![\"\"](\"https:\/\/writer-insighter.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/IMG_3957-scaled.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wasn\u2019t prepared for the change. And no, that wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Where I began the process I laughingly call growing-up, there wasn\u2019t any public transport to speak of. There were infrequent busses, taxis weren\u2019t 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\u2019d 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019d overlooked. It had to go, even though it didn\u2019t 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\u2019t get. I didn\u2019t bother to tell him about the 30% discount he could have had the week before.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then it was probably my favourite bike, the Triumph T25, the kind of thing that now sells for over \u00a34,000 any day of the week and which then you felt lucky if you could raise \u00a3200 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\u2019s a junction ahead then you\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019d left the electric fire warmth of some girl\u2019s 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 \u201cDuh, it\u2019s icy mind.\u2019 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\u2019d 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\u2019s slash-cut trim bolted on the ends. I wasn\u2019t a rocker, but I thought it rocked.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019d left months before. We got to her parents\u2019 newish house in the summer sunlight, said hello, put the bike in the driveway. Then decided we\u2019d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I started the bike but it didn\u2019t fire first time, so I tickled the Amal carburettor and tried again. There was no air filter on the carb – there often wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t even recognise, but we had to. \u00a0 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\u2019t turn the petrol off. I managed to pull the rubber petrol feed line off instead. The flames came up to chest level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My first thought was to run for it, but my second was that I\u2019d 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\u2019s what I did. I couldn\u2019t see past my elbow in the flames, but it worked or I wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s mother saw the whole thing from the kitchen. She waited until the flames had gone out before she came out to tell me I\u2019d dropped oil on her driveway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019t mention motorcycles. But nothing happened. Back then that was all that mattered.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u00a3200 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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? \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the intervening coughty years I\u2019ve 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\u2019s now soft enough to be wearable and looks, I think, pretty darned good, even if it doesn\u2019t have a single CE rating to its name.\u00a0I’ve skipped the red Hermetite that used to decorate every pseudo-serious biker’s jeans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019d had a twenty-year break from bikes and had just picked up an early retirement pension pay-off. He didn\u2019t read the T&Cs that said you still can\u2019t ride like an arse. The American guy I didn\u2019t ride around Chicago with lost his foot and they didn\u2019t find it in time to put it back on. For all I know it\u2019s still in a field in Wisconsin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CE-rated armour wouldn\u2019t have helped a single one of them. I\u2019m certainly not saying safety gear isn\u2019t worth the effort, or I wouldn\u2019t have specced out my new helmet so carefully. But motorcycles aren\u2019t the safest thing. You have to watch your sides, your front and what\u2019s underneath you, as well as your back. <\/p>\n