SV-Wolf's Bike Blog

[sv-wolf]

Ah! yes. Reinforcements! Great! Bring them on!

Tarts? Is that like a popover or a strudel? Or a crumpet? Is a crumpet like a strumpet?

Well, noodle, it really rather depends what you like to get your mouth around on a Saturday night.

The American preference for the term 'broad' on the other hand, merely suggests your nation's dreary obsession with size over quality. It's really not very edifying, you know.

Oh Lord! No, 'crumpet' is not like a strumpet. A 'tart' is like a strumpet, (or a 'mean' or a 'slag' or even a 'judy' if you are unfortunate enough to have been born north of Sheffield.) 'Crumpet' (as in 'a bit of crumpet') is more like a 'bird' or a 'bint' (Arabic deriv.) which are general terms for a woman - or possibly even a girlfriend if you have been careless enough.

('Tart' was once a term of endearment, probably derived from 'sweetheart.' But the slide into contemptuous usage can be put down to the generally cynical nature of men and the lack of communication between the sexes. That is one thing our two cultures probably have in common.)

And what's with all the "wings" on British cars? They don't so much fly as plummet, y'know. And you put your fenders where the bumpers should be? And what's with the "bonnets" and "boots?" I don't dress my car up all frilly-like, nossir.

It's got a hood, and a trunk, and bumpers, and fenders, all where they SHOULD be!

How very pedestrian of you! What a colourless imagination you Americans have. Sigh! You must bore yourselves, silly. ( )

And if a "cookie" is actually a "biscuit," then what have I been pouring "gravy" on at "dinner" all these "years?"

That depends on how clumsy you are, my dear boy!!!!!!

[sv-wolf]

"Did the earth move for ya, baby!

Well, it did here, last night.

Strewth, I thought the walls were coming down.

We're not exactly used to earth tremors in the middle of the night here in the UK. The land is tame, domestic, mild-mannered, not given to bursts of head shaking. Well... it wasn't up until last night! I'm told the tremors hit 5.2 on the Richter scale. They were felt everwhere from Scotland in the north right down to the Kent coast. The epicentre was in Lincolnshire, which you might describe geographically as the Middle-East of the country (where terrorist squads of anti-bike police pounce on unsuspecting motorcyclists.)

It happened round about 1.00 am. I was in bed, reading. The house shook, a big pile of paperbacks on my floor collapsed and the heat outlet on my neighbour's wall clanged around dramatically for about fifteen seconds. There were several loud bangs nearby. I came down as soon as everything stopped moving expecting to find smashed tiles and chimney pots littering the ground outside but everything seemed spookily quiet and normal.

The bikes were OK. Well, that's what I was really worried about. They weren't tipped over or covered with rubble from my roof or any of the other things I had fantasised for them. In fact, the damn Suzuki whose alarm starts wailing if I as much as brush by it on the way down the garden hadn't uttered a peep throughout all that shaking.

I knew what was happening the moment I felt it, because Di and I were caught in the earthquake zone in Italy some years ago when the earth shook on and off for several days. We were in Assisi the day the roof collapsed in the basilica, and the Giotto frescos came crashing to the floor.

One night while we were there, staying in a little hill village called Greppolischieto, a tremor set the window blinds banging, and shook a scorpion out of the rafters and on to our bed. That was scary. Even scarier, the scorpion scuttled away somewhere and we couldn't find it.

Like the land, the wildlife in the UK is fairly shy and peaceable, so having scorpions wandering around in the bedroom at night was a new experience for both of us. (The only truly poisonous form of wildlife seen in the UK in recent years has been Margaret Thatcher.)

The shock waves must somehow have been very localised or nodal because many of my colleagues at work who live close by hadn't felt a thing, others just a slight tremor, while still others got the full works.

Tremors like this aren't unknown in the UK; we get them every fifty years or so - I'm told - but not often as extensively as this. The last really big quake caused the roof of the parish church in Hitchin town centre (St Mary's) to collapse. But that was in the tenth century - a little before my time. Personally, I've never experienced anything like it before, not here. So, no, I'm still convinced that this is a nasty continental habit. Bloody EU!

[Wrider]

Lol well I'm glad you're ok!!! And everything in your house is too! Oh, and about the zuke, figures doesn't it??? lol
Wrider

[sv-wolf]

Lol well I'm glad you're ok!!! And everything in your house is too! Oh, and about the zuke, figures doesn't it??? lol
Wrider

Cheers Wrider.

The SV? I reckon that, being a big pile of japanese Cr-ap (I love it really; I'm just in a mood with it at present) its ECU has built-in earthquake recognition. I just hope it's not preprogrammed to commit hara kiri as well.

BTW, sorry to hear about your (ex -) Volusia. Hard times, eh! That doesn't sound too comfortable: no job and no bike. Anything hopeful on the horizon?

I did try to post something rude about you on the Suzy forum to cheer you up, but TMW wouldn't let me. Apparently I don't know the correct Suzuki handshake or something, so I haven't got access. Didn't know we had secret societies around here.

Take care.

[Wrider]

Just go and PM Mike to let you into it! Special access forums and such...
As for the Vol, that was quite near a year ago now lol...
I almost (if I could have afforded it it would have come through) had a 98 Bandit 1200 for $1100 US. But alas, the gods of the financial worlds have decided against it...
Have a good one bud!
Wrider

[sv-wolf]

Friday night

Wind’s getting up!

It’s roaring and flapping around the trees at the bottom of the garden. It’s bloody cold out there, too. The rain is chill and the winds are chillier. I’ve just got in from the back yard where I’d been bodging up a strap that had snapped on the SV’s bike cover. Stray flowerpots and seed-trays and other garden leftovers were rolling about on the lawn. No doubt about it, ‘it’s going to be a blowy night’ - as my ol’ dad would’ve said in his country accent.

As a kid, I grew up in the very last house on the edge of a small farming village in Hertfordshire. Open fields spread out around us on three sides. At night, in the autumn time, as the moonlight drifted into my bedroom from behind a wrack of clouds, the sound of the wind would be everywhere. It screamed across the open pastureland. It roared in the trees and cracked their branches together. It howled round the corners of the house and whistled down the chimney pots. It blotted out all other outdoor sounds except the sounds of the boys next door revving up their bikes in the alleyway next to my bedroom. They did that nearly every night whether they went riding or not. They’d sit and talk and smoke and run their engines. They spoke loudly and belligerently, and occasionally I’d hear a snatch of their conversation. Sometimes other lads would turn up outside the front gate and run their engines too.

I’d listen out for Chud’s bike. He rode a 350cc BSA. He’d rev the nuts off it. His brothers had Triumphs, I think. They all sounded good to me, but none sounded as beautiful as Chud’s BSA. When several bikes were running together in the alleyway, the adjoining wall would shake and set the head of my bed trembling. I loved it. The bikes and the wind; the wind and the bikes: they were the two great remembered sounds of my early childhood. I’d drift off to sleep with them thrumming in my ears. I’ve loved both sounds ever since. They’re wild sounds, fierce and lonely, but there’s one important difference between them – at least, it was important then. The winds were cold and friendless and made you shiver comfortably in your warm bed: but the bikes were hot. Hot. Hot. Hot.

In those days, village life seemed to offer endless freedoms to a young boy. At weekends and during school holidays I roamed for miles through the woods and over the fields with my mates, dodging gamekeepers and getting into trouble. We all did - all of us. Country kids ran loose in the fifties and sixties. Not even the lurid images of Myra Hindly and the “moors murders” investigations which monopolised our television screens for months changed any of that. Adults never bothered much where we went or what we got up to. They seemed to think our roaming was good for us. “Get out of the house,” they’d yell. “Turn off that blasted television set. Go out and get some fresh air.” So that’s what we did. We had fresh air aplenty. And we had plenty of fun.

Occasionally a gamekeeper would spot us roaming through fields belonging to the estate, or dismantling the hay bales after the combine harvesters had gone back into storage, or – the greatest sacrilege of all - tramping through the woods during the pheasant nesting season, destroying the bird’s eggs. Gamekeepers rarely managed to lay hands on us – we ran too quickly for that. We knew they’d give us a good belting if they caught us. Instead, because they were local people and knew all of us by sight, they waited until our fathers were home from work and then called at our houses. They’d talk aggressively and with borrowed authority and threaten to call the police or set their dogs on us. But our dads were as contemptuous of gamekeepers as we were. We knew it. Most of us came from old village families who’d lived around here for generations. The old undeclared class war between village folk and the estate was settled in all our bones.

But they rarely came to my house. They were frightened of Rex, our mean-minded, bad-tempered, vicious and loving old labrador-cross who had taken a bite out of the pants of every post-boy, milkman, policeman, baker, grocer and gamekeeper in the village. (RIP Rex: you were the greatest and most loving of friends.) No-one came to our house who was not both known and welcome.

Nothing lasts forever, though. As I grew older, other interests began to take hold of my imagination. The fields no longer seemed to be where the best adventures were to be had. And life in those five or six over-familiar streets began to seem suffocating, frustrating, confining. Over time, we got bolder, more angst-ridden. We got into even more trouble. But there was one thing we all knew and understood. There was one great freedom highway out of the village and that was on the saddle of a snorting two-wheeled café racer, like Tich’s, or Doug’s or the Handyman’s (that was Frank, but we never called him by his name.) It seemed that we had only one ambition between us; it was the only thing we could imagine. It invaded our dreams.

I guess we were just a bunch of village hicks. We had very little ambition, any of us; very little conception of a world outside our own small environment of clay and chalk. We spoke with a thick village accent and in a dialect I now rarely hear. Our village was a kind of Brigadoon, existing outside time and space, permitting us only the haziest idea of what lay beyond its boundaries. We caught only hints of another, larger, somehow more dangerous world.

It was the time of the cold war, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Somewhere, going off vaguely over there, was something called the Vietnam War. Then there was Suez and the rumblings from East Africa as the British disengaged themselves from empire. We heard serious words being spoken by serious men on the BBC’s six o’clock news every evening. We saw our parents looking darkly at one another. And, of course, there was always something funny going on with the French. We distrusted the French - intensely. We distrusted them because… well, because they were French and foreign and smoked multi-coloured cigarettes, and we were normal and honest and English. But none of this made any real difference to us – at least, not to me. We - I - was too young, too ignorant to care, too fascinated by my own small world.


But of all of us, I was, perhaps even then, the most ‘cosmopolitan,’ the one who was a bit ‘different’. Every morning, before Chud and Barry and John and Les all traipsed off to school together – a short half-mile’s walk through the village, past the green and the manor house - I was already descending the chalk ridge on the number 383 bus, leaving my hilltop home and travelling six miles to the nearby market town of Hitchin. Unlike the rest of my neighbours, I was a Catholic (so I was told) and so I attended a Catholic school. People spoke differently here in the town. They thought differently. Some even commuted daily into London on the train. Hitchin was an engine of commerce and heavy drinking and small-town self-importance. More significantly, it had sweet shops and newsagents where I could buy all the comics I wanted, the moment they came out.

But the differences were superficial. Once I got home in the evening and changed out of my school uniform, I did what every other boy in the village did: I sat down to tea and watched ‘children’s hour’ on the box, then disappeared up to the village green to hang out with my mates and talk to the older lads: the rockers who gathered there on their bikes. Or I ran off down the fields before the vile word ‘homework’ could be mentioned. Sometimes Rex would come too, bounding along at my side, or he'd disappear like a bullet across the grass to commit some new outrage upon the innocent and unsuspecting.

For me all this was to change when I got sent away to school in Hampshire at the age of twelve. In one single act of bureacracy, I lost my home, my friends, my culture and my fantasies; I lost my accent, my language, my vision and my world. Ultimately, I lost my parents, too, who were utterly confused and defeated by this strange new son who came back home to them at the beginning of each school holiday. My talk grew full of the strangest ideas. I became a stranger in my own village and even in some way to myself. My former friends and I grew rapidly apart, like two new species beginning to take their own evolutionary paths. Without my knowing it, my boarding school came to dominate my life.

The school was located in yet another green wilderness, somewhere out beyond Andover – but it was a place so alien to me at first, that it might as well have been on the other side of the moon. Its upper-middle-class culture was so different from anything I had ever known that I was completely dumbfounded and hardly spoke for the first few weeks. Its rules and rigid regime allowed us almost no free time to follow our own inclinations at all. That came as a complete shock. It was a way, I realised later, of manipulating children into complete conformity: don’t give them time to think or understand how they feel. Although the intellectual foundations of my political beliefs were formed later, they had their emotional origins here.

I remember the first time I saw the building. It had been built as a Queen Anne hunting lodge but was more like something out of Dickens. It had three, wide, heavy stone arches in its façade and three gross, hairy heads, one carved on each of the keystones. I remember stepping over the threshold for the first time into the Black and White Hall. I remember squeezing back the tears as I struggled up the stairs with my case to find my first dormitory. From that moment, motorcycles faded completely from my external world – faded and then, for the rest of my teenage years, disappeared almost entirely. The great highway leading out of the village was now part of the rubbish bin of history. The route had changed, though I didn’t know now where it lay. For a while, all my thoughts and energies became bent on the single pressing need to survive the school’s brutal and abusive regime. Fortunately, I was only there for just over a year.

I moved on to another boarding school the other side of Andover. I’d won a scholarship. The new school, Redrice, was much more civilised. It had the reputation of being the most beautiful public school in England. And it really was – beautiful. It was set in 54 acres of Hampshire parkland. If you want to see an image of a disgustingly priviledged childhood, then you only have to take a look at Redrice House. I gradually found a place there for myself, but it took several years, and although I absorbed many of its values without realising, its culture remained alien to me.

If, in those years at boarding school, motorcycles were almost entirely absent from my environment, they were not absent from my imagination. Like most teenagers, my plans for my future life were extremely vague, but not my plan to buy a bike. It wasn't until I was in my twenties, free at last to pursue my own life again, that I fulfilled that childhood ambition. As I'm already repeating myself, and I’ve told that story elsewhere in this blog, I won’t go over it again.

In my twenties, I put the memories of my teenage years behind me and moved on – or, at least, I thought that's what I was doing. But memories have a knack of coming back to haunt you in all kinds of disguises. I used to listen endlessly to ‘The Boy’s Magic Flute’, a set of nineteenth-century German songs set to music by Gustav Mahler. They tell the stories of prisoners, press-ganged soldiers, those who have been cheated and those who are oppressed. The heroes of these songs are forced to deal with life as best they can. Their tone is often richly ironic or sarcastic. I listened to them so often, I learned the German words by heart. One phrase in particular from the 'Song of the Prisoner in the Tower' has stuck almost obsessively in my mind ever since: “Die gedanken sind frei”, “thought is free”. The German language is wonderful, you can get your teeth into it. And you can hardly get your teeth into these words without feeling angry.

Riding home from work tonight, the wind came howling across the fields to the by-pass. Several times I was blown across the carriageway, once dangerously close to the traffic island on the Wymondly junction. I had to fight hard to keep the bike under control. It was the sound of the wind that brought these thoughts back to me again. It reminded me too of my father: “It’ll be a blowy night tonight, you mark my words,” he’d say. And, once again, I understood how like him I am in so many ways. The first time I realised that I was horrified. He never escaped the village, but was content all his life to accept its small, self-righteous and complacent ways. For me, I’m so glad that I eventually found a highway out of there, even though I played little part in the choosing of it.

No, we’re not completely alike, but we're alike enough, and these days I've come to cherish the similarities. My dad was a country man through and through with an extraordinary memory for the details of concrete experience. He had little capacity for abstract thought, and cared little for it but he had a countryman’s love of the small material details of life, human relationships and of the natural world about him. As I get older those things seem of more and more value to me. Conversely, many of the products of my excessively expensive and extensive education, I value less and less.

Though my dad hated motorcycles – they scared him silly - they belong to his world. They are part of the physical apparatus of our existence. Bikes and the experience of riding them are simple, direct and immediate things. Getting on a bike and going for a long ride is a great thing to do when life begins to get complicated. One further thing I've learned. If you treat them correctly, relationships can be simple, direct and immediate too.

[sv-wolf]

As for the Vol, that was quite near a year ago now lol... Wrider

Wow OK

Still getting back to the real world here!

[dr_bar]

Boy, do you ever wander down some old roads when you ride... I enjoy the insights into your past, there was obviously a lot at work that combined to shape the man that exists today...


So, is there a book in the works? Maybe a way out of your current "Village". (or job)

[Wrider]

No problem!
And I agree with Doc... You've gotta have a book or something coming out. Personally I love the way you write, and the way you communicate your past really does let one see how past experiences can shape a person. If you wrote a memoirs of some sort, I'm sure it would be popular, a middle class English boy growing up into the man you are today!
Wrider

[sv-wolf]

Thanks guys, Yes there is a book hovering somewhere. I want to do a long motorcycle journey and write it up a travel book. But first I have to take the journey, and then I have to think of a way of making the travel book work. I find most travel writing unsatisfactory somehow. It's episodic (as of course it must be - you can't control what happens on a journey.) But there must be a way of developing a theme within it, a structure, to bring the whole thing together. I'm working on that, trying ideas out.

I also have to learn how not to get carried away with words. My writing gets pretentious sometimes, as it does in my blog. It's a bad fault. I'm working on it. I think I'm getting better.

I already have one published book. About eighteen years ago I wrote a history of my home town. It's out of print now but it's still in demand second-hand. Copies fetch quite a high price - which is very gratifying, though I could have done with the extra money when I was earning royalties on it.

I've got a second unpublished manuscript up in the attic somewhere almost complete. It's another local history. It was built round a series of paintings by a brilliant local artist. We agreed to work together. Eventually she decided she didn't like the way I had written it and withdrew. The manuscript doesn't work without the paintings, so I had to abandon it. I keep thinking that one day I might go back to it and see if it is rescuable.