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A life dedicated to disaster?

OK, a week ago last Thursday at five to one, I abandoned my obligations and my responsibilities, changed into my leathers, signed off from work, and hurtled out the office door. As I hit the street, I thought of Bilbo running off into the wild, unknown landscape of Middle Earth in search of adventure. (Lord of the Rings is my all time fantasy favourite!)

Well, that's what went through my head anyway. (It usually does at moments like this.) In reality, my adventure wasn’t going to be anything like as dramatic as Bilbo's. I was running off to Aston Clinton to pick up the Daytona. And I didn’t exactly run either; I caught a rather smelly number 61 bus from the Galaxy Centre in Luton and sat tight while it trundled its way across country to the dealers. But why be unromantic? It was still an adventure. Anything is an adventure if you view it in the right way.

And from the start it was a slightly complicated adventure. Before catching the 61 I had to ride home to Hitchin from work on the SV then catch a number 100 into Luton. It’s a long time since I‘ve I played the public transport game and I’d forgotten how confusing and infuriating it is if you don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of routes and timetables. What's more, I was on a tight schedule. There was one and only one set of interconnecting buses, bike rides and walks that would get me to my destination before the dealers closed. If I messed up on any part of it, that was it! There woudl be no Triumph and no reunion - just a wasted afternoon.

My meeting at work had run on and by the time I left the building I was already late. So when I said I ‘hurtled’ out of the office door, that’s just the simple truth. But I only 'hurtled' the first time I attempted to leave the office. Seconds after I hit the street, I reached into my pocket to pull out my bike keys and realised my wallet wasn't there. My wallet is always there! Always! I won’t describe the very particular feeling that hits the pit of your stomach when you realise something like that. If you’ve lived on this earth for any period of time, you’ll know what I'm talking about.

A dozen possibile options flashed through my mind, but whichever way I looked at it there was a certain remorseless logic to my situation: no wallet - no money - no bus-fare - no bus - no journey - no Triumph. I hurtled back into the office.

The second time I left the building was a far moodier affair. I still hadn't found my wallet. But, I thought, there was just a chance – a small chance - that I had left it at home that morning. I reasoned that if I hung around the office searching for it I would miss my first bus, for sure. If I went back to the house, and it was there, I might still get to the dealers on time. I was aching to sling my leg over the Daytona once again.

But I was far from convinced that I’d left my wallet back in Hitchin. As I rode out of the office courtyard on the SV five minutes later I was already trying to reconcile myself to an afternoon spent cancelling cards, not picking up a bike. I was so preoccupied with these thoughts that I almost didn’t see Angelina running round the corner of the building, shouting and waving her arms at me and carrying a little black square of leather in her hand. Angelina! My angel! My wallet! "fudge"! was I grateful!

During the remainder of the ride home I meditated on how my recent life had become dedicated to brinkmanship and near disaster.

I parked the SV, hoofed it the half mile into town and arrived out of breath at the bus stop to find the bus already there, ready to leave. What a hassle!

There had been no time to change out of my leathers and pack them in my rucksack before leaving home, so the ride into Luton was a hot and sticky one. Fortunately, it was also short and reasonably fast. The number 100 bus travels a good road through some attractive, wide-open countryside. The landscape on either side settled my thoughts. The quiet time on the bus helped me to regather a little presence of mind and restored my enthusiasm for the journey.

But once in Luton, the mistakes of the day continued. I had twenty minutes to get across town to the Aston stop. It wasn’t far, so I didn't hurry. I was determined to remain relaxed. Ten minutes later, though, I was squinting anxiously at a notice attached to the bus shelter. (My glasses were packed in the bottom of my rucksack.) The notice said that from Monday (three days ago) the bus to Aston would depart from stop ‘G3’. Hells bells! I looked at the map – ‘G3’ was almost back where I had just come from. My return trip across town was... shall we say, just a little faster and sweatier. In five minutes I was looking up and down the road where the ‘G3’ stop was supposed to be - only it wasn’t. The stops here all began with a ‘C’ not a ‘G’. (Dammit! I knew I should have got out my glasses.) The ‘G’ stops, I learned from a passer-by, were all down by the Galaxy Centre. I put my trust in his local knowledge and ran like hell.

Have you ever tried running in full motorcycle leathers through crowded streets, with a lid in your hand and a rucksack on your back? It is extremely uncomfortable and moreover looks and feels decidedly naff! I began to wonder if owning a Triumph was always like this. Was this some kind of cosmic loyalty test devised by the company?

The number 61 bus ran out of Luton and into Dunstable past dreary lines of 1930s, Tudor-fronted semis, solidly built but boring as hell. Occasionally, on street corners, there were raised shrubberies that might once have looked attractive on an architect’s drawing board, but had grown rank with neglect now that the contract to maintain them has timed out. We passed metal and plastic industrial units built in the 1990s. Car showrooms and garages with sagging awnings squeezed themselves onto whatever awkward bits of land they could. The showrooms sparkled with chrome; their glass frontages glittered. And all were as false-looking as a car salesman's smile. The industrial units, by contrast, were grimed with the constant emissions from slow-moving cars and lorries. Security guard boxes and barriers at the entrances to factory buildings turned an already ugly, unloved area into a gulag. The bus moved through it all sullenly, stopping and starting, like it was part of some sort of funeral cortege. Visually, the place was a mess – a wasteland. I hate this part of Luton. I hate this kind of development which you see so often on the outskirts of semi-industrial towns.

Inside, the bus was full of depressed-looking shoppers, sitting stiffly beside their bags. As usual at this time of day most of them were women or older folk. Peopled talked, but just briefly and sourly. Women struggled on and off, laden with purchases, accompanied by the huge and anarchic wills of small children.

And to think I used to enjoy travelling by public transport!

But as the bus travelled further out into the countryside and passengers continued to get on and off, the mood inside the bus gradually changed. Most of the occupants were now villagers - country people. They ambled: they didn't hurry. They occupied space comfortably and looked at ease in their seats. They greeted each other and talked quietly among themselves. There were smiles and jokes. The children seemed to be having fun. No-one bothered them too much as they ran up and down the aisle and occasionslly fell sprawling along it.

The bus followed an eccentric route among green meadows and across invisible county boundaries: every few hundred yards we’d pass a sign: Hertfordshire, it would say; Bedfordshire; Buckinghamshire. One moment we were in Herts, the next in Bucks, then Beds, and then, unaccountably, back into Herts again. The bus wiggled its way through the countryside and across the wiggly county boundaries. There was no telling what it would do: one minute we were up on the chalk ridge, the next we were trundling back down the hillside and onto the Bedfordshire plain. We passed though villages, all different from one another as it is possible to imagine, but all with their stout Norman churches and village greens. England is still a land of churches but these days, there are no congregations to fill them. The churches stand alone or side by side with Baptist or Congregationalist chapels, Quaker meeting rooms or Methodist halls - all of which tells you that you are in the historic heartland of English religious dissent.

We passed through small market towns: Totternhoe; Ivinghoe and then through Tring with its lively canal and fantastically pierced 'youth'. Everywhere there were neat country gardens with box hedges, and heaped flower beds. Allotments and cemeteries marked the edges of villages. And beyond and between them all lay miles of magnificent countryside. At times there was wild open grassland to the right of us, merging into heath covered hills. To the left there were small cultivated fields, smallholdings and farms. Then suddenly it would all go into reverse as the bus took a sudden 180 degree turn. This is an ever-changing landscape, full of suprising features, but there is no natural water here: the underlying strata is chalk. Occasionally you see a pumping station and there is the reservoir near Tring, but that is all. The land is lush and green from all the recent rainfall, but there is not a river to be seen.

At three o’clock the villages were suddenly full of mothers waiting outside schools to pick up their little ones. A few minutes later the streets were crowded with small children being accompanied home in tea-cosy hats and berets and beanies and strange looking headgear with piggy ears. Older kids were walking home by themselves: groups of boys, tussling, grabbing at each others jackets; overweight nine and ten year olds with their shirts hanging out; a small group of teenage girls, their chins in the air, smoking ostentatiously, full of attitude and confusion; spindly lads following on behind, horsing around and joking self-consciously. Sod it! It all looked so awkward and painful. I’d hate to be a teenager again!

At Ivinghoe we passed the youth hostel where Di and I stayed on our two-week walk along the Ridgeway to Avebury back in the 1990s – the walk wasn’t particularly arduous but it seemed epic in our imagination. It was a time that brings back intensely happy memories. We passed Ivinghoe Beacon standing out on the line of the chalk hills, marking the route of the fabulous Ridgeway itself – the oldest road in Europe – a commercial highway for at least five thousand years. It’s still a mysterious route to travel along, lined with Neolithic burial mounds and hill carvings, and big, rambling farms that have been settled there since medieval times.

I grew up with an overpowering sense of this landscape, its changing moods and unpredictable weather. I wax very romantic the moment I start thinking about it. It is big and it is varied because, as everywhere in Britain, the underlying geology is insanely complex. At the same time, there can hardly been a landscape more sleepy, more intensely cultivated. It seems wholly benign. And yet, on a stormy day – or when it is just a little wet and windy, even a tame and subdued land like this reverts to its original nature. It becomes huge, potent, singular. It exercises an ancient will.

The land’s will is something you can sense but never describe or understand. It is as hard and as pure as a diamond. It has no need to negotiate its existence. To be in the presence of this will is to know your own essential self. Be attentive to it, and you can hear the endless shifting movement of your own fear, your own courage - and your own insignificance. To know the original nature of the land is to be granted a space in which you can truly live as a human being.

I don’t think I could have survived sanely without a regular connection with this land. For six months back in the nineteen seventies I had a flat in central London and went almost mad with frustration and stress. Every night I had bad dreams. I dreamt I was climbing over endless concrete walls trying to find the one green field that lay beyond all this urban grime and ugliness. It was in those six months that I learned that I wasn’t the person I wanted to be. For the first time I understood there was a place where I belonged. Being in this open landscape settles and grounds me. It absorbs my distress and leaves me full of joy and happiness.

To know the nature of this land is to find your own heart. But, as I’ve come to understand in recent years, you can only find true peace when you know that you are prepared to die. That was something Di taught me. It's the sacrifice demanded by life and the challenge it poses.

If you are lucky you will hear the land speak. When the land speaks, it speaks with a single voice. You hear it in the drench of the rain or in the soft silence of snow; you hear it sometimes in the intense heat of mid-summer, when it speaks through a million living things; but most of all you can hear it when the wind howls around the hillsides, shaking the trees.

When you hear the land’s voice, it is special. The experience is personal and belongs to the time of your hearing. For me it is something like a single, deep organ chord. I heard it first when I was a child lying in bed, listening to the sound of the wind whistling round the corners of the house. I remember it clearly. It was like an undertone that reverberated in the earth and the trees and up through my own physical body. It reverberated in my mind too: a sound, but not a sound.

Too much imagination, my mother always said!

The voice of the land is a metaphor and also a reality. It stands for the unmediated moment. It is a moment when the world is not grasped through thought or intention or will; it is not grasped at by fear or sought by longing; it just is. It is a moment of direct experience. It happens rarely, but when it comes it is well worth waiting for.

The Daytona was well worth waiting for too.

But it gave me a moment of regret. Over the previous fortnight I’d been growing fond of the SV again. It has started to feel like an old warhorse. I love its grunt and ballsy low-down energy. But all those extra ponies in the Daytona are very seductive. And I love the bulk of her and the way she handles. Someone once said to me that riding a motorcycle is the nearest thing on earth to flying. Well, for me, when riding the Daytona, that is no more than the literal truth. She soars. She’s not an ‘exciting’ bike. She’s not nervous or twitchy or unpredictable. – she doesn’t have ‘character’ as the motorcycle magazines like to call it, but she flies like a bird. I love her to bits.

I rode her home back through Hemel on the A41. It’s not the most interesting of routes, but its one where any bike can find its wings. And what wings she has. Bilbo never had an adventure like this.

I suspect the SV is going to start feeling neglected again for a while.

Postscript. Oh yes! The dealers didn’t charge me a penny for checking the Daytona over, despite the fact that they had spent a couple of hours on her - and that included taking her for a test ride to see how the engine was performing. I suspect they know that they’ve got a regular customer here. They clearly know how to keep their customers happy, and that’s fine by me.

So with the Daytona swooping round corners beneath me and my bank balance healthier by some margin than I’d expected I started to think that life is not wholly dedicated to disaster after all.

Yabut....did they fix it?

Great writing, as usual.

sv-wolf wrote:A life dedicated to disaster?

The problem with you beginning posts in this way is that I start thinking, "damn, he's gone and dropped or broken a bike again." I'm not saying you're a bad rider, that's as far from the truth as possible. But you've got to admit, you and complex machinery haven't been the best of friends the last few months!

By the way, I'm envious of your skill with the written word. I think you missed your calling: author, not government worker.

jstark47 wrote:
By the way, I'm envious of your skill with the written word. I think you missed your calling: author, not government worker.

We've been telling him that for a few years. He writes better than many novelists whose books I have read.

blues2cruise wrote:Yabut....did they fix it?

Hi blues.

Erm... How can I put this?

Simply, the answer is, no. There was nothing to fix, except drain a little excess oil out of the engine. ( ) But I still have an issue about the engine clatter that suddenly started one day on the way home. That seems to have disappeared all by itself. I'll just have to monitor it and hope for the best.

blues2cruise wrote:

jstark47 wrote:
By the way, I'm envious of your skill with the written word. I think you missed your calling: author, not government worker.

We've been telling him that for a few years. He writes better than many novelists whose books I have read.

Thanks guys. It's just that dedicating a little time to sitting in front of a keyboard has been a lot cheaper than riding a bike recently!

Last weekend I took a trip up to Manchester on the Daytona. The plan was to visit Vicky, an old friend I haven't seen for more than a year.

There are a number of ways to get to Manchester from North Herts but it comes down to a simple choice between the motorways and the A roads. The motorways will get you straight there (M1/M6/M56). They are quick, slick and mind-numbingly dull - and they square off your tyres. The A roads are slower, unpredictable and much more interesting. There are any number of A-road routes you can follow, but whichever one you choose, the trick is to avoid Birmingham! Birmingham is England’s second city, vast and sprawling. It is slap bang in the middle of the country, where it squats like a giant polyp just waiting to engulf you.

In the end I opted for speed, and on Saturday morning, reluctantly set off towards Luton to catch the M1 - dead easy, dead quick and dead boring. The only relief from 200 miles of fast bumper-to-bumper riding was a quick detour on the Midlands Expressway (the M6 toll road): 27 glorious miles of traffic-free motorway. It is the only toll road in Britain and is worth every penny of the £2.50 they charge for a bike.

On Saturday, Vicky drove us out of the city towards the Derbyshire Peak District. Half way over the Snake Pass we paked the car in a lay-by, put on our walking boots and hoofed it into the heart of the White Peak.

The Derbyshire Peak District is stunning. The landscape alternates between impossibly beautiful green valleys and massive, booming moorlands. On Saturday we headed out to the moors on the scarp side of Kinder Scout: huge and wet and magnificent. Thick peat beds, black as tar, soft as a sponge cake, have been accumulating on the top of Kinder Scout for 7,000 years, ever since our stone-age ancestors felled all the trees. (Nothing new there, then.) The peat makes for some squidgy walking and has created plenty of surreal scenery. I'll say no more and let a few pics do the work.














































An area of eroded peat. A few black mounds of peat have survived
where the overlying grasses have held on as a 'thatch' to protect them.















What a great weekend!

A nice outdoor hike with a lady,can't beat that.
Could be very romantic if that is what one was after......

The butcher, the wolf, the surgeon and the teenager with uncoordinated eyes.


Mooching round town last Thursday afternoon with nothing better to do than to think about dinner, I found myself gravitating towards a familiar shop window. That window belonged to a butcher, one that I use from time to time whenever a carniverous urge overtakes me. I don’t normally eat red meat, but once in a while, when I get a craving for an oven-baked joint of lamb or a big plate of spicy pork sausages, this is where I come. When I fancy something special I know that this guy won't let me down.

I stared at the contents of the window. Framed by some giant legs of beef and a selection of chops was a tray of artistically arranged pork mince. That intrigued me because I’d never thought of butchers as having an aesthetic sense. I always imagined that to be a butcher you had to have a strong stomach, a poor sense of smell, and a thick-skinned attitude to life. You had to be mean perhaps, or mindlessly jolly but that was about it. Yet here before me was evidence of artistic flair: several pounds of pork mince, carefully laid out to spell the butcher’s name and cleverly decorated with what looked like spinach leaves and sprigs of thyme.

It brought home to me how we like to prettify some of life's less attractive things so that we don't have to face up to the realities behind them. Meat isn’t pretty. Even a traditional butcher's shop like this gives only a cleaned-up version of the truth. Half-carcases, hanging further back in the shop in full view of customers, tell us something about our physical natures, but the blood, snot, p1ss, dodo, mucus, saliva, intestines, organs, connective tissue, fur, genitals – all the yucky or sentimental bits - these have already been removed at the abattoir. That would not have been the case 150 years ago.

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, most butchers in Hitchin slaughtered their animals in the back room of their shop; and if they didn’t have a back room, they slaughtered them in the street out front. I have copies of Victorian photographs of the town which show it happening. If a butcher did that today, most of his customers would hot-foot it across to the local supermarket to find their meat cleanly and hygienically wrapped and in a form that wholly removed it from its origins.

As I stood looking in at the window, a familiar memory drifted into my mind. One winter afternoon, when I was still a small child, a travelling butcher arrived in our village. He drove a dark blue van, and came knocking on our door, selling his meat. Travelling shopkeepers were not uncommon in the villages of the 1950s and 60s when few working people owned a car. But this butcher was an odd-looking character in his long, tan-coloured shop-coat. I remember that he made me feel very uncomfortable as he stood there in our doorway. We’d not seen him before. (And we never saw him again.) I could tell that mum didn’t like him either, but she bought some mince from him anyway. I've often wondered about that, because she was always fussy about food and especially whom she bought it from. But dad often didn’t have much work at that time of year. I suspect now, that the meat was cheap and there probably wasn’t much money in the household kitty at that time.

The mince was chosen and brought back from the van in a brown paper packet. When mum opened it later she found that it wasn't what she thought she had bought. It was very crudely minced. I remember watching her tip it into a bowl and then try to pick little splinters of bone out of it. She pointed them out to me as she worked. As I was still getting to grips with the recent knowledge of where meat came from, I was appalled.

I stood, reflecting on this memory for a moment or two outside the butcher's. I took a long look at the carefully arranged mince in the window and then walked a couple of hundred yards across town to the supermarket where I bought myself a nice hygienically wrapped free-range chicken.

Like most people, I don’t like to dwell too deeply on the unpleasant things in life. And I guess that is natural; the mind is designed to protect itself from trauma. But, as natural as it is, it's like target-fixation – not always the most useful of hard-wired skills for surviving in the 21st century. A little bit more reality-fixing would not come amiss to many of us.

But I also have a cussed kind of mind that likes to know things, especially if they are just out of sight. My thoughts tend to overleap their own defences. So as I walked to the supermarket, I started to engage in a little bit of reality checking. With the images of butcher’s meat floating through my head, I allowed myself to think about some of the risks and potential consequences of riding motorcycles. Several grisly (or gristly) scenarios passed through my mind, and served as reminders of why I should ride defensively – not something I'm always very good at.

Before the day was out, those thoughts proved to be curiously useful. They may even have saved me from a bloody and painful accident.

Time to introduce you to Re-wired Youth .

I had to work late that night so I didn't leave the office till about eight o'clock. The weather was grey and damp and it was already growing dark as I passed the Lister Hospital at Corey’s Mill. I was tired and my main thoughts were of getting home. Yet, as I came to a halt at the traffic lights, my attention was drawn almost hypnotically to something tall, thin and exceedingly limp sitting behind the wheel of the vehicle beside me. It's head drooped from beneath a regulation back-to-front baseball cap but I couldn't see its face clearly. It was Re-wired Youth.

Between the hospital and the roundabout we travelled side-by-side. He was driving a scruffy Vauxhall something-or-other (one car looks much the same to me as another) and I was riding the Daytona (what else?). He was on the inside lane, I was on the outside. We were at the back of a small group of cars.

We stayed together on the roundabout. He started to pull off it onto the dual-carriageway to Hitchin. I did the same. Until that moment, I had no real sense of danger, but two things suddenly registered on my radar: first, he wasn’t indicating (but then, no-one under twenty-five indicates these days), and second, (I'm still trying to figure it out precisely) he seemed to be only very tenuously attached to his steering wheel. Something inside me went instantly to DEFCOM 3. And it was lucky for me it did, because a split-second later Re-wired Youth suddenly pulled one of those ‘organic,’ (i.e. unpremeditated) manoeuvres. Without any warning, he decided he just didn’t want to go down the dual-carriageway to Hitchin, after all. He swung the wheel hard round to the right, and indicated (bless him!) that he was turning back onto the roundabout. But the only way he was going to do that was to drive directly through or over me.

He did try.

I swerved the bike back onto the roundabout and across two lanes to stay out of his reach. It was bloody lucky for me that there was nothing coming up behind us.

We both came to a stop, and stared at one another. I felt oddly un-belligerent, just shaken and a tad indignant. I gave him a what-the-hell-was-that-all-about kind of gesture. He sat in his car, utterly motionless with his eyeballs going in all directions. I was fascinated. I had the impression that his eyes were even less securely connected to his thoughts than his arms had been to his wheel. I'm pretty sure that if he was aware of me right then, it was only vaguely as an obstacle to be avoided.

Suddenly, without a word or a gesture he backed up fast, then took off down the Hitchin Road (the road he had just decided he didn’t want) and disappeared round the bend. As I’d overshot the turning by a couple of dozen yards, I had to ride all the way round the roundabout before picking it up again.

I didn't catch up with him until I was about half-a-mile down the dual carriageway. He was drifting along well below the speed limit, travelling in the overtaking lane on a completely empty road. That came as no surprise but it did add to the sense of weirdness that was growing on me about all this. I did think briefly of getting past him on the inside but I’d already had enough excitement for one evening. And who knows what surprises he might still have had in store for me? I slowed up behind him and sat there waiting to see what would happen. Eventually, reality did penetrate into the remaining core of his intelligence because, after about 30 seconds, he pulled over (without indicating), to let me pass - well, I presume it was to let me pass. I was ever-so-slightly surprised at this but thankful nonetheless. The moment I got by him, I whacked open the throttle and left him behind as quickly as I could - hopefully forever.

But before I did, something happened - someing approaching the state of human communication – but not quite. I didn't speed up until he was behind me because I was frankly curious and wanted to get a good look at the lad. As I passed, his head turned briefly in my direction and his jaw moved slackly. He was forming words, very slow words. But oddly enough, I understood them.

“Wassup mate?”

That was it. What could I say?

Words like these would make a fitting and ironic comment on the lad's tombstone. More likely, though, they will be the last sounds heard by some innocent and unsuspecting road user who fails to get out of his way.

As I powered home, that silent, 'Wassup mate' kept going through my head. 'Mate!' There was a certain aptness to it, I thought. (I was in denial again: the self-protecting geek had taken over.) It was apt because historically the word, ‘mate’ means ‘meat’ (in Middle English, ‘y-meat’ means someone you share your ‘meat’ with.) Back at the roundabout, I had come very close to sharing some of my meat with the side of Re-wired Youth’s car and probably spreading some it around on the tarmac as well. But etymologies lie and in this instance I didn’t feel at all matey with him or with the roadway - I might acknowledge a cold fascination with them, perhaps, but that was all.

For the remainder of my journey home I didn’t ride so well. My nervous system was beginning to react to the shock. As I changed down to 30mph on the outskirts of Hitchin I started thinking what might have happened if my instinct had not kicked in. I suddenly became acutely attached to those of my precious and sensitive body parts that might even now have been lying, crushed into mincemeat, at the side of the Corey’s Mill roundabout. The contents of the butcher’s window came back vividly to mind, as did that afternoon I spent in the kitchen watching my mum sort the meat. And then, a scene popped into my head. In it, a roomful of white-coated medics at the nearby hospital stood against a backdrop of arc lights and equipment picking little slivers of cracked bone from out of a large bowl of wolf-mince. I decided I’d had a very lucky escape.

I woke up last Tuesday morning dreaming of riding the Daytona up the motorway at 130 mph, trying to scare the dodo out of the pillion I was carrying on the back. The pillion was Tony. Despite being a total petrol head, Tony has never ridden on a motorcycle. He’s been asking me for a lift for months but only on the understanding that we ‘go slow.’ Heh! Heh! Heh! I guess the big f**k-off demon in me decided to show his horns that morning – if only in the privacy of my own head.

At least my dreams are beginning to show a bit of spirit. For six weeks I’ve been cooped up in the house, first with “flu” - of the total-wipe-out variety - and then with some sodding awful post-viral condition. If you have ever wondered what it’s like to sleep16-18 hours a day, day-after-day, week-after-week, I can tell you: it is f****g bizarre, and you go kinda stir-crazy. For the first two weeks I couldn’t even stand upright for more than a few minutes. If I tried, I got dizzy, and either had to sit down, or fall down under the weight(lessness) of my condition.

By the end of week three I was managing to walk the half-mile into town every afternoon. But when I got home, all I could do was crash onto the sofa and go back to sleep for the rest of the day. I did not like this. The bikes were rusting away in the yard. I was getting bored and mutinous (even in my dreams). The house was beginning to look like a tip. And Tarzan would have got lost in what was once my garden. But at least I was managing to do the washing up – some of it, some of the time, somehow.

I'm pretty sure the tiredness is some kind of emotional kickback. May 6th was the second anniversary of Di’s death, and perhaps these two things are not unconnected. Time hasn’t passed in the normal way since then, and 'reality' had been a big hole, a strange washed-out space unconnected to anything solid or purposeful.

Maybe this ‘flu’ is some kind of reckoning.

Shortly after it first hit, I developed a high fever which dragged me through all the weirdest mental dodo imaginable. At times I was deranged. I keep thinking of all those sweaty, yelling nightmares that I had as a kid, where everything seemed hyper-tense and hyper-real. My head was full of the same kind of stuff as I lay on the sofa, only it didn’t go away when I woke up.

My temperature finally fell, the fever abated and the good ol' solid world started to swing back into view. But just as I thought it was all over a crew of big, black, emotional demons appeared. I got mad, vengeful, vitriolic, enraged, stubborn, hateful, spiteful, bitter. I had violent dreams, filthy angry nightmares; I woke up from sleep with my jaw clenched tight and my hands balled into fists.

It suddenly dawned on me that not once, in the last four years have I been seriously angry. I've felt irritated or frustrated or pissed off but not lung-pumping angry. And it is easy to see why. During Di's illness, getting angry wasn’t a option or a priority. I was her carer and she was dying. Somehow I got into a groove and the habit of ‘coping’ and ‘caring’ just stuck.

But the angry phase passed. Within another week, I'd started to relax - for the first time in years. The daily routine of drifting in and out of sleep started to feel very pleasant and for a while I was happy just to cosy up on the sofa without worrying about it. It reminded me of the way I felt as a kid when I lay on the goatskin rug in front of the fire in the dark, feeling all comfortable and secure.

But now I’m fretting again, because, though I’m still tired and feeling physically weak, ‘reality’ has broken in on me and I’m seriously impressed with all the things that suddenly need doing - and are not getting done.

First, I have a load of stuff to sort out for the Himalaya trip. Simon and the guys at EnduroHimalaya have sent me through another barrowload of bureaucracy to deal with. (Note how matey I am sounding with this crew these days. They’re beginning to feel like a distant part of my extended family.)

I need an international driving permit – that’s easy, if only I could lever myself into Luton to get it;

I need insurance – that’s easy too if I could only remember the name of the company I want to use;

I need a visa – that means a trip up to India House in Central London - a waste of a day and a lot of standing round, but simpe enough – if you have the energy;

And now I’ve just been told that I need to complete another goddam annoying little form called an ‘Inner Line Permit’.

This ‘Inner Line Permit’ is necessary because I’ll be travelling through a ‘notified area’ on the Chinese/Tibetan border. If it helps to get me through the road barriers and, more important, if it stops trigger-happy Chinese guards taking pot shots at me then I guess I’ll bite the bullet and fill it in.

Damn! Why can’t the Chinese establishment admit that they are running a big capitalist state just like everybody else? If they did, then Jiang Zemin (and all those faceless people in the “Standing Committee of the Chinese Politburo” etc etc etc) would be left alone to get on with exploiting and tyrannising their working population with impunity - just like capitalist states have always done in the west. Amnesty International would carry on grumbling, but as it doesn’t get much up-front public exposure it doesn’t count for a lot in this media-obsessed world. China could then be welcomed as a full member of that fragile and recently discovered media joke: ‘the international community’. And I wouldn’t have to fill in all these f****g ridiculous forms.

The second reason I need to get well quick is that I’ve booked a day’s two-wheeld green-laning on the 28 May. I'm doing this because I want to crunch a little bit of Hertfordshire gravel and ford a few Hertfordshire rivers before tackling the Himalayas. If I’m still too ill to do it by the time the 28th comes round, I will lose my deposit of £50, and that will make me very pissed. Besides, I’ve got myself all excited about it. The bit of rough riding I did in India was amazing! So, being a mature, thoughtful, cautious kind of person, I’ve decided that off-roading is going to be my next BIG THING.

The third reason for getting well, is that next week is the bloody BMF motorcycle rally - the central event in the year’s biking calendar. My BMF weekend is sacrosanct. It is one weekend out of 52 when I abandon a life of unbridled sobriety and for three glorious days get thoroughly pissed, eat loads of crap burgher bar food, blast out my brains with mega-db rock music, have a f****g hilarious time with members of the bike club, and then come home again, happy and content, ready to face yet another year of care, regulation, toil and integrity.

Since all this 'flu' stuff hit me, bikes (and every other physical or active entity) have been eliminated from my consciousness. In the early days of my cocooning, a bulky yellow blur would form occasionally in the corner of my mind. I hardly noticed it at first until, one day, I realised it was the best I could do to summon up an image of the Daytona. But there was no energy in it. It was no more than a reminder that the bike had once been important in my life.

Slowly though, as the days went by, formed thoughts oozed up in my head and I began to be troubled by the occasional bike-related anxiety. I became aware, in particular, that the Daytona was standing in the garden under a loose cover in the rain with a chain that needed oiling.

I lived uncomfortably with this anxiety for a week before it occurred to me that I could do something about it. But then, rapidly, I realised I couldn't. It was a ridiculous idea. I would have to get the keys off the hook, open the back door, squeeze down between the bikes and then spray lube on the Daytona's chain - and if that wasn't enough, I'd have to wheel the big mf backwards bit by bit or get out the paddock stand. Just thinking about it it made my muscles ache and my head feel dizzy. It took another week before I had enough energy to go out and spray some lube over the few bits of chain that were exposed – pathetic I know, but, at the time, this simple act seemed like a huge personal triumph (absolutely no pun intended.)

A little while after that came the great day when I did something really decisive. I got the pillion seat off the back of the Daytona and strung up the charger to the battery leads – and then strung enough thoughts together to remember to turn the charger on. Seeing the little light turn to green was the nearest thing to an fun I had had in… oh…! a fair while.

The Suzuki had to wait a little longer to get some juice. Fact is, I’ve never got around to fitting her up with permanant charger lead. (I’ve been meaning to do it for months - No, I lie: years!) It took another hundred hours of sleep before I managed to walk into town, buy some connector leads, wire her up to the battery and then plug her into the charger. I stood back and admired my handiwork for at least half-an-hour. Was I pleased with my self? Not half! Now, I thought, if I ever I were to come down with some goddam awful bug like this again, at least I would be able to look after the Suzuki.

After that success, I got down and oiled my leathers, polished my lid and in a truly heroic moment even found sufficient raw strength to lug a Hein Gericke leather jacket into Stevenage on the train and get a new zip put in it. I'd bought the jacket from the BMF nearly a year ago. It was on sale as a second, so I got it dead cheap: the zip had already gone, but it was otherwise in a perfect condition. I love this jacket. It’s identical to the one I bought five years ago but one size bigger. The idea is that I’ll be able to get more layers under it, come the winter.

After that, things started moving quickly. Motivation came back and one afternoon, ten days ago, I spent several hours thinking that maybe... if conditions were right... I might... just... like... to take... the Daytona… for a ride... sometime. It was a great thought. I turned it over and over it in my mind. I started to plan it all out. First, I'd need to check her tyres, oil her chain and wheel her out of the backyard onto the street. Then... But I didn't get much further than that. The more I thought about all that effort, the more my resolution collapsed and eventually my body reverted gently back to Zzzzzzz……………………………..

F***

But at least the desire had returned.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Having nothing else to do durng my waking and dozing hours, I spent a lot of time listening to music on 'Planet Rock' and 'Radio Three' - the twin stars of my musical universe. Most of what they pumped out was standard stuff, but I did discover Black Keys, a two piece, low-down-and-dirty, blues rock band. Great musicians, great music (if you ignore the lyrics.) I went out and bought a couple of their CD's and played them over and over.

I also spent a lot of time listening obsessively to Folie d’Espagne. I picked it up out of curiosity in a CD classical music sale during one of my afternoon trips into town. It's utterly nutty. It appears, at first, to be a set of variations based on a courtly seventeenth-century dance tune but as it continues it becomes increasingly interspersed with bits of blue grass and Indian rag. It has parts for renaissance instruments but also tubular bells, circular saws, pistols, deflating balloons, bits of casual conversation, and a recording of a car journey. I’m not sure why, but it made me laugh uproariously.

I decided, too, that this was a perfect opportunity to catch up on some reading and started looking through piles of old paperbacks for something to entertain myself with. (I never throw books away. There are thousands of them all round the house, in the attic, in the cellar, on shelves, everywhere.) Given my general lack of energy and determination I cannot therefore explain how I ended up reading a political diatribe by Che Guevara. The book has been lying around the house for decades. Guevara was briefely a hero of mine many years ago when I was still running on teenage hormones and ignorance. Once having opened the cover, though, I got strangely hooked. But there's no doubt about it, reading his stuff is not unlike doing the washing up: it feels like a chore and it's not exactly thrilling.

He was a hell of a complicated character. I get the feeling he was genuinely distressed by the plight of the South American peasants and wanted to do something about their condition. But he also appeared to be romantically attracted to violence for its own sake. To be fair, blood-lust a common experience in combat, but a lot of people died as a result. Middle-class Cubans who had become p1ssed off with the Batista regime supported his "revolution," but there is not much evidence of enthusiasm for it among the peasants or workers he believed he was devoting his life to.

I wanted to find something to like about him but couldn’t, except, of course that, as we all now know, he spent a part of his early life riding round South America on a beat-up Norton Commando. So, what, I ask, went wrong?

By some obscure sort of logical progression I moved on from reading about Che and his Norton to looking up Russian motorcycle blogs. Unfortunately, all the Russian blogs I could find were in Russian (Well, OK genius! What did you expect?) But I did come upon one glitzy site in English. According to this, biking in Russia is taking off in a big way again. There are regular sporting events and exhibitions and lots of commercial showcasing. All very much like it is here, really. And I thought that was a shame. I’m finding all the commercial glam and glitter surrounding motorcycling less and less attractive.

I much preferred what I found next. This was a site belonging to a (British?) biker living in the former Soviet state of Georgia in the Caucuss mountains. (How the hell do you spell that?). Georgia hasn’t been doing too well economically like some of its Central European neighbours. It has good soil (it is part of the 'black earth' region of the former Russian empire which fed most of the population), and some oil and mineral deposits, but its agriculture and infrastructure are in a mess.

This is what this bloke’s blog says about the biking scene in Georgia.

“The Georgian Traffic Law and Highway Code have no provisions for motorcycles; there is no training and no form of driving test. Any Georgian biker who has the appropriate stamp on his driving licence must merely convince the issuing office that he is competent (and normally a small present helps). There is no requirement for insurance and indeed no means of insuring a motorcycle here. Of course helmets are not compulsory and I have even been stopped by the police, to be told that it was not right to wear a helmet in Georgia! The police in Tbilisi have recently been equipped with some old Moto Guzzi’s, and though they do wear open face helmets, they do not fasten the straps!”

Sounds just like the sort of place where you could really cut loose and feel free: no safety nets; no nanny state to minister to your every need and to complain about when things go wrong - and no-one to mend the holes in the road, either. (An R1 is not the best bike to own in Georgia!)

OK, I'll admit it. I'm romanticising now. I’m just a soft ol’ Western European really and Georgia is nothing if not a bureaucratic state. But for somewhere to ride through on a long bike journey into the unknown, it sounds ideal. (I sure as hell could do with time away from the mind-numbingly trite commercialisation of life we have to endure these days in The West.)

And then, at last, it happened. On Friday, while wandering round the town in the suddenly glorious weather, I was hit by a real physical urge to get out on the bike. As the day wore on the urge got dodo hot. It worked its way through my wilting muscles up into my brain, took hold of my thoughts and wouldn't let go. I had no idea whether I would be able to ride safely - or at all - but I was as sure as f**k going to try. I ‘hurried’ home, prepared the bike, kitted up and caned her up the A505/A10 into Cambridge.

Not having ridden for nearly six weeks, and still feeling like a bendy toy, I expected to be all hesitant on the corners and in traffic. Not a bit of it! I was so relaxed, I felt like I could do anything. It was a beautiful day, the roads were clear and... dodo, was I in the mood for this. Riding home, I started to recall that the Daytona was a high performance road bike and needed some exercise. I was a bad, bad boy.

It was a great afternoon. Sheer bliss! But by the time I got back to the house I was ready to crash again. I left the Daytona parked out in the road, went in and went to sleep - happy and fulfilled.

Later

It was three o’f**king clock in the morning and the events of the next half hour were to morph me into the foulmouthed ***t I become just once in every fifteen years or so. 'Cos it is only every fifteen years or so that I have to face a situation like this.

I'd just woken up on the sofa where I'd gone to sleep in my clothes and remembered that I'd left the Daytona out on the road. I was heading for the door, bike key in hand, when a couple of coppers knocked and let themselves in.

They told me what had happened. Some f***ers had tried to nick the Daytona. It seems the bastards had neutralised the alarm and somehow wheeled her down the street, presumably with the intention of sticking her in their van. (The cops thought it was a professional job.) Somehow, on the way, they dropped her. Ngrrrrrh! They had picked her up and were wheeling her through a connecting alleyway to the car park when a neighbour came out to see what was happening. They took fright and scarpered, leaving the bike propped up against the wall. She must have made a huge crash as she went down to get this guy up.

They smashed a mirror and scratched the fairing and the can. I can’t f****g believe it! I just can’t. I can’t believe I can be that jinxed with this sodding bike.

The coppers called a dog-van but it got here too late to get a trace. The three police officers were pleasant, unparanoid blokes and we stood talking for a while, trying to piece together what had happened. It gave me a chance to calm down.

I went to bed totally f**ked off!!!!! I hope the thieving bastards spend the next ten years eating dodo! I don't often think in these terms, but this has really got to me.

I dunno, maybe the thing is jinxed... is insurance going to cover this?

Around here, Triumphs aren't that popular with the sport bike crowd... the joke is you can leave the keys in the Triumph, the thieves will always go past and steal the GSXR instead.

I feel your pain though. I really don't know what else to say - I know you're not religious, but maybe Somebody is trying to tell you something about this bike? Is there something else you like - maybe it's time for a trade?