I may be way off base with that, but the guys who have seen it all seem to agree that there is no obvious mechanical cause, the ignition/injection systems are the next suspects.
Hang in there, Man. We're pullin' for ya.
SV-Wolf's Bike Blog
-
sv-wolf
- Site Supporter - Platinum
- Posts: 2278
- Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2003 2:06 am
- Real Name: Richard
- Sex: Male
- Years Riding: 12
- My Motorcycle: Honda Fireblade, 2004: Suzuki DR650, 201
- Location: Hertfordshire, UK
Friday 9th December 2005
dodo, it’s cold. And not just outside the house. The temperature in my living room has dropped to 8 degrees F. That’s because where my kitchen and bathroom once stood, there’s now just a gaping hole. And round the ragged brickwork edges of the hole, the frost is glistening.
We’ve got the builders in. In the last two weeks, they’ve pulled down part of my house. If I’m lucky, they will rebuild it before the next millennium, giving Di more space to move around in her wheelchair. This is all potentially good news except for one small item. The new kitchen is larger than the old one and will take up most of my bike parking space in the back garden. But I’ll think about that when I need to. For the moment I’m keeping the SV on an area of hard standing at the back of Toby’s house. Toby is my next-door neighbour. He’s a biker too – so he understands.
And as I sit here in the cold, with my work laptop perched on my knee, I’m thinking of Di, comfortably asleep in the cosy, centrally heated studio flat we are renting for her directly opposite the house. The flat has only one main bed-sitting room, so when we have a carer in to look after her during the night, I spend my time here – in my half-a-house.
When I’m not asleep on my bed, cocooned in my ‘Arctic’ sleeping bag, I sit in my front living room - the only inhabitable downstairs room - and shift about from chair to chair to avoid the worst of the icy blasts. I also try to ignore the dried up feeling that comes from contact with the brick dust (all that remains of my back wall), and which now covers everything and will not go away, no matter how often I wash things down. I think, at last, I am beginning to understand entropy.
The central heating does its best to raise the temperature of my front room a degree or two. And normally, if I sit up against a radiator, I can just about maintain some sense of comfort. But half an hour ago the batteries went dead in the radio-linked thermostatic control box causing the system to shut down. Like everything else in my house, the spare batteries are packed away somewhere in crates and I have no idea where to find them. So, I’ve resorted to sitting here in my front room wearing all my winter bike gear from base layer to padded jacket and lined boots. Ho Hum!
You could say I’m feeling kind of uncertain about my ability to cope with the plunging temperatures. It’s widely predicted that this winter will be one of the coldest for decades. And already, as the last of the year’s available warmth drains away, my body and mind are becoming slowly immobilised. I think I’m turning into a reptile.
It is affecting my attitude to riding as well. Usually, I’m prepared to ride in all weathers (well, almost all), but somehow this year I can’t raise the usual enthusiasm for ‘just getting out on the bike.’ Yep, I enjoy it when I get on out, but it’s not as easy to motivate myself as it once was. Stress and tiredness always make me feel the cold more and they send me quickly into reptile mode. Hell, I’m skinny enough, and need plenty of layers to keep me warm even in a normal winter.
Perhaps the most irritating thing about winter time is not the cold (after all, you can wrap up against it) but all the extra work it brings – like having to wash the salt off the SV when I get home from work every night. I’m a lazy bugger and like to have an easy life, free from too many physical exertions – unless they are interesting ones. I struggle with regular jobs like cleaning down the bike. This winter I keep ‘forgetting’ to do it - which is not good for the SV's longevity. In my mind's eye, I can see it rusting away - even as I write. But I’m being hard on myself here. When do I have time for things like that these days.
There are alternatives, of course. For a while I was seriously thinking about ignoring my financial situation and buying a winter hack. Two years ago, before I bought the SV 650, I thought about a GS550. It’s a good, solid, beast and might do me now. You can pick up a second-hand one for about £1800. But the downside is that the finish is poor and they need a lot of looking after. Not the most attractive of prospects, at present. I need something that will look after itself. And it’s easy to pick up a bummer, as so many of them have been thrashed to death by couriers (especially round here, so close to London).
I've started thinking (secretly) about a EX500. (Haven't told Di yet.) Great little bike. It would be fun for the winter. A mate of mine let me have a few rides on his last year and I really enjoyed it.
On the other hand (so my thinking goes), I’ve never owned a IL four and I’d like to get to know how one handles. It is all possible. I could sell ‘Sonny’, my Hyosung Comet 125, and buy a hack - if I could find the time to do it. And that's the problem: finding the time. 'Finding the time and the energy' has become a kind of refrain to my life these days.
Oh God! That reminds me, I’ve not brought the SV round to the back of Toby’s house yet. It’s still out on the street – and my insurance doesn’t cover me if I leave the bike in a public place overnight. Anyway, that’s not the point, is it? Lose my bike? Doesn’t bear thinking about! It would be like losing a limb. I just wouldn’t feel the same about myself.
OK. All my anxieties are now being pricked. I suddenly have this image of an ugly-looking crew with beer guts and a large van, cruising the nearby streets looking for two-wheeled hardware to nick. But, hell, I’ve got to keep this in proportion! Getting my bike stolen is not very likely round here – there are too many villains living in this part of town, and they don’t like to do business on their own turf.
Still, it’s Friday night and there’ll be a lot of arseholes about when the pubs close. I don’t want my bike scratched, smashed or pushed over. Last week, some drunken idiot with a chip on his shoulder walked down the street smashing the wing mirrors on about a dozen cars (including Di’s). So, here’s a hint to myself: I’m not actually turning into a reptile: That means I’m capable, even in low temperatures, of getting my butt up off this chair, and going out into the night, to see to my bike. OK? (Do me a favour, someone: if this post ends here abruptly, call out the rescue services and tell them to bring a warm blanket.)
……………………………………………..
Now that the bike is stowed safely off the road , the OTHER recurrent thought has popped into my mind. Parking the SV in Toby’s back garden might just be the worst thing I could do. The path between my bike and his shed is narrow and he’s letting our builders use it for wheelbarrow loads of concrete and bricks (He’s a good bloke, Toby). It will only take one cheerful, happy-go-lucky builder and a barrow of cement to do a load of damage to the new pipes. Apart from that, there’s enough builders’ mud and other slime on the paving back there to make me drop half a dozen bikes. Hell, owning a motorcycle can make you feel paranoid – especially when you’re in an advanced state of temperature-and sleeplessness-induced self-pity.
Toby likes to watch me manoeuvring the bike in and out of my garden, which, because of all the obstacles, and the narrowness of the space, takes dexterity and patience. He also likes to tell me, on a regular basis, that one day I’m going to drop it. Each time he tells me, the look of dismay on his face increases. I suspect that is because, although I haven’t dropped a bike in our back gardens yet, he has. As I said, he’s a good bloke. Honest, and human. You always know what he is thinking. He can’t help it showing in his face.
But the more I consider the matter, the more I think he has a point. I’m beginning to wonder if the reason I’ve managed to keep the bike shiny side up so far is because I’m trained as a shiatsu practitioner. Shiatsu is all about balance and centreing. I’m supposed to do daily exercises to develop stability and focus (not that I do – at least, not as much as I should). Without those qualities you can’t treat patients properly or move them comfortably around on the mat. A bike is not very different from a body – except that there aren’t all those awkward arms and legs to think about. It’s heavier, of course, but the principles are just the same.
And it also helps me get Di safely around the house. She is no longer able to walk on her own and I want to put off using a hoist for as long as I can. Hoists are horrible things – small mobile cranes, in effect, for lifting people and moving them around the room and into and out of bed.
Mind you, when we had the guy from the National Health Service come to demonstrate one to us, Di ended up swinging around in it, giggling for all she was worth and saying. ‘I want one, I want one.’ The NHS guy was pretty upset and kept muttering that his demonstrations didn’t usually go like that.
That’s my Di!
dodo, it’s cold. And not just outside the house. The temperature in my living room has dropped to 8 degrees F. That’s because where my kitchen and bathroom once stood, there’s now just a gaping hole. And round the ragged brickwork edges of the hole, the frost is glistening.
We’ve got the builders in. In the last two weeks, they’ve pulled down part of my house. If I’m lucky, they will rebuild it before the next millennium, giving Di more space to move around in her wheelchair. This is all potentially good news except for one small item. The new kitchen is larger than the old one and will take up most of my bike parking space in the back garden. But I’ll think about that when I need to. For the moment I’m keeping the SV on an area of hard standing at the back of Toby’s house. Toby is my next-door neighbour. He’s a biker too – so he understands.
And as I sit here in the cold, with my work laptop perched on my knee, I’m thinking of Di, comfortably asleep in the cosy, centrally heated studio flat we are renting for her directly opposite the house. The flat has only one main bed-sitting room, so when we have a carer in to look after her during the night, I spend my time here – in my half-a-house.
When I’m not asleep on my bed, cocooned in my ‘Arctic’ sleeping bag, I sit in my front living room - the only inhabitable downstairs room - and shift about from chair to chair to avoid the worst of the icy blasts. I also try to ignore the dried up feeling that comes from contact with the brick dust (all that remains of my back wall), and which now covers everything and will not go away, no matter how often I wash things down. I think, at last, I am beginning to understand entropy.
The central heating does its best to raise the temperature of my front room a degree or two. And normally, if I sit up against a radiator, I can just about maintain some sense of comfort. But half an hour ago the batteries went dead in the radio-linked thermostatic control box causing the system to shut down. Like everything else in my house, the spare batteries are packed away somewhere in crates and I have no idea where to find them. So, I’ve resorted to sitting here in my front room wearing all my winter bike gear from base layer to padded jacket and lined boots. Ho Hum!
You could say I’m feeling kind of uncertain about my ability to cope with the plunging temperatures. It’s widely predicted that this winter will be one of the coldest for decades. And already, as the last of the year’s available warmth drains away, my body and mind are becoming slowly immobilised. I think I’m turning into a reptile.
It is affecting my attitude to riding as well. Usually, I’m prepared to ride in all weathers (well, almost all), but somehow this year I can’t raise the usual enthusiasm for ‘just getting out on the bike.’ Yep, I enjoy it when I get on out, but it’s not as easy to motivate myself as it once was. Stress and tiredness always make me feel the cold more and they send me quickly into reptile mode. Hell, I’m skinny enough, and need plenty of layers to keep me warm even in a normal winter.
Perhaps the most irritating thing about winter time is not the cold (after all, you can wrap up against it) but all the extra work it brings – like having to wash the salt off the SV when I get home from work every night. I’m a lazy bugger and like to have an easy life, free from too many physical exertions – unless they are interesting ones. I struggle with regular jobs like cleaning down the bike. This winter I keep ‘forgetting’ to do it - which is not good for the SV's longevity. In my mind's eye, I can see it rusting away - even as I write. But I’m being hard on myself here. When do I have time for things like that these days.
There are alternatives, of course. For a while I was seriously thinking about ignoring my financial situation and buying a winter hack. Two years ago, before I bought the SV 650, I thought about a GS550. It’s a good, solid, beast and might do me now. You can pick up a second-hand one for about £1800. But the downside is that the finish is poor and they need a lot of looking after. Not the most attractive of prospects, at present. I need something that will look after itself. And it’s easy to pick up a bummer, as so many of them have been thrashed to death by couriers (especially round here, so close to London).
I've started thinking (secretly) about a EX500. (Haven't told Di yet.) Great little bike. It would be fun for the winter. A mate of mine let me have a few rides on his last year and I really enjoyed it.
On the other hand (so my thinking goes), I’ve never owned a IL four and I’d like to get to know how one handles. It is all possible. I could sell ‘Sonny’, my Hyosung Comet 125, and buy a hack - if I could find the time to do it. And that's the problem: finding the time. 'Finding the time and the energy' has become a kind of refrain to my life these days.
Oh God! That reminds me, I’ve not brought the SV round to the back of Toby’s house yet. It’s still out on the street – and my insurance doesn’t cover me if I leave the bike in a public place overnight. Anyway, that’s not the point, is it? Lose my bike? Doesn’t bear thinking about! It would be like losing a limb. I just wouldn’t feel the same about myself.
OK. All my anxieties are now being pricked. I suddenly have this image of an ugly-looking crew with beer guts and a large van, cruising the nearby streets looking for two-wheeled hardware to nick. But, hell, I’ve got to keep this in proportion! Getting my bike stolen is not very likely round here – there are too many villains living in this part of town, and they don’t like to do business on their own turf.
Still, it’s Friday night and there’ll be a lot of arseholes about when the pubs close. I don’t want my bike scratched, smashed or pushed over. Last week, some drunken idiot with a chip on his shoulder walked down the street smashing the wing mirrors on about a dozen cars (including Di’s). So, here’s a hint to myself: I’m not actually turning into a reptile: That means I’m capable, even in low temperatures, of getting my butt up off this chair, and going out into the night, to see to my bike. OK? (Do me a favour, someone: if this post ends here abruptly, call out the rescue services and tell them to bring a warm blanket.)
……………………………………………..
Now that the bike is stowed safely off the road , the OTHER recurrent thought has popped into my mind. Parking the SV in Toby’s back garden might just be the worst thing I could do. The path between my bike and his shed is narrow and he’s letting our builders use it for wheelbarrow loads of concrete and bricks (He’s a good bloke, Toby). It will only take one cheerful, happy-go-lucky builder and a barrow of cement to do a load of damage to the new pipes. Apart from that, there’s enough builders’ mud and other slime on the paving back there to make me drop half a dozen bikes. Hell, owning a motorcycle can make you feel paranoid – especially when you’re in an advanced state of temperature-and sleeplessness-induced self-pity.
Toby likes to watch me manoeuvring the bike in and out of my garden, which, because of all the obstacles, and the narrowness of the space, takes dexterity and patience. He also likes to tell me, on a regular basis, that one day I’m going to drop it. Each time he tells me, the look of dismay on his face increases. I suspect that is because, although I haven’t dropped a bike in our back gardens yet, he has. As I said, he’s a good bloke. Honest, and human. You always know what he is thinking. He can’t help it showing in his face.
But the more I consider the matter, the more I think he has a point. I’m beginning to wonder if the reason I’ve managed to keep the bike shiny side up so far is because I’m trained as a shiatsu practitioner. Shiatsu is all about balance and centreing. I’m supposed to do daily exercises to develop stability and focus (not that I do – at least, not as much as I should). Without those qualities you can’t treat patients properly or move them comfortably around on the mat. A bike is not very different from a body – except that there aren’t all those awkward arms and legs to think about. It’s heavier, of course, but the principles are just the same.
And it also helps me get Di safely around the house. She is no longer able to walk on her own and I want to put off using a hoist for as long as I can. Hoists are horrible things – small mobile cranes, in effect, for lifting people and moving them around the room and into and out of bed.
Mind you, when we had the guy from the National Health Service come to demonstrate one to us, Di ended up swinging around in it, giggling for all she was worth and saying. ‘I want one, I want one.’ The NHS guy was pretty upset and kept muttering that his demonstrations didn’t usually go like that.
That’s my Di!
Hud
“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
SV-Wolf's Bike Blog
“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
SV-Wolf's Bike Blog
-
blues2cruise
- Moderator
- Posts: 10182
- Joined: Fri Apr 22, 2005 4:28 pm
- Sex: Female
- Years Riding: 16
- My Motorcycle: 2000 Yamaha V-Star 1100
- Location: Vancouver, British Columbia
-
sv-wolf
- Site Supporter - Platinum
- Posts: 2278
- Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2003 2:06 am
- Real Name: Richard
- Sex: Male
- Years Riding: 12
- My Motorcycle: Honda Fireblade, 2004: Suzuki DR650, 201
- Location: Hertfordshire, UK
Thanks Blues, but I do not value my life so lightly. Di doesn't want to come over to see the house till it is completely finished, but friends do, and they would tell her.
Come to think of it though, you may have a serious point. The new doors that are being put in are wide enough for wheelchair access... and we now have ramps...
I could try persuading her.
Nah!
Before she retired she was a psychotherapist. I've learnt in twenty years of living together that there is a golden rule in life - never tangle with a psychotherapist. She can still run rings around me when she wants to.
Bikes and Di are like oil and water - they just don't mix.
She only tolerates them because they make me happy. So, I guess I can't complain about that.
Come to think of it though, you may have a serious point. The new doors that are being put in are wide enough for wheelchair access... and we now have ramps...
I could try persuading her.
Nah!
Before she retired she was a psychotherapist. I've learnt in twenty years of living together that there is a golden rule in life - never tangle with a psychotherapist. She can still run rings around me when she wants to.
Bikes and Di are like oil and water - they just don't mix.
She only tolerates them because they make me happy. So, I guess I can't complain about that.
Hud
“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
SV-Wolf's Bike Blog
“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
SV-Wolf's Bike Blog
-
sv-wolf
- Site Supporter - Platinum
- Posts: 2278
- Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2003 2:06 am
- Real Name: Richard
- Sex: Male
- Years Riding: 12
- My Motorcycle: Honda Fireblade, 2004: Suzuki DR650, 201
- Location: Hertfordshire, UK
Sunday 18 December 2005
I’ve had several near misses recently.
Eight weeks ago, when the weather was still pretty decent, I led a club rideout. It’s the first time I’ve been asked to do that, and I was pretty nervous about it. There are some very good riders in the club, a lot faster and more experienced than I am. There are also several nutters who IMHO are a lot crazier than I am. So, I expected there to be plenty of people who would get bored very quickly with my style of riding. I kept telling myself just to ride my own ride and forget about any pressure I felt to deliver other people’s goods, but my insecurities were peaking that morning and during the ride I kept catching myself trying to perform. Bad deal! It left me fairly primed to do something stupid.
I decided early on, to plot a route using B roads. That was also a bit of a risk as many of the guys like to thrash their machines and are not so keen on back-road riding. But I am, and I know the local B roads like the back of my hand. So I reckoned familiarity would lend me confidence and give me a bit of an advantage (Ironic how we deceive ourselves. I have this view of myself as non-competitive). I was watching out particularly to see how Bill would react when I told the group I was going to take them through the villages. Judging by the look on his face, I guessed I was going to have a tough time of it. Still, it was too late to make any changes.
As far as I was concerned, the route I’d planned would take us along some brilliant biking roads. Several of them regularly get into those ‘Fifty Best Biking Roads in Britain’ features that motorcycle magazines run when they can’t think of anything else to fill their pages with. The route was a mixture of narrow twisties, and fast straights strung out between some very attractive villages.
Whether it was the result of peer pressure, or familiarity with the roads or the fact that I always ride better when I’m not following someone else, I can’t say, but that morning and afternoon I stayed way out in front while many of the others fell behind and I had to keep slowing down to let them catch up. My ego was lapping that up, but that just put me under further pressure to keep it up, and I started riding carelessly, intent at all costs, to keep up my speed.
In one of the villages, about halfway through the ride on the one short stretch that I didn’t know so well. I took a 90 degree corner at about 25 mph on a narrow road. There was no issue about getting round at a speed like that, but sightlines on the corner were completely obscured by the frontage of a house. I just wasn’t thinking ahead. As I came round the corner I saw that some melon had parked his car right on the bend on my side of the road. Worse still, there was another car coming the other way. So the road was completely blocked.
It was close – very close. I managed to come to a halt without hitting anything by squeezing my front wheel between the two vehicles just as the oncoming vehicle stopped . Stupid or what! I heard Wayne, coming up behind me, whistle under his helmet.
Two weeks later I had an even narrower escape. The club was on a long rideout to Matlock in Derbyshire - home of many a nasty bike accident. It was entirely my fault – just lack of concentration and bad planning. You know that thing, as soon as you start to feel complacent, something is bound to go wrong? I was in the process of congratulating myself on how well I had been riding all that afternoon when I suddenly realised I was going too fast into yet another right-angled bend. I braked, went into a slight rear-wheel skid and froze on the lever.
Some local farmer had very thoughtfully laid down a gravel track straight ahead and hadn't bothered to put a gate across it. Lucky me! Otherwise, I might just have ended up as one more dirty mark on the side of a Derbyshire dry stone wall. I keep trying to think about that. I ran the bike down the track for about twenty yards, braking lightly on the gravel and came to a shambolic stop. I was fine, not even feeling shaken up all that much. And the bike was upright and intact.
Not so Dave and Theresa, who pulled up on the road just beyond the corner to see if I was all right. Dave’s sidestand sprang back as he leant his Triumph over, and down she went. Theresa was thrown off the back. Neither of them was hurt, but Theresa was rattled by the experience. Dave got his bike up again straight away to discover it had a smashed indicator and a few scuffs on its fairing, but other than that there was no damage. Apart from being temporarily very red faced (literally – the colour of beetroot) about the drop, he was very sanguine about it. I, on the other hand, felt really, really guilty.
For the rest of the day, I kept wondering day what would have happened if there had been no escape route for me. What would I have done? I guess I would have forced myself to let go of the brake, blipped the throttle and leaned hard into the corner. Would I have got round? I think, in all probability, I would. In reality, I wasn’t going impossibly fast. My problem had been psycological, a sudden panic, a moment’s mistrust of the bike and of my own capabilities, and a freezing on the brake lever. Would I have been able to overcome the panic? Again, I think the answer is, yes. I do this freezing thing from time to time. I think it is my most dangerous habit on a bike. However, when it happens I can usually wrench myself away from my fear and act rationally. Which is reassuring.
Although I got back on the bike straight away and without, apparently, feeling upset by the event, I must have internalised the shock. I became very absent minded for the rest of the ride. I left my rucksack in a hotel in Bakewell where we went for tea and didn't realise till we were nearly home. I usually need to be stressed to do something like that. There was about £250 worth of bike gear in it (waterproofs etc) and both my reading glasses, so I had to return two days later to pick them all up. It’s a distance of about 200 miles from my home.
(As we left the carprark in Bakewell a traffic policeman approached us and warned us that we should not try to go home via the A6 as there had been a serious traffic accident on it and there were long delays. Just as we were beginning to think it was decent of him to tell us (Derbyshire police are notoriously anti-biker) he put his face into Bill’s and said, ‘It was one of your lot that did it' he repeated his comments several times, stressing ‘One of your lot’ on each occasion and screwing up his face as though he was trying to drill his prejudicial hatred of all bikers into us. I wonder, if it had been a car driver who had caused the accident, he would have told a departing motorist, ‘It was one of your lot’. Somehow I doubt it. Bikers are just clones, of course.)
My third nasty moment came about in my home town. One Wednesday afternoon I had another encounter with a little kamikaze Asian lady. She can be no more than four foot six high and she sits behind the wheel of a large Volvo causing major havoc and mayhem wherever she goes. I’ve seen her twice before in town and her driving is always the same. She travels everywhere at about 12 mph (in a clear 30mph zone). She changes her road position rapidly, unexpectedly and (of course) never indicates. She drives alone and without L plates, but if she has passed her test then I’m a monkey’s uncle.
On this our most recent meeting I got stuck behind her for about five minutes in two very tightly packed lines of traffic in the centre of town. Within that time she performed at least three highly hazardous manoeuvres, one of which nearly had me off my bike. As the queue snaked ahead, she turned into a short filter lane to the right, apparently preparing to make a turn. I picked up a little speed to pass her as quickly as I could, when she changed her mind, and without looking, swerved back into my lane. She nearly sideswiped me good and proper. Very fortunately, a car just behind me in the lane to my left was having trouble getting into gear. This left me a gap in the adjacent line of traffic and I swerved into it. I got off my bike and gave her a piece of my mind, which is something I rarely do. She pretended not to notice me and just stared ahead. But she definitely DID hear me. I think most of the town must have heard.
My final nasty moment came one night several weeks ago while I was on my way to a Monday meeting of the bike club at a pub in the nearby village of Stotfold. It was misty as I set out from home, but as soon as I got out of town I ran into a bank of fog so thick you could cut it with a knife. On the way to Stotfold the road dips down into a deep, steep-sided valley and runs under the arches of a tall railway viaduct. By the time I’d reached the valley floor under the arches, visibility had reduced to zero and the road below me had very noticeably turned to ice. My main thought was to turn round and go back home as soon as possible. Turning might have been dangerous in these conditions, but I knew there was a farm track just ahead with a good metalled surface at the entrance where I could pull in and check the road carefully before turning. (if I could identify it in all this murk, that is).
The trouble was, I had this total arsehole sitting right on my tail. I sounded my horn to no effect. I tried slowing down a couple of times to indicate to him that, ‘Hey, don’t you think it would be better to stay back a little in these conditions’, but whether he just couldn’t judge distances, or was a complete fruitcake, he just kept coming. The second time he bumped my rear wheel (just lightly, but enough to make me wonder if my affairs were in order). That seemed to panic him and he lay off a little, but only a little. At least, I thought, he wasn’t purposefully bent on homicide. I have no idea what goes on in the minds of people like that. He panicked me too, and I had to focus hard to keep calm. He stayed right behind me up the hill on the far side of the dip before turning into a hotel carpark at the top. I was too freaked to go after him and just turned off onto a side road so that I could make my way back home by another route.
Well, I reckon, things like that are enough to make you want to put your bike away and take up knitting. Or they would be if we were rational about them. Fortunately, rationality doesn’t have much of a grin factor attached to it.
So, Happy riding.
I’ve had several near misses recently.
Eight weeks ago, when the weather was still pretty decent, I led a club rideout. It’s the first time I’ve been asked to do that, and I was pretty nervous about it. There are some very good riders in the club, a lot faster and more experienced than I am. There are also several nutters who IMHO are a lot crazier than I am. So, I expected there to be plenty of people who would get bored very quickly with my style of riding. I kept telling myself just to ride my own ride and forget about any pressure I felt to deliver other people’s goods, but my insecurities were peaking that morning and during the ride I kept catching myself trying to perform. Bad deal! It left me fairly primed to do something stupid.
I decided early on, to plot a route using B roads. That was also a bit of a risk as many of the guys like to thrash their machines and are not so keen on back-road riding. But I am, and I know the local B roads like the back of my hand. So I reckoned familiarity would lend me confidence and give me a bit of an advantage (Ironic how we deceive ourselves. I have this view of myself as non-competitive). I was watching out particularly to see how Bill would react when I told the group I was going to take them through the villages. Judging by the look on his face, I guessed I was going to have a tough time of it. Still, it was too late to make any changes.
As far as I was concerned, the route I’d planned would take us along some brilliant biking roads. Several of them regularly get into those ‘Fifty Best Biking Roads in Britain’ features that motorcycle magazines run when they can’t think of anything else to fill their pages with. The route was a mixture of narrow twisties, and fast straights strung out between some very attractive villages.
Whether it was the result of peer pressure, or familiarity with the roads or the fact that I always ride better when I’m not following someone else, I can’t say, but that morning and afternoon I stayed way out in front while many of the others fell behind and I had to keep slowing down to let them catch up. My ego was lapping that up, but that just put me under further pressure to keep it up, and I started riding carelessly, intent at all costs, to keep up my speed.
In one of the villages, about halfway through the ride on the one short stretch that I didn’t know so well. I took a 90 degree corner at about 25 mph on a narrow road. There was no issue about getting round at a speed like that, but sightlines on the corner were completely obscured by the frontage of a house. I just wasn’t thinking ahead. As I came round the corner I saw that some melon had parked his car right on the bend on my side of the road. Worse still, there was another car coming the other way. So the road was completely blocked.
It was close – very close. I managed to come to a halt without hitting anything by squeezing my front wheel between the two vehicles just as the oncoming vehicle stopped . Stupid or what! I heard Wayne, coming up behind me, whistle under his helmet.
Two weeks later I had an even narrower escape. The club was on a long rideout to Matlock in Derbyshire - home of many a nasty bike accident. It was entirely my fault – just lack of concentration and bad planning. You know that thing, as soon as you start to feel complacent, something is bound to go wrong? I was in the process of congratulating myself on how well I had been riding all that afternoon when I suddenly realised I was going too fast into yet another right-angled bend. I braked, went into a slight rear-wheel skid and froze on the lever.
Some local farmer had very thoughtfully laid down a gravel track straight ahead and hadn't bothered to put a gate across it. Lucky me! Otherwise, I might just have ended up as one more dirty mark on the side of a Derbyshire dry stone wall. I keep trying to think about that. I ran the bike down the track for about twenty yards, braking lightly on the gravel and came to a shambolic stop. I was fine, not even feeling shaken up all that much. And the bike was upright and intact.
Not so Dave and Theresa, who pulled up on the road just beyond the corner to see if I was all right. Dave’s sidestand sprang back as he leant his Triumph over, and down she went. Theresa was thrown off the back. Neither of them was hurt, but Theresa was rattled by the experience. Dave got his bike up again straight away to discover it had a smashed indicator and a few scuffs on its fairing, but other than that there was no damage. Apart from being temporarily very red faced (literally – the colour of beetroot) about the drop, he was very sanguine about it. I, on the other hand, felt really, really guilty.
For the rest of the day, I kept wondering day what would have happened if there had been no escape route for me. What would I have done? I guess I would have forced myself to let go of the brake, blipped the throttle and leaned hard into the corner. Would I have got round? I think, in all probability, I would. In reality, I wasn’t going impossibly fast. My problem had been psycological, a sudden panic, a moment’s mistrust of the bike and of my own capabilities, and a freezing on the brake lever. Would I have been able to overcome the panic? Again, I think the answer is, yes. I do this freezing thing from time to time. I think it is my most dangerous habit on a bike. However, when it happens I can usually wrench myself away from my fear and act rationally. Which is reassuring.
Although I got back on the bike straight away and without, apparently, feeling upset by the event, I must have internalised the shock. I became very absent minded for the rest of the ride. I left my rucksack in a hotel in Bakewell where we went for tea and didn't realise till we were nearly home. I usually need to be stressed to do something like that. There was about £250 worth of bike gear in it (waterproofs etc) and both my reading glasses, so I had to return two days later to pick them all up. It’s a distance of about 200 miles from my home.
(As we left the carprark in Bakewell a traffic policeman approached us and warned us that we should not try to go home via the A6 as there had been a serious traffic accident on it and there were long delays. Just as we were beginning to think it was decent of him to tell us (Derbyshire police are notoriously anti-biker) he put his face into Bill’s and said, ‘It was one of your lot that did it' he repeated his comments several times, stressing ‘One of your lot’ on each occasion and screwing up his face as though he was trying to drill his prejudicial hatred of all bikers into us. I wonder, if it had been a car driver who had caused the accident, he would have told a departing motorist, ‘It was one of your lot’. Somehow I doubt it. Bikers are just clones, of course.)
My third nasty moment came about in my home town. One Wednesday afternoon I had another encounter with a little kamikaze Asian lady. She can be no more than four foot six high and she sits behind the wheel of a large Volvo causing major havoc and mayhem wherever she goes. I’ve seen her twice before in town and her driving is always the same. She travels everywhere at about 12 mph (in a clear 30mph zone). She changes her road position rapidly, unexpectedly and (of course) never indicates. She drives alone and without L plates, but if she has passed her test then I’m a monkey’s uncle.
On this our most recent meeting I got stuck behind her for about five minutes in two very tightly packed lines of traffic in the centre of town. Within that time she performed at least three highly hazardous manoeuvres, one of which nearly had me off my bike. As the queue snaked ahead, she turned into a short filter lane to the right, apparently preparing to make a turn. I picked up a little speed to pass her as quickly as I could, when she changed her mind, and without looking, swerved back into my lane. She nearly sideswiped me good and proper. Very fortunately, a car just behind me in the lane to my left was having trouble getting into gear. This left me a gap in the adjacent line of traffic and I swerved into it. I got off my bike and gave her a piece of my mind, which is something I rarely do. She pretended not to notice me and just stared ahead. But she definitely DID hear me. I think most of the town must have heard.
My final nasty moment came one night several weeks ago while I was on my way to a Monday meeting of the bike club at a pub in the nearby village of Stotfold. It was misty as I set out from home, but as soon as I got out of town I ran into a bank of fog so thick you could cut it with a knife. On the way to Stotfold the road dips down into a deep, steep-sided valley and runs under the arches of a tall railway viaduct. By the time I’d reached the valley floor under the arches, visibility had reduced to zero and the road below me had very noticeably turned to ice. My main thought was to turn round and go back home as soon as possible. Turning might have been dangerous in these conditions, but I knew there was a farm track just ahead with a good metalled surface at the entrance where I could pull in and check the road carefully before turning. (if I could identify it in all this murk, that is).
The trouble was, I had this total arsehole sitting right on my tail. I sounded my horn to no effect. I tried slowing down a couple of times to indicate to him that, ‘Hey, don’t you think it would be better to stay back a little in these conditions’, but whether he just couldn’t judge distances, or was a complete fruitcake, he just kept coming. The second time he bumped my rear wheel (just lightly, but enough to make me wonder if my affairs were in order). That seemed to panic him and he lay off a little, but only a little. At least, I thought, he wasn’t purposefully bent on homicide. I have no idea what goes on in the minds of people like that. He panicked me too, and I had to focus hard to keep calm. He stayed right behind me up the hill on the far side of the dip before turning into a hotel carpark at the top. I was too freaked to go after him and just turned off onto a side road so that I could make my way back home by another route.
Well, I reckon, things like that are enough to make you want to put your bike away and take up knitting. Or they would be if we were rational about them. Fortunately, rationality doesn’t have much of a grin factor attached to it.
So, Happy riding.
Hud
“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
SV-Wolf's Bike Blog
“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
SV-Wolf's Bike Blog
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sv-wolf
- Site Supporter - Platinum
- Posts: 2278
- Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2003 2:06 am
- Real Name: Richard
- Sex: Male
- Years Riding: 12
- My Motorcycle: Honda Fireblade, 2004: Suzuki DR650, 201
- Location: Hertfordshire, UK
Sunday 9 January 2006
Di’s daughter, Nicky, is over from Ireland for a few days and is staying in the flat. She is looking after Di through the night, so I’m free to do what I want for a short while. Right now, I’m alone, back in my rubble-strewn half-a-house. To be more accurate, it’s now more like nine-tenths of a house. The workmen are almost finished. They’ve done a great job – at least, on the half they have rebuilt - but they’ve wrecked the rest by blanketing the walls and carpets with concrete rubble and brick dust. They’ve also destroyed a couple of doors, buggered up part of the electric consumer unit and pulled the plug on the freezer cabinet. Sigh!
I suspect there’s a lot of left-over adrenalin sloshing around my system tonight. I had a fantastic but vey scary ride earlier today. I’m also wound up from a long stint of caring for Di (seven care workers just didn’t show up!!!!!!!!). Until this morning, I’d been with her day and night for nearly five days and my head is buzzing – literally – with tiredness, exhaustion, frustration and just general stress. I doubt if I’ll be able to sleep, so this may be a long post.
I’ve just been fantasising. I think it was it Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance who wrote that you could divide bikers into Classicists and Romantics. Classicists are able to recite the names of every model produced by every manufacturer in the history of motorcycling. They are fascinated by engine specs and have spiritual experiences contemplating the beauties of engineering design. They are usually seen, special tool in hand, wrapped around their latest rebuild, attempting a modification to some now uniquely inaccessible component that they once lovingly crafted out of a piece of old guttering.
Romantics, on the other hand, just love to ride the damn thing. Some have dreamy and contented expressions on their faces as they bowl along the highways of the world mile after blissful mile, while others suffer moments of high fun as they get their knee down on the big sweepers high up in the Cantabrian Mountains. Romantics love to follow hairpin-kinked highways down into spectacular ravines hidden away among the wild and fantastical places of the Earth. They read travel books with an appetite bordering on the gluttonous and plan impossible two-wheel journeys where no-one but media celebrities and their film crews would normally dare to go. If it were legal, feasible or acceptable, they would abandon their helmets, their wives and their mortgages, get hard on the throttle and ride away forever into the westering sun.
Or something like that!
I’ve always wanted to be a bike classicist. I’d love to get down to sorting out a gungy engine, and spend my time carefully removing and inspecting con-rods and gudgeon pins and adjusting tappets and shims. I’d love to sit in a pub with half-a-dozen mates and discuss the latest engineering features of new bikes with an understanding borne out of years of oily experience. No really! I would. I used to spend a lot of time taking things apart (much to Di’s horror) – but that was when there seemed to be more time sloshing around in life's daily bucket.
Somehow, I’ve never got around to working on motorcycles. Life seems too short. Why sit around in a cramped and cluttered garage when you could be out riding your bike across the open moors when the gorse and heather are in full bloom? It’s just easier to hand your plastic over the counter to a dealer. So, I’m kind of ashamed to admit how little I know about bikes and how little active interest I currently have in what goes on between my legs when I ride them. (Perhaps I should rephrase that?).
OK, so I have to admit that secretly this makes me feel a bit of a fraud. But I guess there are plenty of us around. One day, I keep telling myself, I’m going to buy and old hack and strip it down, just to get the feel of it and see how it all fits together. But for now, I’m only an oily bike nerd in my wannabe daydreams. The real reason I’m into bikes is that they put me in contact with the natural world. They make me feel alive when everything else seems just routine and ordinary. I even think of my bike as part of the natural world. As far as I am concerned, it has a life and personality of its own and I have some of the same feelings for it that I might have for a person. It’s a good friend. It gets me up into the mountains and deep into the countryside. It fills my guts with freedom, and my head with excitement, and it does a lot to releases the thousand and one tightly coiled springs that propel me through my daily life.
I think it really does no good to mix up bikes and bodies. (Be warned! there's a Bloody Big Hobby-Horse coming up) Modern medicine does this all the time. It regards the human body (and the human mind – if it ever notices that such a thing exists) as a large and very complex machine that functions relentlessly like a bit of soggy engineering. But IMNSHO bikes and bodies have nothing in common (despite what I said in my last post!). Bikes are assembled from pre-formed parts on assembly lines. Bodies grow from a single cell that divides and diversifies. And every daughter cell is in chemical contact with every other daughter cell in a single intercommunicating system. While, the physical sciences have moved on through relativity and quantum mechanics, so-called scientific medicine is still stuck in a crude nineteenth-century mechanical materialism. It’s completely nuts.
My wife’s illness (Motor Neurone Disease – ALS) first showed itself back in September 2004 when her fingers started stiffening up, and she found it difficult to grasp things. It was a sudden and unexpected change. She’d recently taken a tumble off the back of the bike when, as a novice pillion rider, she tried to put her foot down as we pulled up at a roundabout. It unbalanced the bike and we went over. She fell on her shoulder, so at first I thought the stiffness might be caused by a trapped nerve. Unfortunately, it became quickly clear that whatever was going on was a lot more serious than that.
In terms of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is part of my professional stock-in-trade as a shiatsu practitioner, the bodily symptoms a person produces over time can be understood and interpreted as a developing pattern of imbalance within the body. To the Chinese, the universe is nothing less than a vast and infinitely complex flow of energy (Ch’i). As Ch’i flows, it forms temporary patterns. Within these patterns there are smaller, more local patterns. A human body, like everything else in the universe, is just a small fragment of the ever-moving Ch’i and so exhibits a temporary and changing local pattern of its own.
If you are attentive and lucky enough, you can pick out some of the patterns and make sense of them in terms of a developing process of disease. The constipation that someone had several years ago when her mother died and the depression she suffered last autumn may not be completely unrelated to yesterday’s asthma attack.
The thought constantly reoccurs to me that Di’s MND may have been developing for years, right through her adult life perhaps or from childhood, or even from birth and that had I been more alert I might have spotted it and suggested treatment which may have prolonged her life. Or it may not. Who can be sure about these things? With the benefit of hindsight I do see a pattern developing over many years, but I can't quite pin it down. The only thing for sure is that when there is a bereavement, there are always ‘if onlys’ to torment yourself with.
Whenever I start to relax, say, while I'm having an easygoing ride on the bike, I rack my brains in a futile attempt to trace the patterns back to some discernable source - as though, by doing so, I could reverse them and get my wonderful wife back again. Sadly, there’s little chance of that. MND is not curable, though there is a lot of research going on at present, in both conventional and complementary and one or two small breakthroughs. But until a lot more work is done, I’m left managing the ‘if onlys’.
From her hands, the paralysis initially spread to her arms and throat and chest. It looks now as though it might be spreading to her legs. We’d hoped this might not happen – it doesn’t always. We’re not sure yet – it may just be lack of use. The early loss of the postural muscles in her torso meant that she has been unable to walk without a good deal of help for some time.
Her speech is now very slurred and she only makes herself understood with difficulty. She often chokes on food. Choking to death with MND is not usual, but not uncommon either. When she is no longer able to swallow, the hospital will offer her a tube surgically implanted through the wall of her abdomen and into her stomach to keep her supplied with nutrients. But she has already decided to refuse this. Why prolong the inevitable? When she can no longer eat, she will no longer eat. Period.
We take it day by day.
Apart from my grief at losing her, I get angry a lot. I get angry at anything big - the sky mainly. I’m not sure what to get angry with, but I’m angry at something for doing this to my wife. Like a little child, I get angry at the unfairness of it all. I get angry at my wife too, because she will soon be leaving me and because she has tied me down to a mind-numbing routine that is so tedious and confining - so exhausting - that I sometimes just want to yell, get on the bike and not come back. I get angry and frustrated at her increasing inability to speak.
Mostly, I let the anger out on the bike. Sealed in my lid – no-one can see me there, and no-one can hear. I get the bike up to speed and then I let go.
I tell her I’m angry, too. She is a counsellor. She understands about anger and frustration and resentment and the need to express them. When I tell her she cries a little, for herself and for both of us. And then she laughs, and there is another joke between us. Her spirit is strong. She has endured this horrible dieease with much good humour - much of the time. She makes what she can of each moment. But the miracle of all this is that her disease has brought us together in ways that I could never have imagined. Despite all the anger and frustration and fear, it has also brought out all the love and commitment in the relationship. It’s amazing.
But sometimes even the closeness becomes too much and I have to get away on my own or with a few friends – when I can.
I went out for an amazing ride today. Di’s cousin and her husband from Mechanicsburg, Pa are staying with us for a couple of weeks along with Nicky. They spent the day with her, looking after her, so that I could go for a ride during the morning and afternoon. It was a great day for riding. After all the frost and ice and snow of the last couple of weeks, the weather was mild and the roads clear. It’s a relief to be able to ride freely again, without having to be constantly alert for patches of ice or frost. There is too much ‘staying alert’ and ‘being careful’ in my life already.
My back tyre still has a decent amount of tread on it but it has squared off, so on wet or frosty roads, on white lines, tar banding, bumpy roads or on metal manhole covers it has been squirreling all over the place. It has scared the living dodo out of me on a couple of occasions. Though the small slides and wobbles are probably more alarming than dangerous. As soon as I can afford the time, I'm off to 'Bob's Tyres' to get a new set. I've got Bridgestone 010s at present. They've been brilliant - very hard wearing and very good in the wet. I did think of going for something completely different this time though, so that I can get a comparison, but I'll probably get the same again. I haven't got the time to research anything else. I think Bridgestone have replaced the 010s with 014s or something like that. I'll have to find out - but I'm sure the dealer will tell me.
The vibes on the bike haven’t gone away. In fact, they are now a pretty permanent feature. Mostly, I just ignore them. They’re not so bad that they spoil the ride any more, so I just get on with it. I’m due for my 20,000 service soon, so I’ll ask Chris at Redcar Motorcycles to take it out and give me an opinion.
I got up early to go on the rideout this morning. I met up with Ron and Keith (and Keith’s young son, Billy, riding pillion) at the usual place. We decided to head for ‘The World Famous Comfort Café’ just off the A505 on the way to Kettering. Keith knew a back route (of course – Keith always knows back routes), which would avoid main roads. It was a real fun run through the villages, and the undulating Herts and Essex countryside mostly along narrow roads with no markings. ‘Back route’ was right: it more or less tripled the usual distance.
There were some lovely stretches, including several extended chains of joined-up sweepers. And the road surfaces were generally good. I like this kind of ride because, as Ron reminded me, you have to keep your concentration focused 100 per cent. It doesn’t take much for me to drift off into a daydream given half a chance, but I just can’t do that on a run like this. And for me that makes it all the more enjoyable. You need a wide mental perspective to allow for all kind of reactions you need on roads like these. I have this ‘mantra’ which I say to myself when I’m starting to get too involved in my own thoughts on the bike: ‘body and breath’. It’s just a way of reminding myself to refocus, and to let go of all the mental crap that builds up in the course of the day. There's a hell of a lot of crap in the world!
We settled in at the café, ate breakfast and discussed the petty and vindictive nature of traffic wardens. Billy was cold, so his Dad decided to take him back home. It was about one o’clock. Ron and I headed out in the direction of Saffron Walden. Now, I hadn’t planned it, but as soon as we got into Saffron, I started heading off in the direction of Ashdon. I know this area well as I used to come here regularly in the 1980s on my bicycle.
In the village of Ashdon, up a narrow and, on this occasion, very muddy lane there is a Tibetan Buddhist Centre called Chos Khor Ling. I’m not religious, but there is a lot about the Buddhist way of looking at the world that appeals to me. The idea that you create your own unhappiness through longing and attachment makes complete sense in my mind. I used to come here regularly. I love the people. There is a genuine ease and serenity about them that I admire. Ease and serenity are just pipedreams at the moment, completely at odds with my own firecracker mind. I stopped off with Ron to say hello, but there was an event going on, so we didn’t stay very long. Just long enough to reconnect. I think Ron was almost converted to Buddhism on the spot by the smell of the cooking coming from the big communal kitchen. The food is always superb.
Out beyond Ashdon, we just followed our noses, taking whatever roads looked interesting and inviting. Here in rural Essex you can go for miles without passing a village or seeing a car, or another human being, come to that. The land is heavily farmed but has a wildness and remoteness about it that I love. Out here, your eyes naturally settle on the horizon and your mind begins to empty of unnecessary thoughts (which is just about all of them in my view). It makes a big contrast to the sardine can of central Hertfordshire.
On the way back home we got onto a road that just kept taking us further and further east. That was disturbing as my personal radar (my nose) kept telling me we needed to turn south as it was time to get back home. I was leading, so when I saw a crossroads up ahead, I signalled to Ron that I was going to turn right. The road to the right, when I could see into it, turned out to be very narrow. My first thought was to abandon this idea and carry straight on for a bit longer, but then I thought, ‘Oh, what the hell! It looks interesting’ and with that, I leaned th bike into it.
It turned out to be a single track farm road – and it went on for miles (and miles and miles). It twisted and turned this way and that until I lost all sense of where we were or which way we were heading (which is unusual for me). The centre of the road was piled high with gravel for much of its length, and the margins were pitted with some pretty impressive pot holes, some of which you could lose a football (or front tyre) in. That left about a foot of clear riding surface. To say that some of the turns were seventy degrees would be conservative. The road very considerately swerved this way and that to avoid obstacles such as trees, hummocks, bits of old wall, isolated farmhouses and nothing in particular. We rode along at 20, 15, 10 mph. to the sound of all kinds of dodo hitting the undersides of the bikes. At one point I caught sight of Ron close behind me in the mirrors laughing his head off. It was a gas. We both loved it.
Somehow we got back to Saffron Walden and from there I took Ron back through some picture postcard villages with typically Essex names like Arkesden, Clavering, Hare Street and, best of all, Wendens Ambo. We ended up in a Chinese pub at Buntingford. I never even imagined such a thing as a Chinese pub before, but it was relaxing and gave us a chance to talk about the ride. Ron had several back wheel slides while we out on the narrow roads. We rode back home along the A507 which is a real bikers’ road that will test your concentration to the limit if you want it to. On this occasion we were content to amble along at a comfortable pace.
It was the longest ride I have had for weeks – about 150 miles. Mostly I just get to ride to work, and to ride home, a round trip of a mere 12 miles. Occasionally, I have a few hours in an afternoon free and take a spin down some of the local roads. Once in a blue moon, like today, I get to go on a rideout or take a longer trip with friends. My bike is a mess. I have no time to clean it any more. After this afternoon’s run it looks more like a mobile compost heap and probably smells like one too.
The last ride I had was in the middle of December, and that was a bit strange. It was already early evening before I managed to get away on my own. I usually like riding at night, but somehow I just couldn’t work up any enthusiasm. I just knew I needed to get out on the bike, to get some air into my lungs and a bit of energy into my body.
The plan, if I had any at all, was to get myself thoroughly lost and then navigate back to the house following my nose. I decided not to put any limits on the ride, but just to start back for home when I felt like it. I was expecting to get home in the early hours of the morning. It was cold, but I've gpt sp,e some very good Dainese gear and some brilliant brilliant 'Windstopper' undergarments.
At first, I found myself heading north-west up the A600 towards Bedford. The main route to Bedford has plenty of bends, some very fast, wide straights, and lots of variety. It is a well-made country road for the most part, with few turnings and little traffic. You’d think, from that description that it was a good road to ride. But somehow it always disappoints. I’m not sure, now, why I went out this way. I made use of the lack of traffic and fast straights by whacking open the throttle now and then to see what the SV could do. (I do that a lot these days) I did a bit of fast cornering to raise the energy. I tried relaxing into the landscape and opened my visor briefly to feel the freshness of the night air. Nothing worked.
In the dark and icily cold night. the empty fields spreading out on either side across the featureless Bedfordshire plain made me feel kind of dismal inside. The engine’s V-twin roar, which usually sounds very sexy to my ears, seemed merely hollow. Then, as I came down into Cardington, where the two gigantic First World War hangers built for the R-100 and R-101 airships loomed against the night sky, and the sense of space and emptiness they created made me shiver right down to my bones, my resolve collapsed. I just felt bored. I didn’t know what to do. On the outskirts of Bedford I turned east and headed back towards Hertfordshire. A few miles down the road, in a fit of bad temper I turned off into a narrow lane and soon found myself completely lost. It was just a couple of days after new moon, so although there was a cloudless sky, the world was very black. All along one stretch, rabbits froze in front of me or scurried across the road in the headlights. I passed several deer foraging in the hedgerows. Down one windy lane I followed a badger for several hundred yards as he lumbered disdainfully down the road in front of me. There seem to be a lot more brocks around these days, but they are no better mannered than they ever were. About an hour later, and still wandering about the country lanes, I began to vaguely recognise some nearby landmarks. Then I saw signs to Gravenhurst and Pirton. That cheered me up. These were villages I knew. I wasn't far from home. I made for Pirton.
And so at about one o’clock in the morning I wound back through the villages of Shillington and Pirton and found myself riding home along the Pirton Road. It seemed sheer chance that I had ended up coming back this way. But I suspect, all along, some choices were being made, secretly, in the back of my mind. About three miles before hitting town I slowed the bike and turned off the road where the grassy, tree-lined bank drops briefly to the level of the tarmac. Even on a bright summer afternoon it is easy to miss the overgrown beginnings of a narrow path leading directly away from the road. On a night like this the entrance is just another dark patch in the hedgerow. Pushing through a loose cover of vegetation, I turned onto the track and rode between two lines of gnarled hawthorn bushes and crab apple trees.
The track runs straight as a die for about 400 yards, then widens suddenly into a small clearing near the edge of a patch of woodland. Within the clearing, the earth drops steeply away to form a little dell whose floor lies some 10 meters below the level of the surrounding land. My mind is suddenly very focused. I kill the engine, swing off the bike, and walk towards the dell across soft, loamy soil. Without the headlights, the woods are suddenly pitch black. I can make out only a few patches of grey glimmering among the trees.
A few rough wooden steps have been hammered into the slope by some local conservation group. I descend gingerly, squinnying into the dark. Down in the dell the air is, as always, very fresh. The occasional creaking of branches in the night breeze sound friendly and unthreatening. As my eyes adjust, I’m drawn to where a patch of greater darkness lies on the valley floor and I strain my ears in that direction, hoping to catch the sound of a hundred tiny springs that bubble up from the earth. These are the headwaters of the river Oughton.
The river is shallow - a large dog could wade happily through it to the bushes on the other side and not get too wet. For a time the newly emerged waters appear to linger quietly among the trees reluctant to leave the dell. Then, just beyond a rotting log, they slide silently away, meandering across the valley floor. For five lazy miles the river drifts through ancient woods and wetlands, the last in this part of England, past common pastureland, and distant open fields. A narrow footpath accompanies the river all the way. Here and there, fallen trees lie across the stream.
About a mile from the headwaters the river emerges from the woods and runs across an open expanse of tree-lined pasture. In the summer, this part of the channel is choked with watercress and its banks are lined with hemp agrimony. In another mile the river floods out onto the adjacent land. Poking up above waters that occupying the marshes are thousands of pale grass tussocks. The river path is lined with reedbeds that echo with all kinds of birdsong.
Soon, there is another change. The river collects itself once again, the banks straighten, and the waters gather momentum before hurtling themselves over an disused millrace. Next to the race is the sixteenth-century millhouse almost completely obscured by the trees.
Further downstream, a few trout are occasionally seen in the clear waters, and there are yet more woods, narrower, scruffier than before, full of hawthorn and whitethorn and dog rose. Finally, the river slinks past a notorious housing estate before joining the Rivers Hiz and Purwell on the outskirts of town. Of the three rivers, the Oughton is by far the most varied and beautiful. To me it is one of the most beautiful places on earth.
During the day the springs are visited by local people and their dogs. Dirt bikers also used to use the river path, blatting their way up to the springs from the town. They have recently been banned from using it under new government legislation. I think dirt bikers have been unfairly treated, but in this one instance I’m glad they are no longer able to shatter the peace of the woods with their noise and leave behind their trails of petrol fumes.
And where, by day, the riverside is a friendly, jaunty, very human place, by night the Oughton regains sole possession of itself and of the quiet woods that belong to it. Di and I used to come here regularly in the evenings, to escape the town and to spend time quietly together. Now I come here alone. Sometimes, if I’m out walking, I find myself wandering unconsciously in this direction, attracted by its peace and beauty, and also by something else.
Standing for a while on a little spit of earth that juts out tentatively into the river, I listen to the quiet sounds emerging out of silence. On this particular night, a dog fox makes its way down to the opposite bank. It eyes me closely but is not especially concerned. I allow my thoughts to drift back to a time, just over three years ago, when Di and I were married on this exact spot.
For sixteen years we had lived together, loving each other, sharing our leisure time together, but otherwise pursuing independent lives. In many ways, we thought, we had little in common. In those years we fought and bickered as couples do, unable to live peaceably with each other and unable to live apart. Only once did we separate, and that, very briefly. Two years into our relationship we had a disastrous holiday in France in which everything that could go wrong, did. The separation that followed was hell, but it took us both a full six months to swallow our pride and get back together. We met accidentally in town one afternoon. We looked at each other shiftily - and then Di blurted out a question: did I want to go to Helsinki with her for a week’s holiday. I said, yes, of course I did. And that was the end of that.
For a long time though, there was no real question, in either of our minds, of marriage. Di’s previous relationship had been difficult and I was unwilling to commit myself to something so binding, even though I would not have voluntarily exchanged my life with her for anything. I liked the idea that we were together because we wanted to be and not because we had accepted some contract drawn up by the state. I did ask Di to marry me a couple of times, rather half-heartedly, and, as expected, she said, no. At other times, she’d asked me and I said no, too. It was a game we played.
Then four years ago, our attitude changed. I can’t say why. Maybe it was because, as we got older we sensed that our time together was now finite, and we wanted to live together more closely. I’m not sure. One day, I asked her the question, rather more earnestly than usual, and she accepted.
Di is a Christian, though not of the kind that the local church would approve of. She is rather promiscuous with her faith and will attend the church of any sect or denomination without regard to its beliefs, though she has strong ones of her own. Me, I’m an atheist, and have been ever since I walked out of the confessional in my local Catholic Church at the age of 13 and never went back. The idea of a creator God that has eternally excluded himself from his own universe always seemed an absurdity to me, as did any kind of revealed religion. So, we didn’t want to get married in a church or a dreary municipal Register Office and neither of us had any interest in the glamour or the production values of a conventional wedding. We wanted to get married in our own way and at some place that was meaningful to us.
Di’s parents and mine were both dead. Di’s only sister had died twenty years earlier from encephalitis. I am an only child. We made our marriage in the company of friends. We felt as though we were not only being bound to each other as husband and wife but, as a couple, to the community of people we loved. People contributed to the event in ways we didn’t know about until the moment we arrived at the dell at the time of the ceremony. One had made dozens of little wooden boats with candles in them and floated them on the stream. Another made and hung paper lanterns in the high boughs around the springs. A young friend who was a tree surgeon by profession made an arch of living willow under which the ceremony took place. The women who accompanied Di to the springs brought flutes and recorders, the men who came with me brought drums. Many had helped with the organisation. The ceremony, which we had devised ourselves with the help of a friend, was simple and, we hoped, sincere, but it was also light hearted and fun. Di was stunning. It was the central act of our 20-year-old relationship, and the one I will always remember her by.
We asked everyone who was able, not to come by car, but to walk the five miles from town along the river path, or to come by bicycle. For those who couldn’t manage it, there were bicycle rickshaws ferrying people from taxis to the dell along the narrow path from the Pirton Road.
So, I come here from time to time to be quietly by myself and to think of my lovely wife whose life is now being slowly obscured by a mask of encroaching paralysis. Each month she becomes less and less able, but from underneath the crust of her disease, her personality still shines through like a beacon. Her spirit is strong just as it was when I married her among all that enthusiasm and merriment. But there is a lot more fear now, as she gradually descends into an enforced and eventually, a final silence. I’m far from done with being angry. But I never feel angry here.
On the bike or elsewhere when I’m alone, I still sometimes shout out my frustration and rage. The realist in me, says there is little point, of course. But so-called realism is shallow and merely imposes limits that do not recognize inner, more human needs. So because I feel the heat rising , I shout sometimes, and for a while after that I am OK..
We don’t know how much longer she has to live. It could be two, four, six months. The slow decay of the motor neurones in her brain will largely decide. Somewhere in the darkness of her skull her nerves are dissolving away and being replaced by glial cells. As the nervous impulses cease, so her muscles contract and stiffen, and her movements subside.
A whine is now detectable in her voice sometimes. She is aware of it and detests it but can do nothing about it. It is devastating for me to hear it from this person who has always been so strong. It is now so tiring for her to talk that she can rarely manage a few words at a time - so different from her former self. Recently though she has been dictating an account of her disease experience to me by means of a letter frame. It is a long and tedious business since she has to spell out her words one letter at a time using eye movements. But to me, the result is wonderful. The way she spoke, which was always remarkably clear and strong, is now re-emerging in front of me as I transcribe her eye movements onto the page.
The ride back home from the dell was more peaceful and thoughtful than the ride out. When I got back to town the light was off in her flat, so I parked the bike back in the garden and went quietly in to my nine-tenths of a house and got ready for bed. The house looks very different now. A lot of our former life has disappeared. We’ve had to find another home for Loki, the dog-monster who lay in wait for us each day and filched chicken legs out of the fridge. And for some reason we’ve been through a phase of accidentally breaking the few things we possess that have any real significance to us.
Before drifting off to sleep I lay in bed trying to think about what all these changes might mean. But there was no energy in my thoughts and eventually they subsided. All that remained in my mind were a few fragmentary images: of Di herself on our wedding day, of the hedges flashing by along the Pirton Road, and of the brilliance of the night sky.
She has a remarkable spirit. She laughs, as she has always laughed, at the absurdities of the world and her eyes are as bright and lively as ever.
Di’s daughter, Nicky, is over from Ireland for a few days and is staying in the flat. She is looking after Di through the night, so I’m free to do what I want for a short while. Right now, I’m alone, back in my rubble-strewn half-a-house. To be more accurate, it’s now more like nine-tenths of a house. The workmen are almost finished. They’ve done a great job – at least, on the half they have rebuilt - but they’ve wrecked the rest by blanketing the walls and carpets with concrete rubble and brick dust. They’ve also destroyed a couple of doors, buggered up part of the electric consumer unit and pulled the plug on the freezer cabinet. Sigh!
I suspect there’s a lot of left-over adrenalin sloshing around my system tonight. I had a fantastic but vey scary ride earlier today. I’m also wound up from a long stint of caring for Di (seven care workers just didn’t show up!!!!!!!!). Until this morning, I’d been with her day and night for nearly five days and my head is buzzing – literally – with tiredness, exhaustion, frustration and just general stress. I doubt if I’ll be able to sleep, so this may be a long post.
I’ve just been fantasising. I think it was it Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance who wrote that you could divide bikers into Classicists and Romantics. Classicists are able to recite the names of every model produced by every manufacturer in the history of motorcycling. They are fascinated by engine specs and have spiritual experiences contemplating the beauties of engineering design. They are usually seen, special tool in hand, wrapped around their latest rebuild, attempting a modification to some now uniquely inaccessible component that they once lovingly crafted out of a piece of old guttering.
Romantics, on the other hand, just love to ride the damn thing. Some have dreamy and contented expressions on their faces as they bowl along the highways of the world mile after blissful mile, while others suffer moments of high fun as they get their knee down on the big sweepers high up in the Cantabrian Mountains. Romantics love to follow hairpin-kinked highways down into spectacular ravines hidden away among the wild and fantastical places of the Earth. They read travel books with an appetite bordering on the gluttonous and plan impossible two-wheel journeys where no-one but media celebrities and their film crews would normally dare to go. If it were legal, feasible or acceptable, they would abandon their helmets, their wives and their mortgages, get hard on the throttle and ride away forever into the westering sun.
Or something like that!
I’ve always wanted to be a bike classicist. I’d love to get down to sorting out a gungy engine, and spend my time carefully removing and inspecting con-rods and gudgeon pins and adjusting tappets and shims. I’d love to sit in a pub with half-a-dozen mates and discuss the latest engineering features of new bikes with an understanding borne out of years of oily experience. No really! I would. I used to spend a lot of time taking things apart (much to Di’s horror) – but that was when there seemed to be more time sloshing around in life's daily bucket.
Somehow, I’ve never got around to working on motorcycles. Life seems too short. Why sit around in a cramped and cluttered garage when you could be out riding your bike across the open moors when the gorse and heather are in full bloom? It’s just easier to hand your plastic over the counter to a dealer. So, I’m kind of ashamed to admit how little I know about bikes and how little active interest I currently have in what goes on between my legs when I ride them. (Perhaps I should rephrase that?).
OK, so I have to admit that secretly this makes me feel a bit of a fraud. But I guess there are plenty of us around. One day, I keep telling myself, I’m going to buy and old hack and strip it down, just to get the feel of it and see how it all fits together. But for now, I’m only an oily bike nerd in my wannabe daydreams. The real reason I’m into bikes is that they put me in contact with the natural world. They make me feel alive when everything else seems just routine and ordinary. I even think of my bike as part of the natural world. As far as I am concerned, it has a life and personality of its own and I have some of the same feelings for it that I might have for a person. It’s a good friend. It gets me up into the mountains and deep into the countryside. It fills my guts with freedom, and my head with excitement, and it does a lot to releases the thousand and one tightly coiled springs that propel me through my daily life.
I think it really does no good to mix up bikes and bodies. (Be warned! there's a Bloody Big Hobby-Horse coming up) Modern medicine does this all the time. It regards the human body (and the human mind – if it ever notices that such a thing exists) as a large and very complex machine that functions relentlessly like a bit of soggy engineering. But IMNSHO bikes and bodies have nothing in common (despite what I said in my last post!). Bikes are assembled from pre-formed parts on assembly lines. Bodies grow from a single cell that divides and diversifies. And every daughter cell is in chemical contact with every other daughter cell in a single intercommunicating system. While, the physical sciences have moved on through relativity and quantum mechanics, so-called scientific medicine is still stuck in a crude nineteenth-century mechanical materialism. It’s completely nuts.
My wife’s illness (Motor Neurone Disease – ALS) first showed itself back in September 2004 when her fingers started stiffening up, and she found it difficult to grasp things. It was a sudden and unexpected change. She’d recently taken a tumble off the back of the bike when, as a novice pillion rider, she tried to put her foot down as we pulled up at a roundabout. It unbalanced the bike and we went over. She fell on her shoulder, so at first I thought the stiffness might be caused by a trapped nerve. Unfortunately, it became quickly clear that whatever was going on was a lot more serious than that.
In terms of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is part of my professional stock-in-trade as a shiatsu practitioner, the bodily symptoms a person produces over time can be understood and interpreted as a developing pattern of imbalance within the body. To the Chinese, the universe is nothing less than a vast and infinitely complex flow of energy (Ch’i). As Ch’i flows, it forms temporary patterns. Within these patterns there are smaller, more local patterns. A human body, like everything else in the universe, is just a small fragment of the ever-moving Ch’i and so exhibits a temporary and changing local pattern of its own.
If you are attentive and lucky enough, you can pick out some of the patterns and make sense of them in terms of a developing process of disease. The constipation that someone had several years ago when her mother died and the depression she suffered last autumn may not be completely unrelated to yesterday’s asthma attack.
The thought constantly reoccurs to me that Di’s MND may have been developing for years, right through her adult life perhaps or from childhood, or even from birth and that had I been more alert I might have spotted it and suggested treatment which may have prolonged her life. Or it may not. Who can be sure about these things? With the benefit of hindsight I do see a pattern developing over many years, but I can't quite pin it down. The only thing for sure is that when there is a bereavement, there are always ‘if onlys’ to torment yourself with.
Whenever I start to relax, say, while I'm having an easygoing ride on the bike, I rack my brains in a futile attempt to trace the patterns back to some discernable source - as though, by doing so, I could reverse them and get my wonderful wife back again. Sadly, there’s little chance of that. MND is not curable, though there is a lot of research going on at present, in both conventional and complementary and one or two small breakthroughs. But until a lot more work is done, I’m left managing the ‘if onlys’.
From her hands, the paralysis initially spread to her arms and throat and chest. It looks now as though it might be spreading to her legs. We’d hoped this might not happen – it doesn’t always. We’re not sure yet – it may just be lack of use. The early loss of the postural muscles in her torso meant that she has been unable to walk without a good deal of help for some time.
Her speech is now very slurred and she only makes herself understood with difficulty. She often chokes on food. Choking to death with MND is not usual, but not uncommon either. When she is no longer able to swallow, the hospital will offer her a tube surgically implanted through the wall of her abdomen and into her stomach to keep her supplied with nutrients. But she has already decided to refuse this. Why prolong the inevitable? When she can no longer eat, she will no longer eat. Period.
We take it day by day.
Apart from my grief at losing her, I get angry a lot. I get angry at anything big - the sky mainly. I’m not sure what to get angry with, but I’m angry at something for doing this to my wife. Like a little child, I get angry at the unfairness of it all. I get angry at my wife too, because she will soon be leaving me and because she has tied me down to a mind-numbing routine that is so tedious and confining - so exhausting - that I sometimes just want to yell, get on the bike and not come back. I get angry and frustrated at her increasing inability to speak.
Mostly, I let the anger out on the bike. Sealed in my lid – no-one can see me there, and no-one can hear. I get the bike up to speed and then I let go.
I tell her I’m angry, too. She is a counsellor. She understands about anger and frustration and resentment and the need to express them. When I tell her she cries a little, for herself and for both of us. And then she laughs, and there is another joke between us. Her spirit is strong. She has endured this horrible dieease with much good humour - much of the time. She makes what she can of each moment. But the miracle of all this is that her disease has brought us together in ways that I could never have imagined. Despite all the anger and frustration and fear, it has also brought out all the love and commitment in the relationship. It’s amazing.
But sometimes even the closeness becomes too much and I have to get away on my own or with a few friends – when I can.
I went out for an amazing ride today. Di’s cousin and her husband from Mechanicsburg, Pa are staying with us for a couple of weeks along with Nicky. They spent the day with her, looking after her, so that I could go for a ride during the morning and afternoon. It was a great day for riding. After all the frost and ice and snow of the last couple of weeks, the weather was mild and the roads clear. It’s a relief to be able to ride freely again, without having to be constantly alert for patches of ice or frost. There is too much ‘staying alert’ and ‘being careful’ in my life already.
My back tyre still has a decent amount of tread on it but it has squared off, so on wet or frosty roads, on white lines, tar banding, bumpy roads or on metal manhole covers it has been squirreling all over the place. It has scared the living dodo out of me on a couple of occasions. Though the small slides and wobbles are probably more alarming than dangerous. As soon as I can afford the time, I'm off to 'Bob's Tyres' to get a new set. I've got Bridgestone 010s at present. They've been brilliant - very hard wearing and very good in the wet. I did think of going for something completely different this time though, so that I can get a comparison, but I'll probably get the same again. I haven't got the time to research anything else. I think Bridgestone have replaced the 010s with 014s or something like that. I'll have to find out - but I'm sure the dealer will tell me.
The vibes on the bike haven’t gone away. In fact, they are now a pretty permanent feature. Mostly, I just ignore them. They’re not so bad that they spoil the ride any more, so I just get on with it. I’m due for my 20,000 service soon, so I’ll ask Chris at Redcar Motorcycles to take it out and give me an opinion.
I got up early to go on the rideout this morning. I met up with Ron and Keith (and Keith’s young son, Billy, riding pillion) at the usual place. We decided to head for ‘The World Famous Comfort Café’ just off the A505 on the way to Kettering. Keith knew a back route (of course – Keith always knows back routes), which would avoid main roads. It was a real fun run through the villages, and the undulating Herts and Essex countryside mostly along narrow roads with no markings. ‘Back route’ was right: it more or less tripled the usual distance.
There were some lovely stretches, including several extended chains of joined-up sweepers. And the road surfaces were generally good. I like this kind of ride because, as Ron reminded me, you have to keep your concentration focused 100 per cent. It doesn’t take much for me to drift off into a daydream given half a chance, but I just can’t do that on a run like this. And for me that makes it all the more enjoyable. You need a wide mental perspective to allow for all kind of reactions you need on roads like these. I have this ‘mantra’ which I say to myself when I’m starting to get too involved in my own thoughts on the bike: ‘body and breath’. It’s just a way of reminding myself to refocus, and to let go of all the mental crap that builds up in the course of the day. There's a hell of a lot of crap in the world!
We settled in at the café, ate breakfast and discussed the petty and vindictive nature of traffic wardens. Billy was cold, so his Dad decided to take him back home. It was about one o’clock. Ron and I headed out in the direction of Saffron Walden. Now, I hadn’t planned it, but as soon as we got into Saffron, I started heading off in the direction of Ashdon. I know this area well as I used to come here regularly in the 1980s on my bicycle.
In the village of Ashdon, up a narrow and, on this occasion, very muddy lane there is a Tibetan Buddhist Centre called Chos Khor Ling. I’m not religious, but there is a lot about the Buddhist way of looking at the world that appeals to me. The idea that you create your own unhappiness through longing and attachment makes complete sense in my mind. I used to come here regularly. I love the people. There is a genuine ease and serenity about them that I admire. Ease and serenity are just pipedreams at the moment, completely at odds with my own firecracker mind. I stopped off with Ron to say hello, but there was an event going on, so we didn’t stay very long. Just long enough to reconnect. I think Ron was almost converted to Buddhism on the spot by the smell of the cooking coming from the big communal kitchen. The food is always superb.
Out beyond Ashdon, we just followed our noses, taking whatever roads looked interesting and inviting. Here in rural Essex you can go for miles without passing a village or seeing a car, or another human being, come to that. The land is heavily farmed but has a wildness and remoteness about it that I love. Out here, your eyes naturally settle on the horizon and your mind begins to empty of unnecessary thoughts (which is just about all of them in my view). It makes a big contrast to the sardine can of central Hertfordshire.
On the way back home we got onto a road that just kept taking us further and further east. That was disturbing as my personal radar (my nose) kept telling me we needed to turn south as it was time to get back home. I was leading, so when I saw a crossroads up ahead, I signalled to Ron that I was going to turn right. The road to the right, when I could see into it, turned out to be very narrow. My first thought was to abandon this idea and carry straight on for a bit longer, but then I thought, ‘Oh, what the hell! It looks interesting’ and with that, I leaned th bike into it.
It turned out to be a single track farm road – and it went on for miles (and miles and miles). It twisted and turned this way and that until I lost all sense of where we were or which way we were heading (which is unusual for me). The centre of the road was piled high with gravel for much of its length, and the margins were pitted with some pretty impressive pot holes, some of which you could lose a football (or front tyre) in. That left about a foot of clear riding surface. To say that some of the turns were seventy degrees would be conservative. The road very considerately swerved this way and that to avoid obstacles such as trees, hummocks, bits of old wall, isolated farmhouses and nothing in particular. We rode along at 20, 15, 10 mph. to the sound of all kinds of dodo hitting the undersides of the bikes. At one point I caught sight of Ron close behind me in the mirrors laughing his head off. It was a gas. We both loved it.
Somehow we got back to Saffron Walden and from there I took Ron back through some picture postcard villages with typically Essex names like Arkesden, Clavering, Hare Street and, best of all, Wendens Ambo. We ended up in a Chinese pub at Buntingford. I never even imagined such a thing as a Chinese pub before, but it was relaxing and gave us a chance to talk about the ride. Ron had several back wheel slides while we out on the narrow roads. We rode back home along the A507 which is a real bikers’ road that will test your concentration to the limit if you want it to. On this occasion we were content to amble along at a comfortable pace.
It was the longest ride I have had for weeks – about 150 miles. Mostly I just get to ride to work, and to ride home, a round trip of a mere 12 miles. Occasionally, I have a few hours in an afternoon free and take a spin down some of the local roads. Once in a blue moon, like today, I get to go on a rideout or take a longer trip with friends. My bike is a mess. I have no time to clean it any more. After this afternoon’s run it looks more like a mobile compost heap and probably smells like one too.
The last ride I had was in the middle of December, and that was a bit strange. It was already early evening before I managed to get away on my own. I usually like riding at night, but somehow I just couldn’t work up any enthusiasm. I just knew I needed to get out on the bike, to get some air into my lungs and a bit of energy into my body.
The plan, if I had any at all, was to get myself thoroughly lost and then navigate back to the house following my nose. I decided not to put any limits on the ride, but just to start back for home when I felt like it. I was expecting to get home in the early hours of the morning. It was cold, but I've gpt sp,e some very good Dainese gear and some brilliant brilliant 'Windstopper' undergarments.
At first, I found myself heading north-west up the A600 towards Bedford. The main route to Bedford has plenty of bends, some very fast, wide straights, and lots of variety. It is a well-made country road for the most part, with few turnings and little traffic. You’d think, from that description that it was a good road to ride. But somehow it always disappoints. I’m not sure, now, why I went out this way. I made use of the lack of traffic and fast straights by whacking open the throttle now and then to see what the SV could do. (I do that a lot these days) I did a bit of fast cornering to raise the energy. I tried relaxing into the landscape and opened my visor briefly to feel the freshness of the night air. Nothing worked.
In the dark and icily cold night. the empty fields spreading out on either side across the featureless Bedfordshire plain made me feel kind of dismal inside. The engine’s V-twin roar, which usually sounds very sexy to my ears, seemed merely hollow. Then, as I came down into Cardington, where the two gigantic First World War hangers built for the R-100 and R-101 airships loomed against the night sky, and the sense of space and emptiness they created made me shiver right down to my bones, my resolve collapsed. I just felt bored. I didn’t know what to do. On the outskirts of Bedford I turned east and headed back towards Hertfordshire. A few miles down the road, in a fit of bad temper I turned off into a narrow lane and soon found myself completely lost. It was just a couple of days after new moon, so although there was a cloudless sky, the world was very black. All along one stretch, rabbits froze in front of me or scurried across the road in the headlights. I passed several deer foraging in the hedgerows. Down one windy lane I followed a badger for several hundred yards as he lumbered disdainfully down the road in front of me. There seem to be a lot more brocks around these days, but they are no better mannered than they ever were. About an hour later, and still wandering about the country lanes, I began to vaguely recognise some nearby landmarks. Then I saw signs to Gravenhurst and Pirton. That cheered me up. These were villages I knew. I wasn't far from home. I made for Pirton.
And so at about one o’clock in the morning I wound back through the villages of Shillington and Pirton and found myself riding home along the Pirton Road. It seemed sheer chance that I had ended up coming back this way. But I suspect, all along, some choices were being made, secretly, in the back of my mind. About three miles before hitting town I slowed the bike and turned off the road where the grassy, tree-lined bank drops briefly to the level of the tarmac. Even on a bright summer afternoon it is easy to miss the overgrown beginnings of a narrow path leading directly away from the road. On a night like this the entrance is just another dark patch in the hedgerow. Pushing through a loose cover of vegetation, I turned onto the track and rode between two lines of gnarled hawthorn bushes and crab apple trees.
The track runs straight as a die for about 400 yards, then widens suddenly into a small clearing near the edge of a patch of woodland. Within the clearing, the earth drops steeply away to form a little dell whose floor lies some 10 meters below the level of the surrounding land. My mind is suddenly very focused. I kill the engine, swing off the bike, and walk towards the dell across soft, loamy soil. Without the headlights, the woods are suddenly pitch black. I can make out only a few patches of grey glimmering among the trees.
A few rough wooden steps have been hammered into the slope by some local conservation group. I descend gingerly, squinnying into the dark. Down in the dell the air is, as always, very fresh. The occasional creaking of branches in the night breeze sound friendly and unthreatening. As my eyes adjust, I’m drawn to where a patch of greater darkness lies on the valley floor and I strain my ears in that direction, hoping to catch the sound of a hundred tiny springs that bubble up from the earth. These are the headwaters of the river Oughton.
The river is shallow - a large dog could wade happily through it to the bushes on the other side and not get too wet. For a time the newly emerged waters appear to linger quietly among the trees reluctant to leave the dell. Then, just beyond a rotting log, they slide silently away, meandering across the valley floor. For five lazy miles the river drifts through ancient woods and wetlands, the last in this part of England, past common pastureland, and distant open fields. A narrow footpath accompanies the river all the way. Here and there, fallen trees lie across the stream.
About a mile from the headwaters the river emerges from the woods and runs across an open expanse of tree-lined pasture. In the summer, this part of the channel is choked with watercress and its banks are lined with hemp agrimony. In another mile the river floods out onto the adjacent land. Poking up above waters that occupying the marshes are thousands of pale grass tussocks. The river path is lined with reedbeds that echo with all kinds of birdsong.
Soon, there is another change. The river collects itself once again, the banks straighten, and the waters gather momentum before hurtling themselves over an disused millrace. Next to the race is the sixteenth-century millhouse almost completely obscured by the trees.
Further downstream, a few trout are occasionally seen in the clear waters, and there are yet more woods, narrower, scruffier than before, full of hawthorn and whitethorn and dog rose. Finally, the river slinks past a notorious housing estate before joining the Rivers Hiz and Purwell on the outskirts of town. Of the three rivers, the Oughton is by far the most varied and beautiful. To me it is one of the most beautiful places on earth.
During the day the springs are visited by local people and their dogs. Dirt bikers also used to use the river path, blatting their way up to the springs from the town. They have recently been banned from using it under new government legislation. I think dirt bikers have been unfairly treated, but in this one instance I’m glad they are no longer able to shatter the peace of the woods with their noise and leave behind their trails of petrol fumes.
And where, by day, the riverside is a friendly, jaunty, very human place, by night the Oughton regains sole possession of itself and of the quiet woods that belong to it. Di and I used to come here regularly in the evenings, to escape the town and to spend time quietly together. Now I come here alone. Sometimes, if I’m out walking, I find myself wandering unconsciously in this direction, attracted by its peace and beauty, and also by something else.
Standing for a while on a little spit of earth that juts out tentatively into the river, I listen to the quiet sounds emerging out of silence. On this particular night, a dog fox makes its way down to the opposite bank. It eyes me closely but is not especially concerned. I allow my thoughts to drift back to a time, just over three years ago, when Di and I were married on this exact spot.
For sixteen years we had lived together, loving each other, sharing our leisure time together, but otherwise pursuing independent lives. In many ways, we thought, we had little in common. In those years we fought and bickered as couples do, unable to live peaceably with each other and unable to live apart. Only once did we separate, and that, very briefly. Two years into our relationship we had a disastrous holiday in France in which everything that could go wrong, did. The separation that followed was hell, but it took us both a full six months to swallow our pride and get back together. We met accidentally in town one afternoon. We looked at each other shiftily - and then Di blurted out a question: did I want to go to Helsinki with her for a week’s holiday. I said, yes, of course I did. And that was the end of that.
For a long time though, there was no real question, in either of our minds, of marriage. Di’s previous relationship had been difficult and I was unwilling to commit myself to something so binding, even though I would not have voluntarily exchanged my life with her for anything. I liked the idea that we were together because we wanted to be and not because we had accepted some contract drawn up by the state. I did ask Di to marry me a couple of times, rather half-heartedly, and, as expected, she said, no. At other times, she’d asked me and I said no, too. It was a game we played.
Then four years ago, our attitude changed. I can’t say why. Maybe it was because, as we got older we sensed that our time together was now finite, and we wanted to live together more closely. I’m not sure. One day, I asked her the question, rather more earnestly than usual, and she accepted.
Di is a Christian, though not of the kind that the local church would approve of. She is rather promiscuous with her faith and will attend the church of any sect or denomination without regard to its beliefs, though she has strong ones of her own. Me, I’m an atheist, and have been ever since I walked out of the confessional in my local Catholic Church at the age of 13 and never went back. The idea of a creator God that has eternally excluded himself from his own universe always seemed an absurdity to me, as did any kind of revealed religion. So, we didn’t want to get married in a church or a dreary municipal Register Office and neither of us had any interest in the glamour or the production values of a conventional wedding. We wanted to get married in our own way and at some place that was meaningful to us.
Di’s parents and mine were both dead. Di’s only sister had died twenty years earlier from encephalitis. I am an only child. We made our marriage in the company of friends. We felt as though we were not only being bound to each other as husband and wife but, as a couple, to the community of people we loved. People contributed to the event in ways we didn’t know about until the moment we arrived at the dell at the time of the ceremony. One had made dozens of little wooden boats with candles in them and floated them on the stream. Another made and hung paper lanterns in the high boughs around the springs. A young friend who was a tree surgeon by profession made an arch of living willow under which the ceremony took place. The women who accompanied Di to the springs brought flutes and recorders, the men who came with me brought drums. Many had helped with the organisation. The ceremony, which we had devised ourselves with the help of a friend, was simple and, we hoped, sincere, but it was also light hearted and fun. Di was stunning. It was the central act of our 20-year-old relationship, and the one I will always remember her by.
We asked everyone who was able, not to come by car, but to walk the five miles from town along the river path, or to come by bicycle. For those who couldn’t manage it, there were bicycle rickshaws ferrying people from taxis to the dell along the narrow path from the Pirton Road.
So, I come here from time to time to be quietly by myself and to think of my lovely wife whose life is now being slowly obscured by a mask of encroaching paralysis. Each month she becomes less and less able, but from underneath the crust of her disease, her personality still shines through like a beacon. Her spirit is strong just as it was when I married her among all that enthusiasm and merriment. But there is a lot more fear now, as she gradually descends into an enforced and eventually, a final silence. I’m far from done with being angry. But I never feel angry here.
On the bike or elsewhere when I’m alone, I still sometimes shout out my frustration and rage. The realist in me, says there is little point, of course. But so-called realism is shallow and merely imposes limits that do not recognize inner, more human needs. So because I feel the heat rising , I shout sometimes, and for a while after that I am OK..
We don’t know how much longer she has to live. It could be two, four, six months. The slow decay of the motor neurones in her brain will largely decide. Somewhere in the darkness of her skull her nerves are dissolving away and being replaced by glial cells. As the nervous impulses cease, so her muscles contract and stiffen, and her movements subside.
A whine is now detectable in her voice sometimes. She is aware of it and detests it but can do nothing about it. It is devastating for me to hear it from this person who has always been so strong. It is now so tiring for her to talk that she can rarely manage a few words at a time - so different from her former self. Recently though she has been dictating an account of her disease experience to me by means of a letter frame. It is a long and tedious business since she has to spell out her words one letter at a time using eye movements. But to me, the result is wonderful. The way she spoke, which was always remarkably clear and strong, is now re-emerging in front of me as I transcribe her eye movements onto the page.
The ride back home from the dell was more peaceful and thoughtful than the ride out. When I got back to town the light was off in her flat, so I parked the bike back in the garden and went quietly in to my nine-tenths of a house and got ready for bed. The house looks very different now. A lot of our former life has disappeared. We’ve had to find another home for Loki, the dog-monster who lay in wait for us each day and filched chicken legs out of the fridge. And for some reason we’ve been through a phase of accidentally breaking the few things we possess that have any real significance to us.
Before drifting off to sleep I lay in bed trying to think about what all these changes might mean. But there was no energy in my thoughts and eventually they subsided. All that remained in my mind were a few fragmentary images: of Di herself on our wedding day, of the hedges flashing by along the Pirton Road, and of the brilliance of the night sky.
She has a remarkable spirit. She laughs, as she has always laughed, at the absurdities of the world and her eyes are as bright and lively as ever.
Last edited by sv-wolf on Thu Jan 12, 2006 2:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Hud
“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
SV-Wolf's Bike Blog
“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
SV-Wolf's Bike Blog
-
blues2cruise
- Moderator
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sv-wolf
- Site Supporter - Platinum
- Posts: 2278
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- Location: Hertfordshire, UK
blues2cruise wrote:Thank you for sharing your story.
Hi Blues
I wasn't sure whether to post it or not. Much of it has very little to do with bikes. So thanks for the vote of confidence.
blues2cruise wrote:And...What is an electric consumer unit? Is that the gauge that tells how much electricity you have used?
Spot on! In earlier, more innocent days, when there were fewer bureaucrats and marketing executives it would have been called an electricity meter. Everything seems to be ever more geared to consumerism. The language is groaning under the weight of new terms related to it. I think they are supposed to convince us all of something. The marketing guys must think we are idiots!!! Then again, perhaps we are
(I did use the term, after all)Hud
“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
SV-Wolf's Bike Blog
“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
SV-Wolf's Bike Blog
-
sv-wolf
- Site Supporter - Platinum
- Posts: 2278
- Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2003 2:06 am
- Real Name: Richard
- Sex: Male
- Years Riding: 12
- My Motorcycle: Honda Fireblade, 2004: Suzuki DR650, 201
- Location: Hertfordshire, UK
Saturday 14 January 2006
Warning: Anyone who is easily offended or has delicate sensibilities please note – the following post contains several explicit references to bodily fluids.
Now that I have your undivided attention I will tell you how today I got my revenge on the whole tribe of mobile phone salesmen.
When I sleep over in the house, getting out of bed is not the most comfortable or convenient of experiences. The thermostatic control to the central heating has developed a mind of its own and refuses to turn on first thing in the morning, so the house is very, very cold. (Item 4,375 on my ‘to do’ list: ring the central heating engineer’). But that’s not all - since the builders moved in I have had no running water, no cooking gas, no toilet facilities and very little accessible electricity.
This particular Saturday I woke up to the sound of my alarm going off at five to eight. This gave me exactly five minutes to get dressed and get myself over to the flat to relieve the night carer. If I gave myself any longer, I know would drift back to sleep ‘for just another ten minutes (
)’ and the carer would miss her bus home.
It was a particularly bad start to the day. The first thing that I did as I heaved my legs over the side of the bed was to kick over a glass of drinking water and spill its contents all over a pile of my currently favourite books. Not suprising really. First thing in the morning I have all the grace of a rhinocerous and all the intellectual capacity of an amoeba. Sorting that out took two of my precious five minutes. In the remaining three, I flung on some clothes, switched off the intercom, slung my rucksack over my shoulder, picked up my reading glasses, magazine, bracelet and mobile phone and…
But it was the subsequent trajectory of this last item that changed everything. No sooner was the mobile phone in my hand than it liberated itself again. For a split second of slo-mo I watched it helplessly as it hung in the air before my eyes. In another moment it fell to the carpet, bounced once, rose gracefully into the air, executed a perfectly controlled somersault and plunged decisively into the basin of p1ss beside my bed (Do NOT make fun of the night-time requirements of a middle-aged man.)
In a succeeding moment of panic I plunged in after it (bracelet, glasses and magazine flying in all directions) and retrieved it, even before it had time to settle on the bottom. But all too late. With one final fizz of its green keypad lights it went dead. Death by drowning, I remember noting to myself, was specifically excluded in the warranty.
I dried and rinsed it off as best I could, opened the back, dried the shell and the battery and wondered what I should do next. Di refuses to have a land line in the flat, so my mobile is the only way I can get essential calls. I had to get a replacement.
Later that afternoon I entered the ‘Oxygen,’ mobile phone showroom in Stevenage. This is a slickly furnished space. Everthing in it grabs you by the short and curlys and gives you the hard sell. It’s a very single minded space as well.
What the hell was I going to tell the guy?
There were some long queues. For ten minutes I stood in line, listening to the practiced sales techniques of three distinctly oily-looking ‘customer service operatives’ as they deftly sold expensive contracts, dubious insurance deals and unwanted extras to their half-willing victims. Until that time it would never have occurred to me that anyone could have such an extended conversation about a mobile phone. By the time I was at the front of the queue, I was ready to make a run for it.
“Yes, who’s next?” said one of the salesmen in a voice tinged with a combination of boredom and irritation.
(What do I say? What do I say? I thought) “Err… I’d like some advice.” Too late to back out now. I was committed.
He looked at me enquiringly, a self-interested grin spreading across his face.
“I’ve buggered my phone,” I said.
“How did you do that?”
My moment of truth had arrived.
“Erm, I dropped it into a… a… a bucket of bleach.” I said. Inspiration had finally come to my aid. I thought that if there were any smell lingering about it, it might well be mistaken for bleach.
“Ha! How did you manage to do that?”
I had no answer.
“Hmm, yes,” he said, “it does pong a bit.”.
My face remained impassive, but somewhere deep inside, I cringed.
“I’ll just check inside to see if the SIM card is still working.”
Now why had I forgotten the SIM card? It was the one thing I hadn’t washed. I’d vaguely thought the shop might offer to sell me a new battery and tell me to let the terminals dry out… and leave it at that. I’m so innocent.
He took off the back, removed the battery and one slim, well-manicured finger reached for the SIM card.
“NO DON’T” I screamed inwardly. But his telepathic powers were not sufficiently attuned to hear me. He deepened his look of concentration and removed the card.
“Hmm, yes” he said, sniffing it, “I’ll just go and try it in another phone.” He gave me a brief smile to excuse himself from behind the desk and, as he left, he WIPED THE SIM CARD DRY on the sleeve of his immaculately pressed, white salesman’s shirt..
What could I do? I stood there rooted to the spot. In a flashback I saw, once again, the look of horror and distress in my aunt’s face when she found me, at the age of nine, constructing engineering works out of dried cow pats in the 30 acre field behind our house.
But, as the sales assistant went out of the room, I experienced a Jeckyll and Hyde transformation.
I’ve only had a couple of dealings with mobile phone salesmen, and they have either been very unhelpful (when they found out they couldn’t sell me anything) or tried to sell me a highly expensive deal I really didn’t want or need. For just a second, my horns came out and I experienced a truly satisfying moment of revenge.
I did relent when the guy came back. After all he was just trying to earn a living like the rest of us.
But, said the final whisper of the demon voice that had momentarily possessed me, it's his choice; he’s chosen to make his career in a really anti-social profession.
Revenge is sort of sweet But only 'sort of'
Warning: Anyone who is easily offended or has delicate sensibilities please note – the following post contains several explicit references to bodily fluids.
Now that I have your undivided attention I will tell you how today I got my revenge on the whole tribe of mobile phone salesmen.
When I sleep over in the house, getting out of bed is not the most comfortable or convenient of experiences. The thermostatic control to the central heating has developed a mind of its own and refuses to turn on first thing in the morning, so the house is very, very cold. (Item 4,375 on my ‘to do’ list: ring the central heating engineer’). But that’s not all - since the builders moved in I have had no running water, no cooking gas, no toilet facilities and very little accessible electricity.
This particular Saturday I woke up to the sound of my alarm going off at five to eight. This gave me exactly five minutes to get dressed and get myself over to the flat to relieve the night carer. If I gave myself any longer, I know would drift back to sleep ‘for just another ten minutes (
)’ and the carer would miss her bus home.It was a particularly bad start to the day. The first thing that I did as I heaved my legs over the side of the bed was to kick over a glass of drinking water and spill its contents all over a pile of my currently favourite books. Not suprising really. First thing in the morning I have all the grace of a rhinocerous and all the intellectual capacity of an amoeba. Sorting that out took two of my precious five minutes. In the remaining three, I flung on some clothes, switched off the intercom, slung my rucksack over my shoulder, picked up my reading glasses, magazine, bracelet and mobile phone and…
But it was the subsequent trajectory of this last item that changed everything. No sooner was the mobile phone in my hand than it liberated itself again. For a split second of slo-mo I watched it helplessly as it hung in the air before my eyes. In another moment it fell to the carpet, bounced once, rose gracefully into the air, executed a perfectly controlled somersault and plunged decisively into the basin of p1ss beside my bed (Do NOT make fun of the night-time requirements of a middle-aged man.)
In a succeeding moment of panic I plunged in after it (bracelet, glasses and magazine flying in all directions) and retrieved it, even before it had time to settle on the bottom. But all too late. With one final fizz of its green keypad lights it went dead. Death by drowning, I remember noting to myself, was specifically excluded in the warranty.
I dried and rinsed it off as best I could, opened the back, dried the shell and the battery and wondered what I should do next. Di refuses to have a land line in the flat, so my mobile is the only way I can get essential calls. I had to get a replacement.
Later that afternoon I entered the ‘Oxygen,’ mobile phone showroom in Stevenage. This is a slickly furnished space. Everthing in it grabs you by the short and curlys and gives you the hard sell. It’s a very single minded space as well.
What the hell was I going to tell the guy?
There were some long queues. For ten minutes I stood in line, listening to the practiced sales techniques of three distinctly oily-looking ‘customer service operatives’ as they deftly sold expensive contracts, dubious insurance deals and unwanted extras to their half-willing victims. Until that time it would never have occurred to me that anyone could have such an extended conversation about a mobile phone. By the time I was at the front of the queue, I was ready to make a run for it.
“Yes, who’s next?” said one of the salesmen in a voice tinged with a combination of boredom and irritation.
(What do I say? What do I say? I thought) “Err… I’d like some advice.” Too late to back out now. I was committed.
He looked at me enquiringly, a self-interested grin spreading across his face.
“I’ve buggered my phone,” I said.
“How did you do that?”
My moment of truth had arrived.
“Erm, I dropped it into a… a… a bucket of bleach.” I said. Inspiration had finally come to my aid. I thought that if there were any smell lingering about it, it might well be mistaken for bleach.
“Ha! How did you manage to do that?”
I had no answer.
“Hmm, yes,” he said, “it does pong a bit.”.
My face remained impassive, but somewhere deep inside, I cringed.
“I’ll just check inside to see if the SIM card is still working.”
Now why had I forgotten the SIM card? It was the one thing I hadn’t washed. I’d vaguely thought the shop might offer to sell me a new battery and tell me to let the terminals dry out… and leave it at that. I’m so innocent.
He took off the back, removed the battery and one slim, well-manicured finger reached for the SIM card.
“NO DON’T” I screamed inwardly. But his telepathic powers were not sufficiently attuned to hear me. He deepened his look of concentration and removed the card.
“Hmm, yes” he said, sniffing it, “I’ll just go and try it in another phone.” He gave me a brief smile to excuse himself from behind the desk and, as he left, he WIPED THE SIM CARD DRY on the sleeve of his immaculately pressed, white salesman’s shirt..
What could I do? I stood there rooted to the spot. In a flashback I saw, once again, the look of horror and distress in my aunt’s face when she found me, at the age of nine, constructing engineering works out of dried cow pats in the 30 acre field behind our house.
But, as the sales assistant went out of the room, I experienced a Jeckyll and Hyde transformation.
I’ve only had a couple of dealings with mobile phone salesmen, and they have either been very unhelpful (when they found out they couldn’t sell me anything) or tried to sell me a highly expensive deal I really didn’t want or need. For just a second, my horns came out and I experienced a truly satisfying moment of revenge. I did relent when the guy came back. After all he was just trying to earn a living like the rest of us.
But, said the final whisper of the demon voice that had momentarily possessed me, it's his choice; he’s chosen to make his career in a really anti-social profession. Revenge is sort of sweet
But only 'sort of'
Last edited by sv-wolf on Tue Jan 17, 2006 5:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
Hud
“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
SV-Wolf's Bike Blog
“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
SV-Wolf's Bike Blog
-
blues2cruise
- Moderator
- Posts: 10182
- Joined: Fri Apr 22, 2005 4:28 pm
- Sex: Female
- Years Riding: 16
- My Motorcycle: 2000 Yamaha V-Star 1100
- Location: Vancouver, British Columbia
