Sense and Insensibility

Categories: Diary

Decision made. Buy a motorcycle. But what motorcycle? New or second-hand? Get something smaller until I get back in the groove, then trade up? Or dive straight in, somewhere along the spectrum from utility to insanity?

If you've done this, you've been here. First, the logical bit: Asked yourself the questions, What will I use it for? What can I afford to spend? What can I afford on running costs? You'll have scoured the press, read huge numbers of road tests, shorlisted, re-shortlisted, hung around showrooms, analysing to the nth degree exactly what you needed. And then, I hope, ignored it.

That's the important bit – ignoring the rational analysis. There's but a single question to ask yourself: Why? Why am I really buying a motorcycle?

That's the only one you need answer – once that's sorted, everything else just follows.

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A Family Thing…

Categories: Diary

Motorcycles are a family thing – my father competed at everything: road racing, sand racing, trials and scrambling. He also commuted to work. All on the same machine. He only sold it when I became toobig to strap to the petrol tank. At least I've still got more hair than I had then.

My mother, meanwhile, was terrorising the good citizens of North Shields as Hell's District Nurse on her New Imperial. Note the advanced safety equipment – three inches of solid hair lacquer. She's also been around the Isle of Man as a racing sidecar passenger – definitely a sign of being two pushrods short of a rocker.

Sand racing, Royal Enfield Bullet 350, Whitley Bay, circa. 1954. Note everyone else heading in the opposite direction. It's a family thing.

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The Decision

Categories: Diary

I blame my partner. Then again, I usually do. This time however, I claim, it's with good cause. Over Christmas, I'd been clearing my study out and the detritus was accumulating as a large pile of incipient compost in the hall. I hadn't really paid too much attention to its contents, being immersed somewhere about the Lower Cretaceous of my desk. It's was Jane's passing comment as she climbed over the heap that did it – ââ?¬Å?If you'd taken the money you'd spent on motorcycle mags over the last couple of years, you could have bought the bike of your choice and kept it in the garage, rather than just creating heaps of crap in the house!ââ?¬Â� Sub-text: ââ?¬Å?What sort of sad bastard are you?ââ?¬Â�

Good point. I'd sold my last Ducati for the usual reasons – car and mortgage, always, of course, with the intention of getting another bike just as soon as I could. That was 14 years ago… Besides, it was a rhetorical question – she knows exactly the sort of sad bastard I am.

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