shot group in 11mm, something I’ve never been able to do since. That’s why my possible 100 out of 100 wasn’t good enough.
As you can see from the picture, the hole at the top right was a snatched shot where I jerked the trigger. It cut the line between the nine and the ten, so it counts as a ten, but that’s not the problem—although obviously, it’s one of them. The big problem is the size of the group—twenty-two millimetres.
It’s not showing off. Ok, it’s a possible. Ok, it’s 100 out of 100. And yes, I was using a rest, thanks. It’s the size of the group. It’s double the spread of the first group I ever shot with this rifle. And I don’t know why. It’s almost as if it’s my shooting that’s at fault, and that can’t be right.
One thing I never wanted to hear on a motorcycle was the Ra-ta-da-ta-da of my head, elbows, hips, knees and toes bouncing down the tarmac having come off it. Ok, you might have to be of a certain age and indeed of a more than certain pretentiousness to recognise the song and the joke in the title, if that’s not too strong a word for it, but if you ride, you’ll have thought about buying the stuff, if you haven’t already. Which I’m feeling as if everybody else in the universe already has.
Back when I started riding motorcycles, rider armour was something I read about in Bike magazine, something strictly for people like Barry Sheen, who was the nearest thing to the Bionic Man I’d ever heard of. For our younger readers, Barry Sheen dropped his bike at Daytona somewhere around 170mph when he was 24 when his tyre blew up.
“I was rolling, and I could feel all my skin coming off. I didn’t feel the leg because all I could feel was the skin tearing off my shoulders. I went to get up and looked down, and my leg was right-angled, poking under the other one.”
Barry Sheen
He broke his left femur, right wrist, forearm and collarbone, six broken ribs, and a few vertebrae, sandpapered a lot of his skin off and got himself a 40cm steel plate screwed into his leg bone to hold it together. I don’t know what it’s like to do 170 on a motorcycle, and on my antique BMW F650, it’s not something I’m likely to find out. But I do know I never want to feel anything like Barry Sheen that day. Or any other.
I’d seen a kid at school who came off his bike at something under 40mph, but as he was wearing one of those sleeveless tops with a strap over each shoulder, the kind of thing they made you wear at English schools for Games back in the days when the P.E. teacher would wander around the shower room to “make sure” everyone was washing. This kid had one big scab from his wrist to his shoulder for a couple of weeks. He’d given up gloves to keep cool.
My view back then was that the more I looked like Mad Max, the cooler I’d look, so I bought myself a leather jacket. The one I wanted was in a proper motorcycle dealer in Bath, just about affordable, padded with something at the shoulder and the elbow and bulked me up massively. It was also an unseemly shade of orange, which was probably why it was affordable. The other problem was all I had was a Yamaha FS1E. Seriously.
Instead, I got a jacket made for me by a chain-smoking hippy in a weird shop in Bath’s Walcot Nation. He got the leather from cutting up old jackets, handbags, or wherever he could find it for free, then lined the coat with an old wool blanket he’d probably dug out of a decommissioned Cold War bunker under Box Hill. I got full marks for recycling and alternative cred, but it was about as protective as the mini-skirts it was probably made from, and it stank of cigarettes for months until the wind blew the smell away.
When I got a 650 Triumph, I had to get something more becoming, so when I was on holiday and visited Truro market, I bought the Stranglers-style black leather jacket I’d always yearned for, for a massive £35. As Meatloaf used to tell us, it was long ago and far away. According to Google, that would be about £180 today, so it’s not so much better after all. When I got my Sportster, I got myself a Schott A2. Luckily, I never got to test either of these out seriously, but after that, I turned my Harley into a laser printer and a laptop to start a business that saw me around the world for 15 years or so, during which I didn’t have a bike and being dumb, gave away or sold all my kit, gloves, Ashman boots, Belstaff boots, open-face Bell 500, goggles, jackets, waxed cotton over-trousers, Rukka suit, the Schott, the lot.
Then, just before Christmas, Santa brought me a BMW 650. Before I rode it anywhere, I had to start from scratch, starting with a helmet. I drove up to Harleston on one of those crisp December days to find a shop full of bikes I didn’t even know the names of, where they totally ignored me, then on to a shed (always a sign of a better bike shop) full of guys my own age and more who tried very quietly but firmly to sell me a nice Triumph but didn’t have any helmets. When I got home, Best Beloved, who fondly recalled her tasselled leather jacket and Yamaha 650, took me to the nearest bike shop in Ipswich, marched me to the helmet racks and whipped out her bank card. She chose a flip-front helmet I’d never heard of. I tried it on in the shop, and the sales guy told me it was the right size. After talking me out of buying a Scott chain oiler, agreeing it would be ideal if I was riding Route 66 coast to coast but also pointing out quietly and firmly that, in fact, I wasn’t, she walked me to the till and then her car.
The biggest problem was my head. It’s huge. Seriously. It’s 63cm and 64 if I need a trip to the barber. I tried the shiny new, never-heard-of-the-maker polycarb (I know..) helmet on in my home office and couldn’t believe three things: How heavy it was. How much my head hurt. That the nice guy in the shop was lying when he’d told me the helmet was my size.
It clearly said 61cm on the label on the back of it, and yes, I most definitely had said 63 in the shop. Another Saturday, another trip to the store, and a full refund. I got a Bell online instead, with the Gold ACU sticker.
I’d forgotten, or rather never really knew, how fashion was now a massive part of motorcycles. This is good because it means old stock is Out Of Fashion, and the seller still has to sell it, so there’s a whole load of good stuff being sold off cheap because Oh-mi-Gard it’s last season’s gear.
The same day we went to the bike shop in Ipswich I answered an ad on Gumtree that promised leather jeans for £30. After a tour of the town’s lesser architectural gems southeast of the railway station we found the house and the guy who said he was giving up riding motorcycles. Whether or not that was true, £30 bought a fantastic pair of leather bike jeans, padded at the knee. Ok, they zip from the wrong side and possibly, just possibly the cut makes them fit slightly like jodhpurs, more as if I was going to co-pilot Amy Johnson than ride a motorcycle, but hey. £30. A significant upgrade on Levi’s for protection anyway, and I’m too embarrassed to say when I remember Levi’s were £30 anyway.
The brand new Halversen gloves donated to a charity shop on Ebay were better than the ones I used to ride with, despite the Mad Max-style knuckle dusters that seem to be a legal requirement for riding gloves these days. The Bering jacket was the best thing though. I was intending to use my old leather jacket. Not the Schott that went to Ebay about five years back but the one I bought one Christmas in Fuengirola about 20 years back when it wouldn’t stop raining. After waxing it, soaking it in neatsfoot oil, daubing it with cocoa-butter and generally stinking my office up I realised that I might as well just buy something with armour and have done with it.
The Bering was a ludicrous £89, and that’s from a man who still thinks £4.95 is a benchmark price for pheasant pie, chips and peas, which I used to get for quiet evenings on my own in Stow-On-The-Wold back when I had a 400-year old house there. It’s got armour in the elbows and the shoulders, and a slot to stuff more armour down the back. It’s blue instead of leather coloured, with a twin zip up the front and a zip across the shoulders at the back, so that in summer you can ventilate yourself on the three weeks it ever gets above 80 Fahrenheit in the U.K. It’s made of 600 denier Cordura with a woven aluminium zip-in full lining for winter, and a handy strap and a brass buckle at the throat. More to the point, despite all the protection and windproofing, it doesn’t make me look like I’m auditioning for a Mad Max film. Best Beloved, who sews for a living, took one look at it and said “That’s a £300 jacket.”
Now, maybe it’s me, but if I’m spending £300 on a jacket I’m only going to wear in one eventuality, on the back of a motorcycle or anywhere else, then I want it to look pretty special. Some lizard skin detailing, maybe, or a paisley lining. Instead I get armour and fine-spun aluminium. When I started riding the biggest deal in protective clothing was whether you could find white sea-boot socks to turn down over the top of your knee-length zip-up boots, the ones where the only armour insert was a steel plate in the right instep, for the kick-starter.
The older I get the more I realise that saying is true: the past is another country. They do things differently there. And just sometimes, at least when it comes to motorcycle clothing, they do some things a whole lot better here.
Once upon a time, in a land long ago, there was a thing called the Frome & District Pistol Club. That’s how long ago it was.
I’d learned how to shoot rifles, or .22 rifles at least, at the local TA Centre in the town I grew up in, back in the days when no air conditioning, an underground 25-yard range, canvas-covered kapok mats that Lord Roberts had probably personally specified just after the Boer War and no shortage of adults who would have quite happily clubbed to the floor any kid arsing around with a gun in a nano-second passed for a totally normal Thursday evening in a small town.
I loved it. I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be, and that was the point. I wanted to get better. Slowly, I did. The rifle club sent me to Bisley and somehow at fifteen I shot well enough to get my badge as an adult Marksman, which now I think is just a first and not a great step, but a decent start. I couldn’t afford a decent rifle then, and let it lapse through Sixth Form, but took up shooting again when I went to the University of Bath, and hence the Frome & District. There were other ranges, at Devizes and the weird tunnel range somewhere out towards Radstock in a converted railway cutting under the Mendips. I recall someone shooting a “bullet-proof” vest with a black powder .36 caliber pistol there, to see what happened. It was ok, nobody was wearing it. Except it wouldn’t have been ok, because although on examination the ball hadn’t penetrated the vest, it set fire to it instead, and we had no way of measuring blunt-force trauma.
The Smith & Wesson Model 28
I shot all through university. When we weren’t doing .22 pistol shooting at our indoor range built in some old quarry scrape we used the Number Two range at the School of Infantry in Warminster, backstopped by the escarpment of Salisbury Plain. That was when I bought my first gun, a .357 Smith & Wesson Model 28. The frame was too big for my hand and more so with rubber Pachmyer grips on what was a heavy brute of a gun designed back in the 1950s for the American police market. I should have bought a six-inch Model 19, but I couldn’t wait. Mr State Trooper, please don’t stop me, as Bruce Springsteen sang.
Maybe you got a nice car. Maybe you got a pretty wife.
Well mister, all I got is attitude. And I had it all of my life.
Writing this the lyric ‘Pappa go to bed now, it’s getting late. Nothing we can say or do is gonna change anything now’ might be more apt, but as the Boss said. Number Two range was freezing cold, but not so Heytesbury Battle Range, up on top of the Plain where the Army used to let us play on their big boys range now and again if we’d been very good. There were trenches to jump over, electric pop-up targets, and buildings to clear and it was generally all good fun for a growing lad. I met the Special Boat Services guy who invented and luckily for him, patented the SPAS 12, which might have been manufactured by but I can guarantee certainly wasn’t developed by Franchi.
The S.P.A.S 12 I tested on Salisbury Plain.
He’d designed this combat 12-bore shotgun to shoot semi-automatically, meaning it would fire every time you pulled the trigger, re-loading itself, and if you pressed a button it worked as a pump-action, I think in case it jammed. It was a long time ago but I think he’d also tried making it fully automatic, so if you pulled the trigger it simply discharged every cartridge in it, but as there were only seven or eight there didn’t seem to be much point, and it was uncontrollable anyway unless you were built like King Kong, or at least like the chunky kinds of guys the SBS hired in those days.
After university I got a job through BUNAC, teaching kids to shoot on a summer camp in Wisconsin, bought a $200 twelve-year-old Chevrolet and a .22 AR7, and had the best summer of my entire life, thanks to a red-haired cheerleader, a lake, free ammunition, my shooting range and Hunter Thompson, who I tracked down to Woody Creek after driving 1,100 miles to get there. The AR7 didn’t last long, not through any fault of the gun, although it did have the fault of shooting high right and didn’t have adjustable sights. About two weeks after I bought it the police showed up at summer camp and told me I wasn’t allowed to have it because I wasn’t a US citizen. Without citizenship I could buy any kind of shotgun if I wanted, or anything that used black powder, maybe a nice .44 of the kind cowboys used to holster, but nothing using a modern smokeless powder cartridge, however tiny compared to a .44. I didn’t make the rules.
They had an odder rule in America anyway. Back in 1934 when Bonnie and Clyde roamed the land the National Firearms Act set a fee of $200 payable to the Bureau of Alcohol. Tobacco and Firearms if you were a citizen and wanted to buy a machine gun. Today that law, and weirdly, that fee, $200, still stands. Even more weird, in 1968 the US Supreme Court decided that that original NFA was unconstitutional. Not because it banned people from having machine guns unless they had a license. Oh dear me, no. If your idea of your inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness happens to include burning through ammunition at 800 rounds per minute then no American court is going to say that maybe that wasn’t quite what the Founding Fathers had in mind. No, ma’am.
The reason the Supreme Court effectively chucked out the 1934 Act was that if you had a machine gun in 1933, then the Act came in the next year and you thought, gosh darn it, I’d better register this shootin’ iron and stay legal, then you’d be incriminating yourself; by applying for the licence for the machine gun you had, you’d be saying in writing that you had a machine-gun, and that’s against the law, bud. Trying to stay legal and register your unregistered gun meant you were saying you possessed an unregistered gun, which you or I might say was, like some other parts of the Constitution, a fact we find to be self-evident. And that fact also violated the individual’s privilege from self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Get out of that, in the land of the free.
I drove across America un-armed anyway, and nothing ever happened to make that the wrong decision, wherever I went.
The AR7 I had to hand back.
And then London, and no decent ranges I could find and arsey London attitudes when I did track them down, and the dismal Stone range, a train ride and a twenty-minute walk away in darkest Kent. I stopped shooting then and didn’t really start again until I took up clay pigeon shooting when I’d moved out to the edge of the M25. All of that pretty much stopped as a regular thing with Dunblane. I didn’t much want to be associated with that, nor the sickening virtue-signaling of the Home Office Minister I wrote to, protesting the confiscation of legal firearms would do nothing whatsoever to stop gun crime. I wish I’d kept the letter he wrote and signed, saying m maybe not really, but the government “had to be seen to” be doing something. Or in code, The Sun won’t stand for it if we aren’t.
For a very long time, I thought that was that. There isn’t any shooting apart from clays and after I lost half a tooth exactly where my cheek met the stock of my rather nice Winchester skeet gun, the prospect of losing more of them somewhat paled. Until about this time last year, when I discovered not only that yes, there actually were still shooting ranges around, but you could join them, go through a monitored probation period, and after that, shoot pretty much any time you chose, at mine anyway. Which even more amazingly, was walking distance from where I live.
I bought myself an air-rifle about ten years ago when thanks to keeping chickens we were plagued with rats. Big rats. They eat chickens if you let them, which I had no intention of doing, and as my very old cat wasn’t stupid enough to take them on alone I had to give him a hand. I thought it was getting a bit too Country Living when I found myself sitting in the sun at six in the morning, wearing only a dressing gown and wellies, cradling a mug of tea and an air rifle, waiting for the rats to come for their breakfast.
Home on the range
For my birthday last year, I bought myself a better one, a rather beautiful Wierauch 97 with an unbelievable Czechoslovakian telescopic sight that does one thing well: it shoots exactly where you aim it, which if you know anything about shooting at all, you’ll know to be a fairly rare thing. Three weeks ago I managed to do the almost impossible, shooting a possible. In other words, if the bullet did actually cut the line on the target, which it looks as if it did, means 100 out of a possible 100.
My beloved partner likes to shoot some Sundays too and from a standing start, after just a couple of months regularly shoots in the high 90s and about half the time, better than I do. Her challenge is being consistent but then, that’s what shooting is about. Get the group small and in the same place and you can move it onto the bull using the adjustments on the sights; if you don’t shoot consistently then it doesn’t matter what you do, you’ll never get better. It’s about controlling yourself, your breathing, your posture, your relaxation, your mindfulness, I suppose now. All of that. And some of it’s about remembering a summer, with a lake, a shooting range, a flag and a cheerleader called Nancy-Jean.
As a name for a motorcycle it’s ok. It means timber wolf, in Spanish, but maybe that means Mexican. Oooops, I meant Microsoft Spanish, for whom Spanish means Old Spanish. Obviously in global internet land, Microsoft’s 14 year-old-in-Ohio sensibilities reign supreme. Which is a whole other story. And this one is about me. Like all my others, as yours are all about you and Charles Dickens’ were about him. And especially Martin Amis’s were all about him. God, were they about him. I don’t know if he ever had a motorcycle. Hunter Thompson definitely had several, but as he wrote himself, Mister Kurz, he dead.
Lobo was the name of the band that sang A Dog Named Boo, so long ago that I can’t even admit I know the tune. I heard it during my formative years, the ones still a-forming.
Like Arlo Guthrie on his motorcycle I don’t want to die. Despite drinking kettle de-scaler yesterday morning, calling NHS 111 and having a not-great day thinking I might actually die of this, which wasn’t helped by eating a whole packet of spicy beetroot. I love that stuff, except they really ought to put a reminder on the packet of what happens when you look in the toilet bowl, to tell you that you almost certainly will live more than another three days and if you don’t, it won’t be anything to do with beetroots, unless a beetroot lorry runs you over. The gist being that I’d quite like to stay alive for the foreseeable future.
So obviously, I bought myself a motorcycle for Christmas. Unlike the song, although I’ve got my motor running, first time every time, but hey, it’s a BMW. What did you expect? I’ve absolutely no wish to hit the highway because I know from past experience it bloody hurts. Thankfully, my off-bike excursions were few and decidedly minor, but I remember spending an afternoon in Gene Fleck’s Meadow Inn bar in Wisconsin with the road closed while an emergency crew searched against the clock to find someone’s foot. I’d seen him and his girl earlier in the day on a Harley, riding like an accident looking for somewhere to happen, which it duly did.
On which I have no intention of hitting the highway like a battering ram, nor like anything else.
I wasn’t prepared for the change. And no, that wasn’t why I got a motorcycle again. I did it because life is short. I did it because I wanted to smell the grass and the trees and the fields I passed through. I did it because I wanted to do it again before I did.
Where I began the process I laughingly call growing-up, there wasn’t any public transport to speak of. There were infrequent busses, taxis weren’t a thing for a sixteen or seventeen-year-old in a Wiltshire town and even if being chauffeured to places by my Mummy was an option the way it seems to be for kids today, I’d have died of self-loathing to ask. Probably. After I had the lift, obviously. All of which meant that at sixteen I did what was the fairly normal thing and bought a Yamaha FS1-E. It wasn’t just me. Look at the sales figures. Back then, you had a moped only as long as it took to get a motorcycle, which was your seventeenth birthday. Thanks to some bureaucratic insanity, or more likely in England, nobody could be bothered to check the sense of the rules, or read them properly, a seventeen-year-old could perfectly legally if predictably briefly stick a sidecar on a Kawasaki Z1, stick L-plates on it and set off for the obituary column of their local paper, when there were such things.
Not me, baby. I bought a Honda CB 175. I had an Army surplus shiny PVC button-up coat. It felt like, it looked like, it probably was something a dustman on a motorcycle would look like, as a friend of mine thoughtfully pointed out in case it was something I’d overlooked. It had to go, even though it didn’t very fast. I put it in the Wiltshire Times. Nobody even rang the phone number. I put the price up 30% the next week and got about 20 calls. I sold it to the first one who came to see it, even though he asked for a discount. Which he didn’t get. I didn’t bother to tell him about the 30% discount he could have had the week before.
Then it was probably my favourite bike, the Triumph T25, the kind of thing that now sells for over £4,000 any day of the week and which then you felt lucky if you could raise £200 on it. It was fun, and I learned some good lessons on it. One of them being that if you ignore that little triangular sign warning you there’s a junction ahead then you’ll go about three-quarters of the way across it before the twin-shoe Triumph brake stops you. Nothing came. Nothing did on back lanes around Tellisford in those days.
The Triumph got swapped for a Norton 500 that ran for two weeks out of the two years I had it. It sent me spinning down the road like a dead fly in Cardiff one black ice night, after I’d left the electric fire warmth of some girl’s flat (nothing doing there. Never was, with anybody), lost the bike out from under me at about 5 mph, came to a halt against a parked car and had some Welshman peer down at me to tell me “Duh, it’s icy mind.’ I left Wales as soon as I could and bought another Triumph, a real 1970s post-Easy rider identity crisis machine. It was a 650cc Tiger engine, shoehorned into a chrome-plated Norton Slimline frame. Instead of the rocker clip-ons you’d expect it had highish handlebars and cut-off exhausts. Just header pipes in fact, but with Volkswagen Beetle mufflers smacked into them in a Bath car-park, with Halford’s slash-cut trim bolted on the ends. I wasn’t a rocker, but I thought it rocked.
It took two weeks to get the petrol tank the way I wanted it, a deep, deep black you could lose your soul in, sprayed on then sanded, sprayed on then sanded, sprayed on then sanded about fifteen times in the kitchen of my definitively smelly Southampton student flat, the kind of place that gave Ian McEwan the idea for The Cement Garden, only a bit less appealing. On the first trip out on that gloriously glossy bike I rode up to Salisbury, escorted by a girlfriend whose parents purported to believe that she had her own spare room at my university halls of residence, the ones I’d left months before. We got to her parents’ newish house in the summer sunlight, said hello, put the bike in the driveway. Then decided we’d go to a local pub because a) Wiltshire b) nothing much else to do until her parents went out c) that’s what people did.
I started the bike but it didn’t fire first time, so I tickled the Amal carburettor and tried again. There was no air filter on the carb – there often wasn’t in those days – so when it backfired the spurt of flame came straight out into the open air and set light to the petrol that had trickled down the outside of the carb float bowl. I appreciate that these are words that younger readers won’t even recognise, but we had to. I had my leather jacket on, a full-face Cromwell ACU gold-rated helmet, and long leather gloves, so I just reached down nonchalantly to switch the fuel tap to Off. No petrol, no fry, as Bob Marley didn’t sing. Except I didn’t turn the petrol off. I managed to pull the rubber petrol feed line off instead. The flames came up to chest level.
My first thought was to run for it, but my second was that I’d just put three gallons in the tank and I seriously doubted I could run faster than that. All I could think of to do was reach into the flames and turn the petrol tap off, so that’s what I did. I couldn’t see past my elbow in the flames, but it worked or I wouldn’t be telling this story. The insulation on the electrics had burned off so the corn was fused on until I got out my trusty Buck knife (something else we took entirely as normal in the West Country) and cut what was left of the wires. My girlfriend’s mother saw the whole thing from the kitchen. She waited until the flames had gone out before she came out to tell me I’d dropped oil on her driveway.
There was a break after that, for university and unhappily London then Aylesbury and Bath until luck and an unusual skillset saw me in Chicago, on a 650 Yamaha that might or might not have been technically stolen, blasting around Lakeshore Drive and the blue lights area, under half the city, overlooking some huge American river, me and an Italian buddy from summer camp on his bike, living if not the dream then certainly some kind of alternative reality. To this day I don’t know why I did that. No insurance, no clear provenance to the bike, certainly no observance of the speed limits, and only my trusty grey cardboard AA international driving licence that didn’t mention motorcycles. But nothing happened. Back then that was all that mattered.
A gap of some years and then a BMW R1000, a bike that vibrated so much that a trip from London to Wiltshire left me literally unable to make a sentence for about fifteen minutes. It felt good though, that lumpy, dumpy, so-solid bike. I traded that one for a Harley-Davidson Sportster which is what I thought was the ultimate motorcycle ought to be before I found out that I needed to spend £200 a month pretty much every month to get it the way it ought to have left the factory before their accountants had a say in the recommended retail price. It got stolen, we recovered it and instead of putting it back in showroom metal flake purple turned it jet black, bored it out to 1200, and put Brembo four-pot brakes and a fuel-injector on it before it transmogrified into a laptop and a laser printer, when laser printers were a long way from the couple of hundred a good one is now.
And somehow that was 30 years ago. This time the iron horse is a BMW F650, almost as old as when I stopped riding for a while, but with a documented 13,000 miles on it. My idea of common sense says changing the oil and the filter and swapping out the original brake lines and replacing them with stainless steel would first of all look cool but possibly more importantly, be quite a sensible way of not relying on thirty year old rubber. I mean, would you? On any Saturday night?
In the intervening coughty years I’ve either sold or given away my original Schott jacket, the gloves, the Rukka, the Ashman Metropolitan Police long boots and the Belstaff scrambler boots. The Cromwell helmet and the Bell 500 open-face are long gone. I need everything, from the toes upwards and I find that most of the names I grew up with such as Ashman or Cromwell just don’t exist any more. I bought another Bell, but a full-face ACU gold Sharp 5-rated lid this time. I got some gloves, some chain lube and a tube of Solvol Autosol to keep the chrome shiny. I found some leather jeans and my old not-Schott jacket that I bought in Spain and after only three applications of neatsfoot oil and old-fashioned dubbin and hanging it over a radiator it’s now soft enough to be wearable and looks, I think, pretty darned good, even if it doesn’t have a single CE rating to its name. I’ve skipped the red Hermetite that used to decorate every pseudo-serious biker’s jeans.
Of the kids I knew that got in Bad Trouble on a bike, one was drunk and showing off. He died. My cousin lost his job and an inch off one leg when he was swiped by a car that ignored him on a roundabout. One in Wiltshire rode his bike under a combine harvester. He died too. It wasn’t really funny and I try not to think of him looking like SpongeBob SquarePants, with his arms and legs sticking out of the straw. He’d had a twenty-year break from bikes and had just picked up an early retirement pension pay-off. He didn’t read the T&Cs that said you still can’t ride like an arse. The American guy I didn’t ride around Chicago with lost his foot and they didn’t find it in time to put it back on. For all I know it’s still in a field in Wisconsin.
CE-rated armour wouldn’t have helped a single one of them. I’m certainly not saying safety gear isn’t worth the effort, or I wouldn’t have specced out my new helmet so carefully. But motorcycles aren’t the safest thing. You have to watch your sides, your front and what’s underneath you, as well as your back.
