SV-Wolf's Bike Blog

[sv-wolf]

Well, it's a saga but it ain't heroic!

The plan this morning was to go into work on the Daytona, then at lunch time to ride her into the Old Town, buy some fuses, sort out the SV, then ride home - again, on the Daytona. After cooking and eating supper, I'd get a train the six miles into Stevenage, pick up the Suzuki and ride her back to Hitchin. I could then relax with both my babies safely home and under wraps. It was a plan! Laborious but simple! And tragically misconceived.

Why am I such an optimist?

I packed and repacked my rucksack so many times this morning before going into work that I left the tools I'd looked out in a wallet on the floor.

That meant I had to go back home for them on the Dayton in the lunch-break. I might have enjoyed the ride if my belief that it was going to be a fine day hadn't proved to be so ill-founded. My revised belief that those few spots of rain beginning to settle on my visor indicated nothing more than a short-lived shower, turned out to be no more accurate. Suddenly, it was hammering down! Big heavy raindrops bounced six inches and more off the surface of the road as I rode into Hitchin and back. They hammered down almost from the time I left the office courtyard till the time I got back, an hour and a half later. Then as I parked the bike, the clouds disappeared and the storm cleared up as suddenly as it had arrived. I waddled back up into the office. (You know, I hate racing crotches on leathers!)

But despite my getting wet, it was a glorious ride. The sky was electric, full of brilliant white light diffusing from the edges of clouds. I secretly love this weather: the sight of car headlights flashing suddenly in your mirrors, or machine-gunning through the fenceposts in the central reservation; the black tarmac glistening clean, and the whole world looking drenched in black and silver as though it were reflected in someone else's chrome.

After all the morning's meaningless activity in the office, it made me feel alive again.

But the journey into Hitchin and back and the search for fuses in the Old Town all took up so much time that I had to put off fixing the SV until going-home time. And going-home time wasn't till 7.00 pm because I'd spent so long farting around at lunch that I had a lot of hours to make up.

At seven o'clock I unplugged myself from the PC, changed into my leathers (now almost completely dried out thanks to the lung-dessicating heat of the office radiator system) and went down to the courtyard to deal with the intricacies of Suzuki engineering. (Chairman Suzuki, I have to hand it to you... This is pretty inscrutable stuff.) The bike's manual shows a neat little diagram of a fuse box already opened, but no explanation of how to achieve this desirable effect. As I worked, I began to think of reasons why.

It eventually took me half-an-hour to find out how to get the fuse box case open (it was an extremely clever little device) and when I did I discovered that the fuses were totally inaccessible. Short of taking the tail off there is no way I could get at them. The fuse box on the SV sits under the spar which runs across the bike between the main and pillion seats. And as if that isn't awkward enough, the lid of the fuse box swings forward when you open it and comes to rest in a more-or-less vertical position directly in front of the spar, completely blocking off any access to the fuses behind it. How stupid is that?

How stupid is that?

Chairman Suzuki...?

I spent an hour trying to sort out the problem - that's a dismal hour spent fiddling around in plummeting temperatures and poor lighting - an hour spent listening to the wind whistling around the courtyard and the open metal security gate clanging repeatedly against the railings. In the end I cut my losses and admitted defeat.

So the SV is spending another night in the courtyard.

But despite all the grumbling (done more for the sake of form than anything else), I enjoyed spending the time on the bike. It may have been frustrating but it was a damn sight more real that battering away at a keyboard in the office all day (or failing to avoid washing up at home.)

And I guess if I'm philosophical about this, I have to weigh up the occasional hour spent fiddling with the bike against the many dismal hours I would have undoubtedly had to spend listening to the wind whistling round the bleak platforms of Stevenage station if I'd come in by train. And I cannot tell you what a miserable experience that is.

[fireguzzi]

Maybe you need one of those gremlin bells for you bikes.

[sv-wolf]

Hi FG (I'll respond with more about gremlin bells further down the post)

Meanwhile...

The saga continues...

I decided, before I went to bed last night, that I really couldn't be arsed with trying to get at that fuse-box again. The SV was overdue on her service anyway, so the simplest thing would be to get her rescued to the dealer and get it paid for on my breakdown insurance. That seemed a good plan - a bit of a cop out in some ways, but on the whole, a good plan.

I went to bed almost peacefully. I say 'almost' because there was something - the faintest suspicion - relentlessly chewing away in the back of my head...

I got up bright and (reasonably) early the following morning (that's this morning) and picked up the phone. I hesitated a moment before calling the dealer - that nagging suspicion was back. Then, giving into it, turned the page in my phone book, and called up my insurance company instead.

"Oh hello, can you tell me whether I have breakdown cover for the SV1000 on my insurance..."

"Hmmm, I see... Well, OK. Thanks.

I knew it! All those nagging doubts were well founded. I had reinsured the two litre bikes on one policy a couple of months back (the Hyosung is SORNed.) But because the Daytona's independent breakdown cover had a longer period to run than the main insurance, I'd only taken out a short-term recovery policy on the Suzuki (intending to get a full year's cover later) - and that had run out...

Oh bollocks!

It was going to cost me to get the SV recovered, unless...

I rang up the dealer. I asked if they could do the service and check over the electrics for me and then asked casually whether they could also collect - from Stevenage. I was in luck. By chance their van driver was delivering a scooter to a central Stevenage address that very lunch time and could pick her up on his way back. Wonderful! I made the collection arrangements and I put the phone down. Sorted! At last!

Except...

It dawned upon me just fifteen seconds later that I was due to see my bereavement counsellor at exactly the time I had just arranged to hand over the bike keys in the courtyard. With that thought paralysis struck. I didn't want to cancel the counselling since the sessions have been helping a lot. My memory has begun to recover recently - though obviously not as much as I had imagined - and in the last few weeks I'd started to feel like I was slowly making a new life for myself.

In any case, if I cancelled the session at short notice, I'd still have to pay and it would cost me an arm and a leg.

After walking round in circles for five minutes I got back on the phone and made a couple of phone calls. Eventually I called up a colleague at work to see if she would be willing to meet the van driver and hand over the keys for me. No problem, she said. Wonderful!

All seemd to go very well after that. I had a good counselling session, got home, made some lunch and rode back into Stevenage on the Daytona. I turned the Daytona into the courtyard - to be confronted with the SV still standing there, unmoved.

It was, after all, only a little inconvenience in the cosmic scheme of things, but at that moment it felt like a major disaster. My stomach landed instantly on the pavement, and I felt wretched. Under normal circumstances, I'm realistic enough to think things through practically. But I'd just come from a very emotional counselling session and I was feeling a bit unhinged and swinging about all over the place. All sorts of worst case scenarios when through my head.

As it turned out the situation became an object lesson in how you shouldn't make instant judgements about things. When I rang the dealer, I was told his driver had been delayed; that was was all. The van was on his way. And when you come to think of it, whenever do deliveries and collections take place on time, anyway?

It was 5 o'clock before the guy turned up. I went down to meet him in the courtyard. I gave him the keys. He put the keys in the ignition, turned the ignition on, pressed the starter button, and listened as the SV fired up nice and promptly.

Ah!

At that moment I have to say I felt pretty silly. And I had good reason to be thankful for being middle-aged. One of the compensations of being over 50 is that you get to have a sense of humour about yourself and don't take things so seriously. Twenty years ago, I would have been mortified with embarrassment.

They van driver thought it was pretty funny too, and we had a laugh about it before he wheeled the SV out of the courtyard and into his waiting vehicle. We talked for about five minutes about Power Commandering before he disappeared.

So what was going on? I'd turned that key and pressed that starter button at least two dozen times after she first blinked out on me. The last time was earlier that morning. I'd checked all the obvious things without any joy but kept trying her - and on each occasion, nothing! Not a dickie bird! Not a whisper !

Like you FG, I've often thought the SV had become infested early on in life with a particularly mean-spirited type of gremlin: either they, or she likes playing tricks on me. I used to think that. Now, I think she's just a bike with a laddish sense of humour.

[jstark47]

Bad contact in the starter button switch? I think you're doing the right thing having them look at it, 'cause it could let you down again ......... like maybe in Fort William, fr'instance...... (when are you gonna finish the last day of that 4 corners ride blog???!!!!)

But I think motorcycle electrical systems don't really like you for some reason. Good thing you're not riding a vintage Triumph, you'd really be up a creek!

[sv-wolf]

[quote="jstark47"]
(when are you gonna finish the last day of that 4 corners ride blog???!!!!)

Yeah, I know. I've been feeling a bit sheepish about that - and the India blog. I already have a lot of them written up and they're almost ready to post. Must get round to finishing them some time. Just so much to do...

So much to do...

[sv-wolf]

Oh! and before I go to bed, one small piece of public idiocy.

What is this?



In my very simple-minded way I'd say this looks like Christmas, wouldn't you? It's Christmas in Stevenage. (I took this view from the front entrance of my office building before riding home for the evening.)

Only, oddly enough, it isn't.

No! no! no! This is ...

PC madness has finally arrived in my place of work.

It has been announced that we will be given an extra half-day Christmas holiday this year (as every year) - but this year we are not allowed to call it that - because it isn't - not any more. The council has recently adopted the government's new 'Diversity' policy - so, from now on we all have to celebrate, not Christmas, but 'diversity' itself. 'Diversity' is a new-fangled notion that will set the world to rights by making everyone feel cuddly and willing to get along together. 'Diversity' means appreciating everything and everyone (public stonings, for example? mutilations? gassing and poisoning? wife beating?) 'Diversity' is also supposed to make 'good business sense' (That's a quote that I found way down in the small print. Maybe we are getting nearer to the truth now.)

But just hang on in there a moment. Doesn't celebrating 'diversity' mean celebrating difference? Doesn't it mean being 'inclusive'? Aren't we supposed to be seeing the value in everything, including everything, celebrating everything, not banning things - like Christmas?

If the government truly wanted to celebrate 'diversity' wouldn't it stop trying to disguise Christmas as a secular event, something non-descript that we can all share (never mind the fact that it becomes banal and meaningless in the process!), shouldn't it, instead, be declaring a wide-range of new public holidays? That way, in addition to having time off to celebrate Christmas and Easter and Whitsun we'd have the opportunity to celebrate Diwali and Ramadan and all the other faith holidays as well.

I'd be very supportive of that.

As an amiable old atheist, I'd celebrate them all. I'm not fussy.

[dr_bar]

I wonder what all the other ethnic communities would say if the gov't banned the naming of all of their religious holidays/celebrations. The silly thing is, Christmas hasn't been a religious holiday for decades, it's a commercial holiday...

[sv-wolf]

Anyone interested in railway stations? All right! Neither am I - unless the station is St Pancras, London - newly refurbished as the terminus of the new direct London to Paris Eurostar train link through the channel tunnel.

I’ve always loved St P. It must be one of the great fantasy buildings of all time: pure Victorian gothic but looking as much like an Arab palace as a British railway station. And the barrel vault of the train shed behind it is phenomenal too - in its own time it was the largest unsupported vault ever constructed.

Why am I posting this on TMW? Well, I was on my way up to an India Enduro pub night in London and as I was passing by, I thought I’d just drop and see what they have done to it. Here are a few pics of the vault. It was too dark to get a shot of the front of the building.







Down at the Cittie of York pub in High Holborn later on that evening things were really popping. Every year the guys who are about to do the Enduro India rally get to mingle with those that did it the previous year. The idea is that those of us who have already done it go along and scare the dodo out of the newbies and keep them on their toes – something like that.

It is also a clever bit of marketing by the company that runs the rallies. They pose as an amateur outfit in the best British ‘suck it and see’ tradition, but the general suspicion is that they know exactly what they are doing, because they encourage people like me to come along to events like this and do their selling for them. But who cares! It is in a good cause and everyone gets something out of it. Here’s a pic of some of the people I did the rally with last year, all of them every bit as enthusiastic now as they were then.




All but one of us are going again or doing the Enduro Himalaya in 2008. The odd-man-out is James (in the middle) who is just about to metamorphose into a daddy (first time), and too excited about that to think about bikes or India. I’ll look forward to seeing him out there again in twenty years when he has recovered (I should be so lucky!) I felt really glad to see them all again. There was a great feeling of camaraderie.

The Enduro team and the charity reps were bouncing their way through the event as usual, and as usual consuming phenomenal quantities of alcohol.

The newbies were looking anxious and excited, and their wives were looking either anxious or bored. It was all too, too familiar.

[sv-wolf]

I have a rule that personally prohibits Christmas from overspreading its boundaries. This means I confine all my buying, fretting, decorating, card writing and cooking to the week before the 25th. Mostly, I confine it to Christmas Eve. I have this rule because I have always enjoyed Christmas, and playing it this way means that when the time comes for socialising, celebrating, overeating and watching too much television I'm not completely exhausted or fed up with the whole deal.

With this resolution still firmly in my mind, I really believed that December (the first half of it anyway) would be a cheap month this year. I had no big bills to pay, no exceptional expenses to fork out; no real demands on my bank account. My life seemd completely tranquil. Or so I believed.

That all changed, of course, when the SV started playing the prima donna with its electrics. My heart sank when that happened. I was really looking forward to having just a few weeks when I didn't have to fork out a load of money on one or other of the bikes. But still, I told myself, getting it fixed wasn't going to be a huge expense, even if I chose to have it serviced at the same time. It could have been worse - a whole lot worse. And that, of course, is the point.

There is another rule - a cosmic rule this time - which it is not wise to neglect. This rule states that if a thing can get worse, it will get worse, and it will almost certainly do it at the most inconvenient time - like in the weeks running up to Christmas.

The dealers have had the SV for five days now, and each day (except Sunday) I have received a telephone call from them. On Friday they rang to say that they had done the service on the bike as I had asked (£150) but could find nothing at all wrong with the electrics - which meant of course that the problem still existed and could pop up again at any time.

On Saturday, they rang to ask me whether I wanted them to put a new front tyre on the bike as it was beginning to look a bit bald (£130). I gave a sigh and said, yes. It's true, the tyre was getting a bit low on its tread, but I wasn't planning on using it much over the next couple of months and it was still quite legal. When I thought about it, though, I remembered I'd had a few small slides recently in the frosty weather. So I decided to be sensible and go for something a bit more grippy now, especially since the bike was with the dealers anyway.

On Monday Stephan rang me to tell me that the mechanics were too busy and they couldn't change the tyre till Tuesday. So, Monday was a good day - comparatively speaking.

And then came Tuesday (today). And with it came the inevitable phone call. First, Steph suggested I should sit down. Then he told me that having got the front wheel off they discovered a large crack in the bottom of the outer tube of the nearside (LH) fork. They rang me back later to quote me a figure of £390 for the replacement part.

I can't quite work out whether I'm extremely glad to know that the dealer discovered the crack before the bike decided to fall apart with me on it, or whether I feel annoyed that it should have happened at all. Because I would be willing to bet that the fork cracked when another dealer massively overtightened the wheelnuts when I last had the tyre changed.

Simon, the mechanic, more or less confirmed the likelihood of that for me. Given the location and the nature of the crack, he said, it was very much the sort of thing he would have suspected. But I can't prove this, of course, so I will have to live with it.

He also confirmed my belief that the engine is well past its best and that spending a total of £700 on the old girl was perhaps not the best use of my money.

I spent this evening moaning to my mate, Ron, and searching around on the web for addresses of breakers' yards, to see what I could get for less than £390. I also spent some time looking at US sites selling motorcycle parts and wondering why things were so much cheaper on the other side of the pond.

Ron, meanwhile, went onto Ebay for me and found a pair of complete SV1000SK3 forks (claimed in perfect condition) for £125 (buy now). I needed to move fast because the dealers were not prepared to have the bike hanging around and taking up room in the workshop indefinitely. I talked it over with Ron, dithered just long enough to make £125 sound like a reasonable deal in my head, and decided to go for it. Ron is driving me down south of London to pick them up on Thursday. Ron, thank you. You're a good mate.

So, heigh ho for Christmas!

My initial plans for Christmas fell through this year. I was going to fly over to Ireland and spend the holiday season with my step-daughter and her family in Donegal, but I had to use up almost all of my annual leave earlier in the year and now don't have enough left to do that. There followed a period of several weeks when I was worried that I might have to spend Christmas at home. Fortunately, things have turned round and I've arranged to ride down to Brighton early on the 25th and spend the day with some old friends. I'll ride back late that evening.

I'm looking forward to that Christmas day ride. The Christmas period is the only time when British motorways are anything like deserted, especially if you travel early and late. It will be quite spooky riding back in the dark on an empty road. On Boxing Day I'll spend the day with some other friends who live in a village a few miles from home. I'm glad to be invited out: I'm not yet ready to invite people here. Even so, sitting in on other people's family Christmas's does make me feel a bit like a spare package.

Last Christmas was a strange time. Seven months had elapsed since Di had died, but I was still in a state of shock, and protected from reality by a fuzzy halo of feeling that was neither good or bad - or perhaps, a bit of both. This year, the furry edges have melted away and a colder reality has settled in on me. I'm feeling things more keenly. Although I'm gradually moving on and starting to pick up the pieces of my life, anniversaries and family times like Christmas always leave me missing Di again, as badly as before. I miss all sorts of things about her but one thing in particular: when I look at photographs of her, what really gets to me is her smile. Her smile was something special.

When I was over in India looking at the Maharaja’s palace in Mysore, lit by 800,000 light bulbs, I thought constantly about Di. For all its dazzle, the palace generated nothing like the wattage her smile. And there was a lot less warmth about it too. I couldn't help contrasting all the pomp and spectacle around me - brilliant in the darkness of the night - with what I had lost. Di smiled a lot, and when she smiled her whole face lit up, and often that lit up the faces of the people around her too. I always loved to see that happen, and now that she is gone I’ve come to understand just how much I've lost.

When you love someone so completely, it is strange (and wonderful) what you miss about them when they are gone, how even their most annoying habits eventually come to seem endearing (even their dislike of motorcycles.) And that thought makes me realise that if there are a lot of things I find endearing about Di, now - as there are - then it’s because, boy, could she be annoying!

This idea kept pushing itself into my mind all evening as I fretted over the SV (it's extraordinary how time past and time present can get woven together so oddly in your thoughts). I started to dwell - very fondly - on all the domestics and disagreements we used to have, so that after a while I found myself searching out two, now hardly-noticeable, dents in the dining room wall. The first dent was made by the Daytona's rearset when I brought it into the house out of the wet last winter. I can imagine what Di would have said about that! The second dent is harder to explain.

Y’know we all have ways of letting off steam. Well… when I need to let off steam I throw kitchen blenders. Yeah, yeah, really! It’s a long story. When I used to get really mad at Di (and boy, did I) I’d lob our kitchen blender at the wall - not at her: that would be unthinkable! The crunch the blender made as it hit the wall seemed to release something inside me and make me relax. I got through one kitchen blender a year for almost the entire twenty years of our relationship. Replacing them was an annual expense. In the end it got to be a kind of tradition.

It all started early in our relationship. One day, we were having an almighty row when I began to feel close to critical, like a one-man Chernobyl just getting ready to blow. In my frustration I made a big dramatic gesture, flinging my arms out on either side of me and knocking the kitchen blender off its shelf. It fell on the floor and smashed. That was the first time – and it was a pure accident. After that, it got a bit more deliberate. As we did a lot of cooking, there was always a blender ready to hand, just waiting to be picked up and flung…

So, the second dent in the wall was a blender impact zone. Looking at it earlier this evening, I was overcome with something like a feeling of nostalgia - not because I like throwing things (That habit was entirely confined to blenders, by the way) but because our rows just rode the surface of something very much deeper. That dent is paradoxically, a reminder of how close we really were to one another. Whenever one of us got to screaming point it was because something very loving inside was trying desperately to find expression, and failing We came to understand that eventually, and we knew that we got into those tangles because, like everyone else, we were imperfect human beings. Usually, our rows would peak and then end in helpless laughter. Because, believe me, we tried very hard to close the gap. I’d give anything to be driven nuts by her, again.

Sadly, and wonderfully, it was only during her last, long illness that we discovered how to bypass all the rubbish and live quietly together from the heart, enjoying what we most appreciated in each other. That time, as exhausting and frightening as it was, was also very special.

People tell me that you never really get over someone. And I guess I'll always bear the pain of losing her. I still have moments when I get racked with longing for her: longing is a painful place to be. And in some way, as time goes by, it gets harder, not easier - no more so than at Christmas. So I’m glad to have plenty of company this Christmas. I shall be away from home for all of it, thank goodness. I shall need that distance I think.

It's ironic that one of the consequences of Di's contracting Motor Neurone Disease was that we had greater need of a blender than ever before. The disease produces a slow, creeping paralysis, which eventually robs all the body of movement except for the eyes. The worst part of it is when it reaches the throat, making it almost impossible to swallow (or speak). So, for the last six months Di had to have all her food pureed for her, and even then her eating would always be accompanied by coughing and choking fits. I spent hours just blending up little bits of food for her meals. The funny thing is, our last big kitchen blender met its end three years ago, a year before she died. During that last year we made do with two small hand blenders. We never bought another big one. Perhaps we didn't need one any more.

I still have those hand blenders. I use them a lot. They blend food just as effectively and as quickly as a big goblet blender, but I doubt whether they would make quite such a satisfying crunch against the wall.

[noodlenoggin]

Y'know what? It's good to know that other people, on occasion, have fights as intense as my wife and I.