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Time for a travel blog, I'm thinking. One man and his Daytona doing different things on the continent – or something like that.

Edit - I've transferred this to a separate blog: 'Wolf in France' at

viewtopic.php?t=25821

When you get around to Washington State look me up. I'm only a ferry ride away from Seattle, and closer to more pleasant areas.

mgdavis wrote:When you get around to Washington State look me up. I'm only a ferry ride away from Seattle, and closer to more pleasant areas.

Seconded.

I'm in eastern Washington, though. If you're in the area, drop me a line and the least I can do is buy you a meal.

Saturday

I decided to take the DB to Stratford today on the bike. His ex-GF is living with her mother out that way and he has been wanting to visit her for over a week now. He was planning to stay a week or two, or three, he told me, or maybe just a few days. Maybe, he'd go for a month, or maybe not. Offering to give him a lift over to his GF's place had several distinct advantages for me, personally. It got him off my hands for a bit (he probably wouldn't have been able to afford the journey had I not offered to take him) and it gave me a good excuse to get on the bike and go for one of my favourite rides. It also met his immediate need.

His immediate need really doesn’t bear thinking about. He told me he needed to be with his ex-GF after the death of their two-year old baby boy. At least, his GF claimed that the boy was his, but only after he had died. Until that time she had claimed it belonged to the guy who had replaced the DB in her affections. I’m not sure I know how to think about this. Discovering 'truth' in the DB's world is like finding a drop of water in the Pacific ocean.

In any case, I cannot get my head around the kind of crisis-ridden life the lad leads.

The means of the baby’s death doesn’t bear thinking about either. The assumed father had broken up with the boy’s mother, ‘kidnapped’ the child and then neglected him while he got off his head on ecstasy. The baby had found a couple of ecstasy tablets which he'd left lying around and had eaten them. He died in hospital about five days later. This is the story the DB has told me. At first, I thought it all sounded too much like an episode of Eastenders to be true but now I’m not sure. It all hangs together rather too well.

I think the DB is genuinely upset about this (it really is hard to tell - he talks about himself endlessly and manages to reveal nothing.) He has a lot of genuine human feeling, but there is also a fantasy level at which he gets off on the drama of his own life. He wants to settle down - I'm sure that's genuine - but it’s hard for him to give up all the excitement and self-aggrandisement that goes with the crazy existence that he has carved out for himself. I can see the excitement, and to some extent I can understand it. I have a tendency to live for the highs and get bored easily with the day-to-day stuff, too. Fortunately, I haven't had to concoct my dramas out of the same kind of nightmares the DB grew up with and now manages to live with on a daily basis.

OK. That's enough. I don’t want to think any more about it.

On the way to Stratford, we stopped off at Aston Clinton and nipped into On Yer Triumph so I could buy an oil filter - and a spanner for fitting it. (Practically everything on a bike these days comes with a ‘special tool’ to do the job – and a price. Have you noticed?) Over in France a couple of weeks ago, I put about 1,800 miles on the clock (more than I expected). That’s 1,800 miles since the dealers fitted some new piston rings and I haven’t had the opportunity to change the oil since. That's been bothering me. Having the rings changed is not like running the bike in for the first time, but, even so, an early oil change is necessary, I'm thinking and it's way overdue.

It was a good run down to Stratford on some familiar roads. I enjoyed the ride as much as I had hoped. The B4030 between Bicester and Edstone is a real favourite of mine - it's not a racer's road, and it is not exceptionally attractive, but it has a bit of everything and... well, I like it. It's quirky. One old guy, en route, has faked a speed camera and set it up just inside his garden to deter vehicles from speeding through his village. It probably works.

It was, however, with a certain degree of relief that I found our destination and delivered up my package to the waiting GF (and her mother) safe and sound. I hope he has a good couple of weeks but in the quiet of their secluded Cotswold village I suspect he will be bored out of his mind. That probably means he will be back knocking on my door in a couple of days' time.

I was ‘under orders’ from some work colleagues to get some pictures of Stratford, so I dutifully rode into town and flashed the camera about a bit. But I absolutely refused to photograph ‘Shakespeare’s birthplace’. Normally, you can't get near it for the tourists. The building itself looks as though it's been alomost worn away by the endless bombardment of photons launched at it from the barrage of Japanese, British and American flash guns that are trained on it day-by-day; year-by-year. Today, you could see it. You could even get near it. The town was, in fact, alarmingly quiet (meaning merely that you didn't have to elbow your way through the crowds.)

I’m a Shakespeare nut, I’m afraid. I have a collection of almost every Shakespeare video or DVD that has ever been released on the English market and that’s a lot of videos. And I spend a fair bit of my spare time in theatres watching the stuff; so while I was in Stratford, I took the opportunity to spend a blissfully nerdy hour in the Shakespeare bookshop opposite the revered birthplace. A whole bookshop full of nothing but books by, on, or about Shakespeare or Shakespearan performance! It is not something I would normally get a chance to do as I usually come here in the company of other bikers who usually have other priorities (like getting on their bikes and riding away again - fast.)

I did get a photo of the canal basin in the centre of the town, though.


Stratford upon Avon

Moving on from the subject of Shakespeare, I have to say that Stratford-upon-Avon has one particularly fine quality to recommend it. It is the most bike-friendly town I know. Right in the centre, next to the shopping area, there is a bike park for over 200 bikes. And each marked parking bay has a ground anchor. Stevenage, where I work, manages four bike parking spaces, which are scattered accross the town in inconvenient and hard-to-find positions. None of the bays have any provision for security.

On the way back from Stratford I stopped off at Chipping Camden. Now, Chipping Camden is one place where it is well worth getting out the camera. And with a bit of luck and good weather there is every chance of capturing the town in all its mellow loveliness. In summer the walls of its buildings glow golden in the sunlight. Now, that it's mid-October and the sun is low in the sky it isn’t quite at its best, but at least there aren’t so many people around and it is still worth a visit.

Cotswold towns and villages attract visitors in their thousands every year because they are just so exceptionally pretty. And all that prettiness may not be unrelated to the staggering sums of money their wealthy inhabitants must spend on their homes and gardens every year. The houses are built traditionally in a deep, golden sandstone. And gardening, a national obsession, is nowhere practiced with such devotion and energy as out here among the Cotswold Hills.


Chipping Camden

Until I got there, I had completely forgotten that Chipping Camden was one of the places that Di visited in the last year of her life. We spent a whole day there, wandering around, visiting tea-rooms, just walking and laughing and having a really happy and very funny time of it. Trying to get her wheelchair on and off the local busses was a hoot. Everything we did in that last year, we did at an exceptional pitch of intensity, and all that strength of feeling persisted in my memory for a long time. It has faded now - at least from my everyday mind. Life has become more mundane - which, in some ways, in a relief but ,in other ways, a source of deep regret. I’m not sure I want those memories to fade like that. I'm not sure I want that year to become just like any other in my mind. The memories are still there, but they have lost a lot of their depth, their sense of significance. A stimulus, like riding into Chipping Camden and walking about the streets can bring them briefly back, but it's not the same.

And a question keeps presenting itself to me: why do I keep finding myself travelling to places we visited in our last year together? It’s strange but time after time apparently chance events keep occuring which draw me back to those very places - like the DB's need to see his ex-GF, for instance.


More Chipping Camden


And yet more Chipping Camden


The Cotswolds look great in autumn


That is some pretty spectacular thatching on that house

The ride back home to Hertfordshire wasn't quite so pleasant as the way out. It seemed endless - endless and uncomfortable - and at least three times as long even though I came back exactly the same way as I went. Once I had come through Chipping Norton, the way was a slog. Even the B4030 didn't do it for me.

I had hoped to get to Hemel Hempsted by nightfall, but no such luck. By the time it was getting dark I had only reached Aylesbury. And that was a pain. Aylesbury, I do not love. Getting from one side of this wretchedly complicated town to the other always makes me feel like I’m trapped in some Kafkaesque nightmare – especially at night.

You follow the signs around the ring road, or you go through the town. Either way it's the same: you ride past street after street of identical 1950s council houses or 1930s semis. You pass over one identikit looking crossroads after another. It just goes on and on. It's not such a big town. Why is it such a pain in the arse to ride through?

After you've been riding through it for what seems like half-an-hour (though I'm sure it's not) you begin to get the feeling that you are trapped here for ever and ever, doomed to pass by the same buildings over and over on a never-ending loop. And the Daytona is a real pig in circumstances like this. By the time I did eventually get out on to the open road again my hands had nearly fallen off at the wrist.

So, I was very glad when I eventually got home. After parking the bike and getting out of my leathers, I was in no mood to do anything other than slump on the couch and feel sorry for myself. But there was one consolation: at least I didn’t have to listen to the latest instalment of the DB’s very own soap opera.

Sunday

News from a small town.

Nothing raises people’s spirits in a small town like Hitchin more than discovering that they have a small engineering disaster happening in their very midst - especially one for which the local council appears to be entirely responsible.

I discovered this as I rode through the town this morning. I hadn’t wanted to go for another long ride today but was up for a short spin out into the countryside. I got on my gear and rode the short way across town when I saw this.


Hmmmm!

(I’ve started carrying my camera with me most places I go. You never know when it is going to come in handy!)

A burst water main, I thought. Water was pouring out of the ground and running down Hermitage Road, in the town centre. Half way down it was accumulating in the dip where the drainage system (which almost certainly had not been cleaned out since last November) was failing to cope with it. The owners of the small businesses on either side of the road were peering from their doorways with some pretty obviously worried looks on their faces; Dick, the photographer from the local rag was already there hopping about with his camera as gleefully as his not inconsiderable bulk would allow. Then the police started to arrived in their vehicles. They came in at the lower end of the road and drove through the accumulating waters as though to prove some sort of obscure point or other before going up the hill to stare solemnly at the fountain that had appeared at its top.


Police arrive in Hermitage Road

Later in the afternoon when I had returned from my ride I went back to take a look. A fire engine had now arrived and was pumping some of the water out of the road. I spoke to one of the fire officers who was redirecting the Sunday traffic - what there was of it. He told me that the run off water was being dumped into a ‘nearby brook’. Several worthy members of Hitchin society were standing nearby - I recognized them. They looked disapprovingly at him as they realised the ‘brook’ he was referring to was none other than mighty River Hiz (cough…) upon the banks of whose torrential waters (ahem…) this uptight (sorry, 'upright') little town is built.

The fireman then told me (with a smirk) that no, it wasn’t a burst water main. A group of council workmen had arrived earlier that morning to so some planned maintenance. They had been sent out to replace a damaged valve in the mains supply. So keen were they in their work that they forgot that it might be a good idea to isolate the water in the system first. Too late, they discovered their mistake, and too late too, they made the further discovery that other valves had failed as well and that it was impossible to cut off the water supply. One more success for the local council's Maintenance Team to chalk up on their wall.

Skier wrote:

mgdavis wrote:When you get around to Washington State look me up. I'm only a ferry ride away from Seattle, and closer to more pleasant areas.

Seconded.

I'm in eastern Washington, though. If you're in the area, drop me a line and the least I can do is buy you a meal.

Cheers guys. Washington is definitely on my list. If I make it, I'll definitely give you a shout.

[Edit: Ah! just realised that this is my 2,000th post on TMW. Which kinda deserves some sort of mention, I'm thinking. Can't let that one go by without comment. As my posts are not... ahem... generally very 'short' that must add up to a frightening number of words.]

This post is not about bikes. It’s about what happens when you get bike blues and just go off the whole idea of anything on two wheels. It's been like that with me since I got back from France. Is it a kind of illness? If it is, I’ve got it bad. So bad, I haven’t even been looking for a cure. Is it the motorcycle version of the seven year itch? Am I falling out of love?

I don't think so.

It’s not that I haven’t been riding. I’ve been riding a fair bit. But I’ve only been riding when I’ve needed to leave point A and arrive at point B, and the bike is the only convenient way to do it. And it’s not that I am bored with the bike, either. Heading for point B in recent weeks has been enlivened by an enhanced appreciation of the sheer, sensual enjoyment the Daytona can give. It hit 7777 miles on the clock today and its engine is beginning to sound smooth and feel like whipped cream. Mmmmmmm! Gorgeous. Very sexy! I never thought I would get to like the triple engine as much as this. For months, I missed the pumping, gutsy roar of the V-twin. But not any more.

Nor is it anything to do with lack of interest in the art of riding. When I have been on the bike recently, I’ve been riding in a very focussed way – not like me! Mr dreamy. All of a sudden, I’ve hit a new level of confidence. There are fewer of those tiny moments of hesitation, fewer restraints. I’m chucking the bike around with a lot more freedom than I ever did before. So much so that I’m a little scared I might be getting a bit cocky, and heading for the danger zone. Maybe so. I’m watching that – but I’m still having fun. We’re doing great – the Daytona and I.

So what's going on? Despite all the pleasures of riding the bike, I just never have any particular interest in gettin on it any more. And I’ve completely stopped going out for the hell of it. I haven't been on a club rideout for over a month. Unless I’m actually on the bike, my thoughts are elsewhere.

Last Saturday, I’d signed up to give some demonstration shiatsu treatments with my old school which had a stand at the Olympia exhibition centre in Kensington. Did I feel like riding down into central London at 20mph through all the fumes and kamikaze traffic for mile after mile? No I did not! And once in Kensington, did I feel like riding round and round trying to find that elusive safe parking space? Any parking space at all? Take a guess!

Parking in Central London is always a nightmare if you don’t know the particular area you are in. And Kensington, (bless its cotton socks) is no friend to motorcylists - I remembered that from the last time I was down there. Then there is the security issue. If you want to get your motorcycle nicked, then the best thing to do is to park it up somewhere in London.

It wasn't a very hard decision: I took the train. Two years ago, I would have snorted at the idea. I'd come to think that travelling by train was ancient history. Nor is there any additional incentive these days. Since the privatisation of National Rail, trains are more crowded, more expensive, stuffier and less reliable. I used to travel down to London on the train a lot. It was OK, but I’ve never been very good at sitting still or being a passive passenger.

Despite all these very good reasons to avoid the rail network, I just couldn’t be bothered with all the hassle of taking the bike. So, did I make the right decision? Did I relax and enjoy the journey? Not a bit of it. On the train, all the way down to Kings Cross, I was fretful, and uncomfortable, wanting the fresh air, needing a challenge, needing an adrenalin fix - but still weakly glad I hadn't taken the bike. I managed to get the worst of both worlds.

My grandmother would have shaken her head and said, ‘The boy is hankering after something.’ Maybe she would have been right. Maybe the boy is.

Still, I can cope with the trains. The London Tube is another issue.

If you are not familiar with the Tube you should count yourself lucky. Central London Tube lines - most of them anyway - are not like the subways/ metros/ underground railways in other parts of the world . They weren’t built by the usual cut-and-cover method (cut a big trench down the middle of a road, build your railway in the trench, cover it over, and re-lay your road on top). No, the engineers who built the London Tube decided to do things differently. London’s underground trains run in big sewerage pipes.

Certainly they do! London was the first city anywhere to build itself a comprehensive sewerage system. And the railway engineers who came along later, looked at the technology that the sewerage guys had developed and said, ‘what a great way to build an underground transportation system.’

Think about what this means. It means that London Underground: the stations; the tunnels and the trains, are all narrow and have low curving roofs. It’s unpleasant enough having to push your way through crowds of people on skinny platforms, eventually to squash yourself into a tiny overcrowded carriage, but it gets worse than that. With thousands of people, shoulder to shoulder, packed into these confined spaces all day long, the narrow stations, tunnels and trains very quickly start to accumulate large quantities of body heat and carbon dioxide (and probably respectable amounts of methane as well – especially after lunch.)

And by the time many of the Tube lines were built, there was already an extensive network of sewerage pipes and other services running under London’s roads and buildings. So, the railway engineers had to tunnel down deeper - then deeper still. Some of the Central London Tube lines lie as deep as a fifteen-story building is high. They are so deep and so narrow that it is almost impossible to keep an adequate flow of fresh air running through them. That’s what London Transport say, anyway. Down in the Tube, even on a cold day, it can get murderously hot and stuffy. In steamy weather the whole system becomes almost unendurable and people start passing out. And it’s getting worse. Should we get another heatwave this summer, the plan is to close down the Tube altogether. Is this likely to happen in conditions of global warming? And have you ever tried to travel across Central London, when the Tubes are not working?

The Tube is the world’s oldest underground railway system – and it shows. This is not entirely because of age, though. The infrastructure has been neglected for decades by successive governments: so the Tube lines are always breaking down or closed for repair, and you frequently have to take long detours to get where you want to go. And when you come back up to the surface you are pretty filthy too because there is no money to keep the system clean.

For lack of anything better to do I looked up the Tube on the BBC website and discovered several interesting facts that I will share with you. I discovered that you can now get bitten down in the tunnels. Natural selection has taken a hand in things and the London Tube had developed its very own unique species of mosquito. I’ve never been bitten on the tube myself – a friend of mine has, but that was by some lunatic who was off his head on something, not a mosquito. There are loads of nutters on the Tube.

When I read the BBC article, I wondered, at first where the mosquitos would breed, but then remembered it’s pretty wet down there in the tunnels. London, north of the Thames is built on boggy ground and there are loads of underground rivers that sometimes run near the Tube lines. There are well over a hundred pumps working 24 hours a day to keep the system dry. The BBC, a mine of information, explains that, left to itself, the whole system would flood out in just seven days. That’s reassuring!

More entertainingly, you can now also get yourself knocked out by a pigeon flying up the excalator tunnels. It’s been known for a long time that flocks of suburban pigeons living in north and west London fly daily into the city centre to take advantage of the rich pickings left by the tourists. Much more recently it’s been observed that these same suburban pigeons are now no longer bothering to fly into town - they are taking the Tube. No-one, it seems, knows how they manage to navigate down there, or how they know which trains to hop a lift on. The result is that the whole system is now populated by anoraks with clipboards trying to observe pigeon behaviour.

And having to endure all this is a sad result of having a bike malaise.

Doing the shiatsu exhibition turned out to be a load of fun though. I think I enjoy the exhibitions more than giving individual treatments at home. And on this occasion there was something else too. Or, more precisely, someone else. I did a double take – first time since Di died. She was about five foot ten with very slinky brown hair and… I can hear Di saying, ‘...and about bloody time too.’ I might start going along to the school again on a Tuesday night. (I might even take the bike.)

Maybe granny was right, maybe the boy is hankering after something.

A two up type of ride the bike???



(Are you hinting you need another helmet in a different size maybe???)



Di would probably be right...

Luv the tube,

Only way to get around the smog.(mind the gap)

games like - trying to guess which side the platforms going to be on or I wonder what he has got in his rucksack?

Also watching the blurs to your left on the escalators as the sign states keep to your right.

The last time i drove in London was in an Ital - back in 84. One of our sites has parking and must consider taking the VN in.

But you can't be talking about South Kensington - Nat. history museum and Albert Hall. - I've walked the family from Paddington to the Nat history museum seems lovely and there was the added bonus being walking deprived Livingstone of money.

Ade

Hi Ade,

I deduce from your reference to smog that either you have been around a fair number of years or you have romantic notions of London's past. I don't think there has been any smog in London for about forty years. But yeah, whatever I said in my last post I have a sneaking love of the tube too.

Back to bikes.

I noticed the first change about a month ago. On the way into work one morning I felt a sharp wind whistling round my neck, and before I was halfway up the bypass my jaw had frozen rock solid. So the next day I put on my neck protector. The following week it was an extra t-shirt, then two, then my long johns and my winter boots. Yesterday, for the first time I hunted out a pair of dusty winter gloves from the box down in my cellar. If I take any longish journey in the next week or so, I'll be wearing my inner gloves as well. Well whaddya know! Winter’s a cooomin in! Bloody hell, it’s cold out on the bike most days now. And if you are going over forty mph, you'd better be well kitted out.

I used to look forward to autumn: the colours in the trees, the morning mists, the wind howling round the chimney pots. I always thought it was a cosy time of year. There is nothing like getting home after a day at work, lighting a log fire in the grate and settling down to a good meal and some good conversation as well.

Ten years ago, autumn was fun. Sometimes, Di and I would go up into the hills with friends, find a clearing, pitch the tents then sit round a good blaze till the night was old. We’d talk for hours and roast food in the embers. But that was then, not now. Now, when I think of autumn, I think mostly of damp roads, diesel spills, wet leaves and the coming of snow (maybe). And then I think of the necessity for winter maintenance and being on constant salt alert. Yep, this is the time of year you get to pay for your pleasures.

One of the big grumps for me is doing basic maintenance out of doors, in bad weather. I have no garage and only a tiny bit of hard standing to keep my bikes on. (I've been promising myself to do something about that for the last year but so far I haven’t got round to it. There always seems to be something better to do – like riding the bike.)

Last week I did finally get round to changing the oil on the Daytona. And dodo, was it black – very.

It was a messy operation. (I’ve always been a messy eater so it is no surprise that I’m a messy oil changer too.) Every time I do this job I try to remember what happened last time and learn from my mistakes. But no, I always have some sort of spillage, even if it is only a little one. Last week was the first time I had changed the oil and filter on the Daytona, and for the filter I had my newly acquired ‘special tool’. It’s not the usual strap jobbie. Triumph prefer a different approach. This one is like a big socket that fits directly over the filter case. It fits over the filter so snugly that once it is on, it is almost impossible to get off. So, having got the filter tightened into place with the ‘special tool’, I spent half an hour swearing and poking about with all kinds of Heath Robinson gizmos trying to get the bloody thing off again. You know that certain point when you just have to go inside for a cup of tea to prevent yourself kicking something valuable? I'd just reached that point and had got up off the concrete when I heard a clunk. The damn thing had fallen off all of its own accord. Now how do you account for things like that!

But out on the Daytona, these days, I feel soooo good. I'm loving this bike more and more, every time I ride it. I haven't been for any long rides since I took the DB to Stratford but I've been having lots of short ones. (I haven't heard from the DB in a month. I started to get a bit concerned about him last week, but then remembered that if he needed anything he would have been instantly in touch. At least nothing in my house has mysteriously broken since he left.) It's November and November means pitch black nights and late-night treks down country lanes - werewolf territory. November's a time when those heavy, silent moods slip over you from out of cover of darnkess. I'm feeling a bit lonesome these days - and enjoying it.

I’ve also had some interesting reactions from others recently When you see people clocking you in your bike gear, it’s worth taking careful note. As often as not you'll see those tell-tale signs of reaction and instantancous judgement going on behind their eyes. I walked into a bookshop in Hitchin the other day in my full bike gear. I was in a hurry - just picking up an order, on my way to work - so I had my lid on as I entered the shop. I used to own a bookshop in the town which means that I got to know all the local small traders. And I know the people who work in this particular shop very well. But I’ve never been into the shop in my bike gear before - in fact, I’m not even sure that I've ever told any of them that I rode a bike.

I was still struggling with the strap on my lid inside the door, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw the owner - let’s call her, Angela - sitting behind the counter. She flinched! I saw her – she definitely flinched - then stared at me with a look of unbridled suspicion. I couldn’t believe it. She’s a middle-aged woman, who’s led a far from sheltered life. It wasn’t the kind of reaction I’d expected from her.

‘It’s me,’ I said, laughing, ‘I’m in disguise.’
The relief on her face was palpable. She responded by making a joke which she followed with a flood of tension-releasing giggles. I tried to think what kind of thoughts must have gone through her mind. I hardly come across as Big Hairy Biker. Maybe she has had some bad experiences with motorcyclists in the past, or perhaps, more likely she was just reacting to the standard ‘biker bogeyman' images– those fantasies of unhinged-biker maniacs and small-time thieves that seem to circulate the media.

Getting that kind of reaction is unsettling, especially from someone you think you know well. It puts you on the wrong foot. But if I’m really honest, I quite like it too.

As I came out of the shop, I remembered that I’d seen ‘Angela’ react to me in a strange way once before. On that other occasion, I’d been in to buy a book on classical economics and we had started talking about it as she took my money and wrapped it up. When she realised that I regarded myself as 'a socialist' she suddenly went very quiet. I could see she was sitting on a lot of feeling. That’s not an uncommon reaction.

Being a socialist brings out all kinds of interesting reactions in people – reactions that are just as strong as the ones you get as a motorcyclist, but totally different. Unlike the plain old anxiety and fascination that bikers provoke, socialists tend to provoke rage. I’ve faced it on loads of occasions. And it’s quite extraordinary. It’s real, unbounded, infantile rage - not just aggression or honest-to-goodness anger, but something that spews up from out of people’s guts in great uncontrollable gulps. I’ve seen people who I’d previously regarded as calm and well-balanced suddenly reduced to babbling incoherence by the mere mention of the word. And when they have calmed down and you talk to them you invariably find that they have the weirdest ideas about what they think you believe. Most people haven't got a clue about what socialism actually means. And that's not surprising. 'Socialism' can refer to many different and often mutually contradictory political beliefs, but there’s a large section of the population that, on hearing the word, automatically think you must be Uncle Jo Stalin in disguise come to drag them away to the Gulag. Come to think of it, that idea would scare me, too.

Big Hairy Biker and Jo Stalin are both powerful folk demons that bubble up into people's minds on a flood of anxiety. As images, they are far more potent than the average real live biker or socialist. Looking at them that way, Uncle Joe and BHB might have more in common than anyone in this old world would suppose.

Fortunately, riding a bike is such a physical, even visceral thing, and works on such a completely different level to setting the world to rights that talking about the one doesn’t often lead to a conversation about the other. When I’m changing oil filters I rarely have time to think about anything else than the immediate present (and my rising state of frustration and oilyness). And there is another difference. Though I often keep stum and not let on what my politics are, just to keep the peace, I’m rarely bothered about what people think of the fact that I ride a bike. They can think what they like.

OK time for bed. I've got to take the SV into the mechanics early tomorrow before I go into work. The clattering from the engine has now got so bad that I daren't ride it very far. I rang up a local workshop yesterday and asked them to take a look at it and give me a view of whether it is worth fixing. If it is cost-effective I'll ask them to sort it out for me. If not, it looks like the SV might be on its way to the scrap merchant. Sad. I still love the bike, but... Well, there you go... nothing lasts forever... (and other consoling platitudes like that.)

Just a short update on the SV. A very short update, in fact. I turned out at 8.30 this morning to ride the bike up to the mechanic in Letchworth. I spent about quarter of an hour getting her started. She's a grumpy old lady these days; doesn't like to fire up so easily. When she is running she lurches around the rev counter without any input from the throttle, so she's a nightmare to ride.

Eventually I got her going and rode down to the bottom of the road, pulled her up at the junction and there she cut out again and wouldn't start. After a bit she died on me for good and all. Damn battery again. Or damn alarm - which drains the battery. I had to wheel her back up the hill and put her away. It was so late by then that I had to get straight into work.

At lunch I came home, took out the battery and put it on charger. That was fine, but the bloody alarm wouldn't let me leave the bike without a battery in it. Every time the alarm armed itself (it arms automatically after 60 seconds) it started screaming. It gets worse. Once the main battery is flat I can't do anything with the alarm at all: I can't switch it on or off or put it into workshop mode which is what I was trying to do. The alarm seems to have its own battery to power the siren but to switch modes it need to have a source of juice from the main battery - and that little arrangement was the worst of all possible worlds under the circumstances. Nothing I could do would stop it screaming. In the end I found an old dead battery in my shed and hooked her up to it to keep her quiet. It was like sticking a dummy in an infant's mouth.

I was late getting back to work, which meant I had to work late to make up my hours. Yerrrrgh!

Try again tomorrow - perhaps.