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Richard, wow. I am pleased to meet you. I have just spent the last couple of days reading your blog from page one to the present and it is one of the best things I've read in a long time. At turns poignant, inspiring, tragic, comic and awe-inspiring. I salute you, sir.

Done it! Finished! Put it to bed! Yay!

When I was eleven I had a teacher who was nuts about 'Horatius', Lord Macaulay's long poem (59 verses or something like that). 'Horatius' is about the Roman hero who put his own life on the line to save the Republic from nasty old Lars Porsena of Clusium who wanted to get his fingers on the Roman treasury and be fed honeyed larks brains by Nubian slave girls. Every school term this teacher would pull out his manky old copy of 'Horatius' and, to a chorus of groans, announce that we were going to read it in class. Each of us then had to read out a verse in turn.

On one of these occasions, I drew the short straw and got a verse that was full of unpronounceable Roman names - 'Anenus from green Tiferum' 'Aruns of Volsuvium' that sort of thing - totally incomprehensible to a unprepared and uninterested eleven year old. After struggling through it and feeling grateful that it was all over, I looked up to see my teacher staring wearily up to heaven. After a moment he turned towards me, fixed me beadily with his eyes and said 'Richard, you read like a fairy!' (only he didn't call me Richard - this was 1962, so he used my surname). Everyone in the class exploded into laughter, of course. So you can imagine, I wasn't best pleased. I went home that afternoon feeling just a smidgin resentful.

But before class broke up this teacher (whose name I have totally blotted from my mind) told us that for homework over the summer holidays we were to learn the verse we had read and then recite it from memory next term. Oh, Joy!

I put off learning my verse as long as I could (can you blame me!) and only picked up the book a couple of weeks before term started again. I learned my verse in a couple of minutes and, then in a bizarre act of spite (this is an eleven year old's mind we are dealing with here) decided to learn the whole thing. I sat down and in the next ten days or so and committed it all to memory.

Next term, 'Horatius' was, predictably, withdrawn from of my teacher's desk drawer and placed threateningly before us. The usual grimaces and gagging motions were privately shared around the classroom as the torment began. When it came to my turn, instead of reciting my verse, I started at the beginning of the poem and just went on and on and on and...

I still remember the teacher standing over me yelling at the top of his lungs, while I yelled 'Horatius' back at him with my fingers stuck in my ears giving it as much welly as he could wish for. There was nothing fairy-like about my performance that afternoon. It was my first big act of rebellion. (Teenage hormones beginning to kick in, that sort of thing). I suppose it was a pretty geeky kind of rebellion, but I got a hell of a kick out of it. I did stop eventually when his temper finally got the better of him and he belted me round the head for the second time. You were allowed to do that if you were a teacher in those days.

What I learned from all this was that I have a facility for memorising verse. I'm very absent minded about most things. I couldn't tell you what I had for dinner last night without thinking very hard about it, but I can recite 'Horatius' to you to this day, as well as several dozen other long verse narratives.

In my twenties, when I bummed around picking up part-time jobs here and there but only whenever I needed a bit of extra cash (this was the sixties - who wants to be exploited in a f***ing job, man?) I put my memorising skill to use by busking narrative verse on the streets to make some cash. (I belonged to a street theatre group at the time.) It usually went down surprisingly well and 'Horatius' and a growing repetory of other verse saved me from a very hungry few days on several occasions.

OK, so what is the purpose of all this rambling tale? A couple a months ago, when I started to think of ways of raising money for the EnduroIndia tour, I thought I might put this ability to good use. I announced that I would perform something from memory which was so spectacularly long and impressive that no-one would be able to refuse to sponsor me for it.

Well, I never give myself an easy time, that's for sure. I decided to learn the one thing, I'd been putting off all my life: 'Reynard the Fox' by John Masefield. Reynard is 120 pages long in its original 1919 edition. It will take about 2 1/2 hours to perform at a fairly cracking pace. A snip!, I thought, Dead easy! - Like hell! With everything else on my mind at present (and on the minds of other people who have things for me to do) it has taken nine weeks of my life to learn this thing. But as from yesterday, it is done and bottled, so I say again -

Done it! Finished! Put it to bed! Yay!

Now, I can perhaps give some time to riding my bike again, My bike!!! Yep. Apart from my Sundays (Come on! Sundays are sacrosanct. It's a punishable offence not to go for a bike ride on a Sunday) and my short commute into work every weekday, the beast has been languishing unattended in my back garden just waiting for Sonny Boy to throw some more chairs over the fence at it.

I might even have time to post something bike related, too.

I'm performing it on 10th October at a local bookshop and I hope to get a good deal of sponsorship money from it. It's been fun learning it (no truly, I actually enjoy this kind of thing) but I'm ready to get back to real life again.

Could you have someone video your performance so you could then share it with us?

blues2cruise wrote:Could you have someone video your performance so you could then share it with us?

Ulp!

You mean, blow my TMW cover!!!

Blues!!!!! How could you suggest such a thing? ( )

Still.... Down in my own private Colloseum, there's now a mighty battle going on. My geeky, itinerant actor with his big bundle of performance needs is having a massive face off with my inner gladiator, who prefers to remain strong, silent and anonymous behind his armour.

Hmmm! I'll think about it. Not promising, mind....

Cheers

Dick

noodlenoggin wrote:Richard, wow. I am pleased to meet you. I have just spent the last couple of days reading your blog from page one to the present and it is one of the best things I've read in a long time. At turns poignant, inspiring, tragic, comic and awe-inspiring. I salute you, sir.

Noodle

Thanks for the vote, man! And for your other support as well. I'm very grateful for any kind of boost at the moment.

I'm not trying to ignore you. My ISP server has had a touch of the whimsies over the last 12 hours. This is my fourth attempt to reply. You must have very bad cyber karma for so many messages to go astray. What have you been doing?

I can't imagine how long it would have taken you to read this little lot from beginning to end; there must be a ton of it by now. I'm not exacatly known for my brevity, as you may have noticed. So congratulations as well as thanks!

Regards

Dick

Despite everything I’ve said about not having any time to myself these days, I’ve had some good Sunday riding over the last couple of months. I just haven’t had time to write it all up or post it. Mostly, I get back from rideouts, fired up with enthusiasm and start to write things up in Word with the intention of pasting them later onto the boards. Then I run out of time and I don't get to look at them again until a week has gone by and I’ve been on another rideout and another writeup has been started. So I’ve got lots of half finished fragments. As I have some time now, I'll start to summarise them and post them onto the site. But here's one that was almost finished. It was written about six weeks ago.

Sunday.
Was it going to rain? Or was it going to rain? I eased myself out of bed on Sunday morning into an atmosphere that was as unpleasantly intimate as a wrapping of wet Cling Film. Outside the bedroom window, the sky was a thick, raggedy mass of grey cloud. I traipsed downstairs in a dull mood. In the kitchen, short, heavy bursts of rain hammered down on the Velux skylights, threatening to deliver a downpour but quickly fizzling out into a faint drizzle and then silence. The bike, which I had forgotten to cover the night before, sat on the hard standing, all drippy wet and sorry-looking. Even the trees looked miserable.

I should have been pleased at the prospect of some proper rain. The whole, parched South of England was crying out for a good souse. Everyone wanted it, talked about it, longed for it. Me too! I was fed up with all this heat and sun, all this dead and dying greenery. But, like everyone else, I was hoping that, when it came, the rain would chose a convenient moment – and that meant, not now. Come this evening, it could fall in torrents if it wanted to. It could rattle on my kitchen roof and pour down the roads in a flood. I would welcome it. But please, I thought, don’t let it rain right now, not for the next eight hours, not during my Sunday rideout with the club.

In a moment of supreme optimism I decided it wasn’t going to rain after all. No, there would be no rain today, I thought. I took my bike waterproofs out of my rucksack – the one I always ride with - and, with great deliberation, hung them up on their peg beside the cellar door. No. No rain.

I bolted breakfast, briefly tidied the house and got kitted up. There then followed the usual absent-minded scramble for keys, wallet, gloves, helmet, puck (you never know when you are going to need a puck), mobile phone, basic toolkit, and washy thing for my visor. I sneaked a look at the clock – ten to nine. Late again, (of course). Making one last check that I had everything with me, I quickly stuffed the waterproofs back into my rucksack and headed for the door.

The club always meets outside ‘Bike Stop,’ a bike accessories shop in Old Stevenage High Street about six miles from my home, a quick eight minute ride - when the roads are clear, as they usually are on a Sunday morning. I peered ahead as the SV rumbled down Stevenage High Street towards the shop to see how many riders had turned out. Four uninspired-looking figures stood in the parking area in front of the shop surrounded by a lot of empty space. So that was to be it then: a mere handful of hardy souls willing to brave the weather. When I could see who they were it turned out to be the hard core of the hard core.

I had no idea where we were riding out to. No, that’s not quite true. I did know, but I had forgotten. I forget everything these days. I forget where I put my keys, my socks, my bills, my reading glasses. I forget my appointments, my commitments, my arrangements, my work tasks. I forget to water the plants. I forget to cover my bike, to oil my chain, to ring my friends, to take the washing out of the washing machine. I forget to eat. I forget everything except a very few essential things - like the fact that Sunday is Rideout Day and I meet with the club outside ‘Bike Stop’ in Stevenage High Street at nine am (or usually ten past, in my case.) But, as I said, I don’t always remember where we are going.


The plan for the day, as Dave informed me for the second time that week, was to travel up to Coventry and spend the afternoon at the recently rebuilt National Motorcycle Museum. That sounded sort of interesting. I’m not normally a fan of spending a lot of time looking at old bikes but that’s because it usually means long periods patiently listening to their owners’ interminable reminiscences. Even bikers can be anoraks when it comes to bikes. The National Motorcycle Museum was anonymous. It would probably be less endlessly informative than the usual outdoor gathering of enthusiasts but at least it would be less exhausting.

And I was curious to know how it was resurrecting itself. In case you don’t know, the museum, with its world-famous collection of British motorcycles, is still recovering from a devastating fire which destroyed three of its five showrooms a couple of years ago. A huge amount of money has been pouring into its restoration fund, much of it from the pockets of individual bikers and much has already been done to recover the bikes and the buildings. Those donations are controversial because the museum is privately owned and is dedicated to turning a profit for the owner. So I know several people who are huffy about making donations. The museum has a team of top class mechanics and restorers at work. By next year, it plans to have just about all the bikes back in their original state. You wonder, of course, just how original ‘original’ is under these circumstances. But they say that they are using as much of the original material as possible in the rebuilds.

Two famous bikes, belonging to a Stevenage Club member, are housed there, ‘Nero’ and ‘Super-Nero’. George Brown and his son, Tony (the current club chairman) set world sprint records on them back in… (Ahem! I should know this but it is just another something that has slipped my memory.)

As it is a ‘national’ museum it houses exclusively British bikes. But I did spot one German bike sneakily introduced under the pretext that it was built under contract to an English firm. There was also an interesting NYPD police bike, a 1950’s ‘Indian,’ built at a time when the American company had run into one of its periods of financial difficulty and their bikes were being made largely by Royal Enfield in the UK. (I thought I would just get in a plug for the RE there.)

Without the advice, the minute technical details and the excitedly jabbing fingers of owners and enthusiasts, I thoroughly enjoyed wandering round the museum, picking the brains of other much more well informed club members and enjoying the fact that I was only getting as much information as I asked for – usually (We do have one or two dedicated Triumph enthusiasts among us who litter their speech with the name of their favourite manufacturer the way some people use four-letter words.) Many of the bikes were really handsome bits of equipment. My only regret was that we didn’t have more time.

The route we took up to Coventry and back was, unusually, the least interesting part of the day. We rode at a fairly easy-going pace and took a direct route, a good bit of it up the A45. The A45 has its moments. It’s a good commuter road, but that’s about all you can say for it. A ride is a ride, though, and what the road lacked was made up for by just being on the bike.

As I rode along I kept thinking how glad I was to be away from home for a while. It took my mind off Di. Or, at least, it made my thoughts about her less painful. As time goes by, the shock waves from her death are becoming clearer and more direct. I hadn’t expected things to get any easier for a long while yet but I didn’t think they would get more painful. As the weeks go by I miss her more and more. It feels like a huge hole has been ripped out of my side.

The adjustments are confusing. Four months down the line, I’m just beginning to reinvent myself, to find out who I am without her. Just beginning – I’m still in that interim phase of not yet wanting to step past my old life, but no longer wholly tied to it. I need to be with other people, but I also need to be alone and so don't call them very often. Despite being lucky enough to have lots of good friends willing to be supportive, I do feel increasingly isolated. I guess that’s a choice I'm making, and I suspect I will go on making that choice for some time yet, but it is hard.

I don’t really have any close family left. Di’s parents and mine are both dead. I have no brothers or sisters or children of my own. Di's only sister died about eighteen years ago. Most of my parent’s generation, my aunts and uncles, are dead too and those that aren’t live miles away (mostly in Ireland). So I’ve only had rare contact with them over the years and hardly know them. I have Danny and Nicky, (Di’s kids) and their children and that means a lot to me now. I have loads of cousins, but I have never really had much to do with any of them.

I particularly miss Di’s sociability. She was always focused on other people. She could walk into a room of strangers, instantly find things in common with them, and walk out with a dozen new telephone numbers in her address book. Two things mattered more to her than anything else (apart from her family): a sense of community and a conviction that the purpose of human life was to become what you really are. Since she died, literally dozens of people (some of them totally unknown to me) have independently told me that the thing they most remembered Di for was that she helped them to be themselves.

She had a great personal strength and courage (the way she chose to die attested to that), she was also exceptionally strong minded but she never sought the limelight. She built what in many ways was a traditionally female role for herself: she led from behind, encouraging others, helping them to find what it was they most wanted out of life and to go for it.

As the bikes rolled along the A45 I kept thinking about how many roles she played in my life. She wasn’t just my wife and partner, she was also my collaborator in all sorts of projects and activities; she was my most useful (and for that reason, most annoying) critic; she was my sparring partner: we argued over all sorts of things. We had the same sense of humour. She always laughed at my jokes (and that made a huge difference to they way I thought about myself). She was always laughing and smiling and incorrigibly positive about everything (except, at times, about our relationship when it got difficult and confusing). She made me feel damn good about myself. Even the things that were a problem between us always seemed to translate themselves eventually into something useful or warm and loving.

We were a team. I really miss that side of our relationship. We put on some wonderful events together, for ourselves and for other people and we did some crazy things. I often think just how lucky we were to meet and stay together. When I get to feeling low, I allow myself to drift into thinking that nothing will ever replace that thing we had. It was something very special, something unique that will never come again. Perhaps everyone thinks that way about a partner they love. Right now, it feels quite exceptional, as though, despite all the difficulties, we were really just two halves of the same person.

Working together was, paradoxically, something we did very badly. We were always bickering, always misunderstanding each other's needs and intentions. But somehow, the end product always made it well worth while. In the mean time, nothing was ever really clear between us - at least on the surface. We were both always in a state of puzzlement about each other and our relationship. With Di, life was always an exploration and adventure, and the territory was always fascinating as well as painful and full of a sense of vulnerability.

Our rows and quarres and misunderstandings were in all departments of our life. We would bicker about anything and everything down to the most meaningless and trivial detail. People used to joke about it with us or stand back just exhausted or amused. But the quarrels meant we were always struggling to come together and however much we hurt each other and made idiots of ourselves, people always used to say how happy, tender and loving we always seemed when we were together. It always felt like that too.

It’s simple really. Di was my best friend. I miss my best friend.

One of the very confusing things about her death is that she is now both present and absent. She is still a living, breathing presence in everything around me that is old and familiar. Our lives together expanded outwards beyond the immediate confines of our bodies and flowed into all the thousand small domestic objects around us. For twenty years I’d hardly noticed it, just took it for granted. Each object, a tablecloth, a rice pot, a vase, a painting on the wall now has its significances, its connections with everything she was and we were. Di’s presence is now just part of the air I breathe. It fills the house. So why should that stop now? In fact, it doesn’t. She’s still here. She hasn’t gone away at all.

But alongside that sense of presence, there is also a clear knowledge of her absence. There is an emptiness sometimes in the things I do. My routines lack purpose. I miss her physically in all sorts of ways. Her death has meant that my universe has contracted, emotionally and mentally. Two points define a line which can move and change and extend over distances. That line can sweep out broad areas of thought and feeling. One point is just a point with no real location or dimensions. Since her death, I feel like a point. Her presence multiplied the meaning and significance of every moment of our lives. Now, those broad acres of meaning and significance has faded from my here and now. I know that in real present time that Di is gone. My memories of her are frozen. There is no possibility that my life with her will continue to grow or develop. My memories and thoughts might drift and change, but they will no longer change me in the same way.

The two experiences of presence and absence bump along together in my life. Sometimes they arise in turn: the conscious awareness of one provoking the other. Sometimes they alternate rapidly, throwing me backwards and forwards between moods. Sometimes they occur simultaneously. When that happens, they clash uncomfortably or drift confusingly through my mind and my imagination, unable to resolve themselves. Sometimes the conflict takes on a physical form like a spasm in the muscles. Often it is impossible to bear or to manage and I have to divert my thoughts elsewhere. On those rare occasions when I am a bigger container, I just let them be and watch them dispassionately. But that is rare. I don’t want to do anything dispassionately when I am thinking of Di.

Her death was a seismic event in my small tectonic universe. Layers of belief laid down at an early age that once appeared solid and immoveable, have been shifted. Some of the big notions I have always carried with me about life and death; body and mind; dissolution and survival have been destabilised, and I now struggle to find solid ground again. I need that solidity. (Or do I?). Like the simultaneous sense of Di’s presence and absence, these old beliefs and new desires have to be managed with tools that, as yet, I don’t understand. The old scientific/logical paradigms I absorbed through my education are quite inadequate to explain or interpret her death. I'm thrown back on older untutored notions that somehow seem more real, more human and for that reason more genuine. The fact that they are less demonstrable or less amenable to rational thought seems, almost for the first time in my life, to be completely irrelevant.

Many mornings now I wake up dreaming of Di’s death. On her last day she sat looking out of the window from her bed. Not having eaten for three weeks she had become very thin and bony. We were short of groceries, so I suggested that Nicky should look after her for an hour or so while I went into town. She asked me not to leave the house. After a while she began to relax and her eyes drifted into the middle distance. I sat there in silence for an hour just holding her hand, watching her breath rise and fall, rise and fall. Each breath seemed to completely fill the room. And then there was a final breath. And then the change, so complete, so strange, so incomprehensible; a sudden unmistakable change from life to death. At intervals over the next minute or so, her body swallowed sharply five or six times. Just reflex - all her life was gone.

I wake up dreaming of that last breath day after day, with a pain about by ribs.

Di’s belief in the existence of an after life was something I never understood or shared. But that belief was absolute and unwavering. Her expectations of continuance came to belong to both of us. She expected to live on in some new state, and I wanted her to have what she expected. So I began to want it too. I'm still unconvinced about the existence of life after death but now, in addition to the world I always knew and believed in, there is, in addition, a sequestered space in which she still exists, a space as real in my mind as the hard material world I walk upon. It's just not 'here'. It exists in a world beyond both belief and non-belief. My worlds are multiplying now, budding, drifting off into unlocated mental space.

Just before Di died she had a dream that after her death she would visit her cousin Gordon again, beside a lake under the night sky. She believed in dreams. She told him all the details, using her eye movements to spell out words on the letter frame that was, by then her only means of communication. Gordon occasionally swam in such a lake not far from his home.

It is strange that Di should dream of appearing to him. Gordon is a small, dark, wild Scots Canadian, a Marxist, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Halifax, the last person on earth to entertain notions of life after death. On the other hand, perhaps it's not so strange: there was always a deep bond between them and Gordon is full of unplumbed emotional depths. He has much of Di's strength in him, and much of her innocent vulnerability. He emailed me a fortnight ago. He had been to the lake for the first time since her death in May. It had been a beautiful night. He sat by himself for an hour. He swam. He came home. He met no-one.

I cried.

It's funny that. When I read his words, my world seemed suddenly emptier than I had ever known. I had an image of the chill night air rippling over the dark waters of the lake, the frosty sky, miles of darkened space utterly devoid of human warmth or human light. For the first time, I felt she was truly gone and it left me feeling very cold and alone and very vulnerable. It's not a moment I shall forget.

And when, for that moment, the sense of presence left me and her absence became total, I realised fully just exactly how much she had meant to me. Even our bickering had generated a warmth and, in a strange way, was just as wonderful as our quieter, tenderer moments. I've often wondered why I've felt no anger at her, since her death. I felt very angry with both my parents. It's a common enough experience. But I think the answer is probably simple. The anger was all expressed in our life together, there's nothing left to get angry about.

Di had a powerful mind. She was far from being a woolly-headed thinker. But she also believed in signs and portents and dreams and intuitions and all sorts of things that did not fit into any of my neat empirical categories. I could never quite reconcile these two sides of her personality. We argued a lot about religion and belief in the early days of our relationship. It was a matter of sadness to her, I know, that she could not share these thoughts with me or explore them together. In the end, she just gave up trying.

wow....that is a very powerful chapter.

As I appear to be off the subject of motorcycles at present, I thought I'd post a selection of Di's poems here. Except for the first one, they were all written in the last months of her life. The first one was written a couple of days after 9/11,


September 13, 2001
On a day when 'always' still meant a long time
I was stirring jam, sorting apples
Making green-tomato chutney
The house smelled of spice, the sloe gin tasted good.

One tiny spot of crimson on the creeper
Showed that change was coming,
But still the swifts screamed
And the squirrels frisked the tree for nuts.

I cleaned and dusted all day long,
Stopping only to test the set of jam or pickle,
Polished, tidied, turned out cupboards,
Braved gusts of rain to drag the washing in.

Then evening came. I hauled our laden box
Of fresh-picked pippins to the fireside,
Wrapping them slowly, one by one,
In pages from yesterday's newspaper.



Trust
Beyond the naked trees
The roof ridge is sprinkled with golden lichen,
The tiles freckled with dark moss,
A chimney flares against the sky.

In the topmost branch of the tallest tree
A crow's nest perches, netted in twigs.
Into this frail ark crow parents have committed their eggs.
Crow hatchlings learn to ride the pitch and toss
Before they're fully fledged.
Later, when they're grown
They'll ride the storms
In fine feather.



A Blessing for Dacre Road
May your old people be honoured;
May your children be nurtured;
May the cats grow sleek on your windowsills;
May the squirrels recall their winter hoards;
May the frogs spawn in your ponds;
May your water butts overflow;
May your trees flourish and choirs of birds sing hallelujahs every dawning;
May the youths who lurk in dark alleys throw away their gear
And go down to Molly's
For a pint of Guinness and the good craic;
May your church and temple unite in friendship:
And, praising the god of generosity and the open heart,
May news of your warmth roll across Ransoms Rec. to the Community Garden
And when the new folk move into Lavender Fields
May they say to themselves
Let's try and create a neighbourhood like the one in Dacre Road.



Waiting
I watch the rosebuds open imperceptibly
they are cream with pink frilled edges
Slowly they reveal their hearts.
The tulips are full blown
One petal cants over, ready to fall.

I watch the door
A nurse calls to her colleague
Footsteps approach, then recede.
The woman with the swollen face
Has eaten a huge bag of chocolates.
She's gone back to sleep.
In the next bed, the ninety-six year old,
Full of drugs, sleeps through all her grand-children.

The sky outside is blue;
Branches stir in the breeze.
In here, sunlight slinks across the floor.
The petal droops.


Water, Water
Quiet feet trudge across the carpet.
You’re tired, my darling,
So tired,
I wish that I could spare you this.

You lean across me, stubble ashed.
You're weary love,
so weary,
If only I could spare you this.

I've gnashed my teeth for hours. No spittle comes.
I'm thirsty dear,
So thirsty,
Only you can spare me this.


Losing Self
Hard must I have been of heart
To have to travel this far now.
In the mirror world of pain
I sometimes sense the persecutor's urge
And often catch a glimpse of tail
Whisking down a burrow in my mind.

But now I am becoming whole
By losing power, I've gained in strength.
Unable now to say or do
I see the boundaries dissolve
That separated me from you
Your smile becomes my skin,
My heart, your breath:
Motes dancing in a ray of light,
There is no death.



Finishing Off
I'm charging my needle with a ghostly thread
And sewing up the edges of my life
But the fabric is stiff and my hands are weak
Will you help me to finish this seam?
Only a few more stitches to go.

Friday

Same ol' roundabout. Same ol' turnoff. Same ol' blind-as-a-bat, pull-out-and-f**k-what's-coming driving method. This time I left some serious rubber behind me in the road. This time I very nearly hit.

It was a kid. OK (for the under fifties) he was about 25. He decided that he could accelerate past me, then, half-way across my exit, he decided he couldn't. Suddenly there was a car rapidly coming to a halt directly in front of me. I came face to face with his side window as he put a hand across his eyes and shook his head. This was one young puppy with some very embarrassed hormones that didn't know where to look or what to do with themselves. He had a very unattached-looking girl in the passenger seat. Trying to impress and not quite up to the job, do you think?

I just gave him a look, pulled round him and left him to stew. His GF was doing a good enough job on him without me.

But why this roundabout? Time and time again, it happens. Several times a week, on my commute home some driver gives me cause to wish all cars off the road just at this point. I've posted here often enough about it, but only on the more serious occasions. It happens all the time. The sight lines are as good here as on all the other roundabouts I have to negotiate. It's a five road junction, but I can't see how that would make a difference. It's busier and faster than most but not as hectic as some.

My only guess is that for a lot of commuters driving down from the industrial area this is the first major junction they will meet after leaving work in their car. Their minds are still probably on their work or, more likely, on their dinners and definitely not on the road (if they ever will be). Who knows?

Almost as common these days are the number of dead foxes on the tarmac and in the verges. Since when did foxes become so stupid as to end up as road kill in such numbers? I never remember seeing so many before. Maybe brain tissue is degenerating everywhere, right throughout the animal kingdom. What have cagers and foxes got in common? Now you know. I soon expect to hear that our political masters are all watching old Batman films for clues on how to defeat Al Quaeda.

Wouldn't surprise me!

I'm starting to get my gear together for India. A couple of weeks ago I spend a weekend on the club stand at the BMF 'Tailender' show outside Peterborough, and spent a load of time looking for the perfect lid. I traipsed around the stalls for hours and in the end thought it was going to be a lost cause. Then, at the very last moment, I found it. It was perfect for the job - and dirt cheap, too.

There wasn't any point in buying something flash and expensive. It is a pretty sure bet that I will come off at least once on the trip - most riders do. And I'm hardly likely to be doing racing speeds on Indian roads or on a Bullet! Apart from anything else, it will be a brand new machine an so will have to be run in. Bullets have to be run in at speeds under forty miles an hour for quite a long distance. I'm told that some of the guys on the Enduro get fed up and just thrash them and hope for the best. The good thing about a Bullet, though is that it is totally bomb proof. If the engine seizes, all you have to do is wait for it to cool down and then set off again! It's a tough little bugger.

It's so hot riding in India, even in February, that many of the guys who go on the Enduro opt for a half face or even a pudding basin helmet. I'm too scared to do that. The one time I laid down my own bike in recent years I skidded along the road flat on my face, and saved my good looks only because I was wearing a full face lid.

So, I compromised and bought an off-road helmet and goggles. It has very good ventilation. It is brilliant white to reflect the sun and has a silver metallic piece round the front vent. The goggles are white too. It looks pure Star Wars. I plan to wear a set of armour on a net shirt over and ordinary t-shirt. I have half a mind to spray the armour white and do the full Star Wars thing. Watch it, Verm! You may have a rival in the making here.