FridayAs I rode into the courtyard at work this morning, there she was: a gleaming new V-Strom, storm-blue and beautiful. As I parked her sister, the SV thou, beside her I was wondering where she had come from. None of the regular motorcyclists at work had said they were looking for a new bike. Was this a newcomer?
It turned out that the new bike belonged to Mike, erstwhile owner of a wine red Royal Enfield 500cc ‘Electric’ Bullet. He'd taken the Enfield up to Cambridge for a regular service, he said, seen the V Strom, asked for a test ride, was utterly smitten, and signed on the dotted line. It was an impulse buy. (The mean!)
When I pinned him down later, though, he admitted that there was a bit of a history to the purchase. As much as he loved the Enfield he was getting fed up with the cost of having to service it every 2,000 miles (
) - and fed up, too with the experience of having bits dropping off it on a fairly regular basis.
Sigh! Old British or Anglo-Indian bikes are great lookers but they have always been generous in the way they like to dispose of their parts …
I've never ridden the V Strom but, as it has the same engine as the SV1000, I suspect Mike is going to have to reprogramme his Enfield-oriented brain to deal with the torquiness of the new machinery. When I asked him about the ride into work this morning he didn’t reply for a moment but just stood there with a far-away look in his eyes.
OK, OK, Mike. ‘Nuff said!
Not that Mike is a stranger to speed: he was a blue-light, hospital emergency rider for many years, couriering pints of blood up and round the county, flat out, day and night. He bought the Enfield three years ago when he moved out to one of the country villages in North Herts, in the hope that it would calm him down and help prepare him for his retirement. Hmmm…… Once a bike has set your blood a'boiling, it is going to be hard after that to live without the bubbles.
A week last Saturday I rode the SV into Letchworth this morning and paid a visit to the dealers. The thieving swine who molested the Daytona a couple of weeks ago had smashed a mirror and I'd ordered a replacement. I hadn't ridden her since then. (£72 the bloody mirror cost me - $140 - what a rip off!) It took me five minutes to fit the mirror, ten minutes to kit up and then the rest of the afternoon to get over my agitation.
No! No! No! Hell and damnation! She felt wrong. She sounded wrong. She rode wrong all the way to Cambridge and back - which meant that the whole world felt wrong, too – wrong and ugly and out of sorts. I could have wept.
I knew she was misaligned from the moment I sat astride her and leaned into the bars. I couldn’t see the problem but I could sure as hell feel it. The throttle and clutch adjustments were out very slightly, too, and once I had her running at speed she kept pulling to the right. You know what it is like when a beautiful and perfect thing that brings joy to your life becomes maimed and distorted…
Whatever the bastards did to her was very slight: but it was enough to upset her handling big time.
I’m not going to try and fix her myself, even though I’m told that if it is the bars it will be easy enough. When I know
what I’m doing, then I’ll start to maintain her myself. In the meantime I will just have to hold up my hand and admit ignorance. So she goes back to the dealers in Aston Clinton. (They must love me!) And that means taking more time off work. Damn!
Saturday night: I rode down to see my friend, Anna. The plan was to sleep over at her place and then for the two of us to go walking with her friends the following day. Anna and I are good mates. We go way back.
And that's all. (It's amazing how your female friends all start to turn into matchmakers the moment you become unattached.) Anna lives in Dorking on the other side of London. It’s a 70 mile journey, first down the A1(M) then half way round the London Orbital (M25), then a short ride along the A24.
Back in the 1960s The M25 was carefully designed as one of the world’s most boring roads. And I can personally vouch for the fact that nothing has changed in the intervening 40 years. The M25 is boring to the point of stupefaction. It's boring and also very busy; but primarily it's just plain boring.
You need to have spent your entire life watching black-and-white footage of five-day international test cricket not to be bored by it.
As I turned off the A1(M) onto the M25 at the South Mimms roundabout I wondered in desperation how I could liven up the journey just a little. Maybe, I thought… maybe I could try to remember the turn-offs on the way down, ‘cos I’m always getting them muddled up. (OK, OK so I was already scraping the bottom of the barrel – but you see the problem.) Or I could try and work out where the speed cameras were hidden under the Heathrow gantries, or experiment with improving my motorway road positioning technique. Surely, I thought – surely, there must be some way to make riding the M25 more interesting!
Fifty miles later, as I turned off the M25 and headed for Anna's, I reflected that the last hour had been one of the most truly boring experiences in my motorcycling life.
Anna, I thought, as I reached the outskirts of Dorking, you’d better be on good form this weekend!
Sunday
The British weather forecast for the south-east of England said it was going to be wet and grey. The French weather forecast for the south-east of England said it was going to be wet and grey, too. And, as I later found out, the weather back home in Hertfordshire
was most definitely wet and grey all day long. But in this little corner of England, and for this one afternoon, the sun shone, the air was warm and sweet, birds sang and I began to imagine that summer had genuinely arrived.
We drove out into the glorious Kent countryside and up onto the greensand ridge where I would be meeting Anna's walking friends for the first time. I was looking forward to it. After weeks of being cabined at home with flu I was feeling feisty again and in need of a damn good laugh. We found the place, got out our gear, breathed the air, and then, as Anna introduced me to her friends, one by one, in the car park, I felt my heart sinking slowly like a stone.
I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this elderly and determinedly upper middle-class gathering. Elderly is fine: I like older people. They can be fun. Middle-class is fine too – up to a point: I can play the propertied middle-class game with the best of them. But after all these years, people who are both elderly
and middle class still fill me with dread. There are barriers, you see - barriers and prejudices (on both sides) which rarely make for easy socialising.
I started wondering whether to knuckle down to an afternoon of polite conversation or gratify a growing desire to be as impolite as possible. ("Go on!" the voices urged, "Play the gobby motorcyclist. Unpack that low sense of humour.") It was during this inner debate that I started to realise that a lot of these ‘elderly’ walkers were actually younger than I was. That came as a serious shock. I started to feel confused. These days, I don’t look in the mirror very often.
A lot of people (very annoyingly) regard me as middle-class too.
But that’s different!!!
The walkers gathering here on the ridge belonged to that strata of English society for whom ‘being middle-class’ is a badge of identity. They build their middle-classness around them like a castle wall to defend against invasion or attack from the rest of the world - and that, in my book, is very bad news. I imagined an afternoon in the company of some bloke with full fat cheeks and debatable chins going on about how well his son's business was doing in Abu Dhabi, or waxing lyrical about the relative merits of this or that continental 4x4. As the latest arrival with a plummy voice stepped out of his Range Rover and began pulling on his walking boots, I was already asking him in my head how many Arabs his son was exploiting on low wages and how many motorcyclists he had mashed on his bull bars this week. Prejudiced? Me?
It's just that there is a certain kind of middle-class English accent that liberates great waves of hostility in me.
I realised that, right now, I was going through some sort of crisis.
I realised, too, that it had to stop before there were... consequences!
I started talking to myself sensibly and rationally and calmly about what I was feeling. I reminded myself that I was a tolerant person who generally got on with most people and… (oh god, it wasn’t working)…
LISTEN! (I was shouting at myself now.) Calm down! You’re behaving like a stupid stroppy teenager. Most people are fine once you stop treating them as stereotypes. Don’t prejudge. What the hell has got into you anyway?
But, I knew what had got into me. I could feel the beanie on my head shifting around as the horns started sliding out beneath it. Then, in the distance, I heard the roar of a sportsbike changing down to take a corner - and that was that! I suddenly felt furious. What the hell was I doing here, I asked myself, traipsing around the countryside with a lot of stiffs capable of boring the life out of a glass eyeball?
It is a very curious fact about prejudice that it can always find plenty of raw meat to feed itself on. These people, I noted, did not want to engage with the landscape, they wanted to tidy it up. Stiles were ‘rather muddy’, ‘too high’ or ‘badly designed’. Several of the walkers were using those alpine walking sticks that I despise so much. Weak dinner-table jokes began circulate... It was all so f****g bourgeois.
“Get on with it!” I wanted to scream. Get dirty. Enjoy yourselves! Take up the challenge, if that is what it is. STOP COMPLAINING!
And then, as I dropped back to wait for Anna while she went for a pee... it happened. A woman in a bright red top and with a ringingly cut-glass accent stepped forward and, in the extraordinarily polite but authorative manner of middle-class women, told me to carry on walking.
She would wait for Anna…
I took a second for me to catch on. In her world - a world I had inadvertently wandered into - it was improper for a bloke to be waiting for a 'lady' while she relieved herself in the bushes. She would take charge and perform the required duties.
“Oh! For crying out loud!”
“Don’t you think that is a little medieval?” I asked, rather more loudly than was absolutely necessary. “Don’t you think it is positively pre-cambrian?”
She didn’t talk to me after that...
...which was a relief.
It was the turning point. After that, I began to relax. Having vented my spleen (and having felt immoderately pleased with myself for several minutes) I started to see just how funny this whole situation was. The ridiculousness of it came washing over me in great waves. Thank god that my moodiness, which was poisoning my whole day (and potentially, someone else's as well) was beginning to dissolve in silent laughter.
Soon after that I fell into conversation with Maggie, who, I discovered was neither elderly nor middle class nor boring nor cut-glass nor effete but shared a common Irish ancestry with me, enjoyed the same kind of films and had a similar love of being out of doors.
Gradually, individual human realities began to penetrate my awareness and the beanie settled back down on my head. This collectivised mass of elderly, middle-class walkers gradually became Pam and Isobel and Irene, and Bob and Jack and Mike. I started to like some of them, found them funny or interesting, and got occasionally animated when we talked. The warmth of the Kentish sun softened me. After months of confinement and dreary weather it was wonderful to feel the heat beaming down on my head and shoulders. And Kent itself, ‘the garden of England’, so full of plump May greenery, began, at last, to work its own natural magic.
Thorough it all, though, I still kept hankering to be out on the bike.
LOL If ever there was a spirit of mischief then this dog embodied it. That's why we called him Loki after the Norse god of mischief and destruction. 
