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i'm noticing the t-shirt and back protector trend here in Tucson lately, too. saw two of them today on the little bit of riding i did, three yesterday over the course of my 100 miles in/around town.

a couple of them were wearing helmets with the back protectors, but not all. it does make you scratch your chin-whiskers at the logic contained therein.

Last week, I got the SV out of mothballs to check her over, ready for Victor to start riding her – and fell in love with her all over again. Since then, the Daytona has been sitting idle in the back garden and I’ve been riding the SV every day to work. I’d forgotten just how comfortable she is and how well she handles. People say she is a bit on the heavy side in a corner, but I can’t say I’ve noticed that. She doesn’t turn quite as nimbly as the Daytona but she doesn't have to be forced. What I like about her is how smooth and planted she feels and how immediate and willing is her response to every input. She doesn’t hesitate: she delivers instant power, instant acceleration, instant engine breaking, too, and all with perfect poise and efficiency. She’s a tough old warrior, now, with nearly 50,000 miles on the clock.

But her engine is past its best. I have to be more careful to select the right gear nowadays, and her long history of increasing vibeyness continues. There are now regular tremors through the pegs and saddle at anything over 40 mph. And, as always, the vibes vary with the weather. The wetter it is, the more she vibrates. I seem to have an affinity for bikes with curious habits.

Eight weeks under a cover in the back garden has also done some dreadful things to her. Her chain has developed loads of rust spots, despite all the oil I lavished on it before I put her away. And the paint on the top of her clutch casing has blistered badly. I have no idea how this has happened. Battery leak? I've had a quick look and everything seems OK. It must be chemical. Must be! I can’t believe it is just damp.

Fortunately, I have a vial of silver paint left over from last year when I touched up some nasty-looking luggage damage around her tail. But as ugly as the flaking paintwork looks, there’s no point doing anything about it until I know what the cause is.

On Monday, I rode her out to the club bike-meet at the Waggon and Horses pub in Watton-at-Stone. It's not a long journey - ten miles or so - but I enjoyed every moment of it. I relished the feel of her and how she handles on country roads. I enjoyed her purity of response. It was with some reluctance that I swung into the pub carpark and switched off her engine.

It was a good turn out at the pub - about fifty members altogether and there were quite a few new faces. We seem to be attracting a lot of interest recently. Gordon and Ray arrived on elderly bikes they had rebuilt themselves. Gordon is retired and his shed floor is always covered with a pile of rusty bits in the process of transforming itself into a classic bike. I admire Gordon immensely, and people like him, who can create this sort of engineering magic. He arrived at the Waggon on his latest restoration, a 1938 BSA SV Tourer – a lovely old thumper tricked out in silver and green. The more I get to know these early bikes the more beautiful they look.

Ray is younger - just. He rebuilds British bikes for a living in his workshop over at Arlesey and has a shedful of classics. This evening he arrived on a Vincent Comet with a sidecar outfit attached. Vincents are relatively common round here since they were made just down the road in Stevenage and that stimulates the pride of local collectors. They are strange and beautiful machines, wholly unlike anything else on two wheels. I was a bit taken aback though, to discover that this particular bike was exactly (I mean, exactly) the same age as me. And I had to comfort myself with the thought that I probably still had more of my original bits than it did.

I’ve seen quite a few classics around town recently and am constantly cursing myself for not remembering to carry a camera. I’ve also encountered one or two collectors - like the bloke who appeared at the Sainsbury’s checkout queue one evening. I’d stopped off to buy a few groceries after a very difficult day at work and was quietly enjoying a bit of peace and quiet in the privacy of my own thoughts.

So, there I am, daydreaming myself into a heroic trek through the mountains of New Zealand, when suddenly he appears like a tsunami, out of nowhere, smashing my reverie to pieces and leaving a trail of devastation in his wake. He chunters on about how bad the roads have become since last winter and how surprising is the political turn-around in the recent elections. In his hand he carries a solitary packet of frozen peas. My eyes, for some reason, cannot take themselves off this object.

A bit of background here: starting up a conversation in a British checkout queue, under any circumstances, is a pretty risky social strategy. It’s not normal behaviour. You can just about get away with it if you mumble or sound embarrassed. You can also complain about the weather or make a quick joke. But coming on to a stranger like you are his best mate is… well, deeply transgressive - you might as well walk up to someone and say, “I am from the planet, Zarg: take me to your leader.” And if you do that, you should expect the appropriate reaction – tightened anuses all round.

(OK, this is an exaggeration. I’m maligning my countryfolk; we do not quite conform to the stereotype like that. But there is enough truth in it for you to get the idea.)

So, I tightened my anus, readied myself to withstand the onslaught of affability and waited to see what he would do next. I racked my brains for possible exit lines and escape strategies, but whatever way I looked at it, I needed my shopping. He had me cornered.

Suddenly, he paused in his delivery and said, “Good weather for biking, innit?” (He was being ironic: it was pouring with rain outside.)

This sudden change of tack confused me. I’d been so focused on getting away that I'd completely forgotten I was standing there in my leathers and holding a lid in my hand. “Errm, errrr, yes,” was about the best I could manage.

“What bike do you ride?”

I pointed out through the plate glass windows to where the rain-washed and gleaming SV stood in all her silver glory. “SV-1000,” I said.

“N-i-c-e,” he said, and then gave a brief assessment of her merits. He actually knew what he was talking about. I began to relax. The bloke was a motorcycles nut: the kind of nut I could understand. The chatter was probably just a prelude, an excuse to start talking bikes. I realised with some relief that he was not about to put his arm round my shoulder and reveal to me the details of his fantasy life in all their hallucinatory intensity.

Or was he?

He positively beamed. I started to feel nervous again.

“That’s my number two bike,” I said, seizing the opportunity to balance up the conversation and gain a bit of kudos. He asked what else I rode. As soon as I mentioned of the Daytona, his face became even more animated and he set off on a rambling appreciation of classic British marques. “I like older bikes myself,” he said finally. “I collect them.”

“Them?” I said, “As in plural? How many do you have?”
“Thirty-six,” he said.
“Ummmmmm…” I backtracked hard, “ I think that’s my cue to stop showing off.”
“I used to have a hundred and forty,” he continued, “but I’ve been selling a lot of them recently.”

I didn’t know what to make of this. Was he just a fantasist after all? There was something about his up-front, wide-eyed manner that made me suspicious. And yet... there are people who collect obsessively like this. I’ve known some, myself. They buy bikes, polish them up, then store them away. The one thing the never do, though, is ride them.

“I don’t ride any more,” he said. “Me an’ my brother; we just collect them.”

He started listing some of his collection: BSA Bantam; Vincent Black Shadow; Royal Enfield Constellation; Golden Arrow; Sunbeam something-or-other. He began to glow inwardly as he spoke. He told me the collection had begun with his father and that he and his brother had just picked up the habit. “I know!” he said, “people think we’re nuts but it is just what we do”.

He lived in Hitchin now, but the family farmhouse was up in Lincolnshire where the collection was kept in a large barn attached to the property. Lincolnshire! Well, that might explain it! There’s not a lot to do under those vast Linconlshire skies apart from collect 'stuff' and go quietly insane.

By this time I had packed my purchases into my rucksack and was shoving my card into the reader, but he'd now become unstoppable. “I have a small car collection, too," he was saying. "Austin Seven’s. I love Austin Seven’s. I have nine of them…”

I needed to escape. I still didn’t know what to think, but it was noticeable that his pitch was expanding exponentially. I wondered how long it would be before he was telling me about the B-52 he kept in his living room. I took my card and receipt, wished him a determinedly cheery goodbye, and left him standing there with his packet of peas. As I walked away from the checkout he was still in full flood, breaking down the defences of anyone else who would listen.

On balance, I believe him, despite (or perhaps because of) his slightly insane manner. Collecting bikes can get to be an obsession with people, it’s a kind of mechanical bulimia. No matter how many you have, you always want more - because there is always more to be had. I’m like that with CDs. I wish I could be like that with bikes. But I don’t think my salary would quite cover it.

Outside the rain was pelting down. I put on my waterproof top in the store's entranceway and strode out to the SV thinking how magnificent she looked. I didn't actually need thirty-six bikes, I told myself. The SV and the Daytona would do me very well - for the present, at least.

Extract from Yahoo news:

Bloggers have no right to privacy says British court
"The High Court in London has ruled that bloggers have no right to privacy under British law since blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity. The case was brought by The Times newspaper after it discovered the identity of a blogger in the police service who wrote the popular NightJack web page, which was awarded the Orwell Prize for political writing in April."

It seems that because I write a blog, everyone and his dog has the right to know who I am, where I live, what I do and anything else about me that they care to discover. Privacy on the web appears to be the hot potato of the moment.

As someone on this site has already managed to track down my address and unmask me (for entirely friendly and helpful reasons) it probably means anyone could do it. Should I be concerned? Should any of us be concerned? (Please note - it really wouldn't be worth your trouble trying to find out anything about me. ) Even a blameles life such as mine can still be disturbed by unwanted intrusions, as I discovered last week.

The DB has been up to his tricks again. I got home from work one evening to find a baliff's 'Letter of Attendance' waiting for me on the doorstep. (Oh God! Does it never stop!) The letter contained the undisguised threat that the company's 'officers' would call again, unannounced, and at any time to distrain my property. They are acting, the letter says, on the instructions of the Warwickshire court service who are seeking settlement of an unpaid court fine.

Well, it's the DB's court fine actually, not mine. The little bugger has landed me in the dodo again by giving my address to the authorities.

What concerns me most is that at least one of the bikes stands outside my back door during the day when I'm not around. Though both bikes are heavily alarmed a baliff with his quasi-legal right might be able to get away with one of them. And the thought of a pair (they always hunt in pairs) of conceptually challenged baliffs getting their grubby little hands on one of my babies does not fill me with joy.

For those less familiar with this blog, the DB is the pet name my wife and I gave to a young lad who used to live with his family in a homeless hostel three doors from my house. DB stands for 'Dear Boy', and like suet pudding the term is heavily larded - with irony. The teenage DB was one day found rooting in our vegetable garden for the ball he had kicked over our fence. In the following years, he got to know us - pretty well, in fact. He did odd jobs for us occasionally (very occasionally and not very well) and eventually became a friend. Di, my wife, had a history of taking in waifs and strays. After she died, I let him sleep here now and then when he was homeless.

I've grown kinda fond of him. His personal struggles to make sense of his life are painful to watch. He's a stupid, fu(ked-up kid, from a stupider and even more fu(ked-up family background, but he's not malicious - just a little... shall we say, challenged. He's entirely self-centred because he's entirely insecure, and because he's entirely self-centred, he doesn't know it. He's also entirely transparent. His lies wouldn't fool my neighbour's cat. And whe he gets caught out fibbing (which is all the time) he goes into paroxysms of embarrassment. I've never seen anyone get so embarrassed. It's all I can do to stop myself laughing. He has also (not quite) convinced himself that he is a marvel of perfection in various sporting activities. He tries obsessively to convince everyone else of this 'fact' (at great and tedious length) every time he opens his (great and tedious) mouth.

Yeah, I kinda like him. I regard the DB as part of the price I pay for living in a fu(ked-up world. E.M. Forster, the novelist, had a good word for this. He called it 'rent.' It seems to me that none of us are independent of one another - though we have a desperate need to think we are. Our isolation and individuality are, in truth, a splendid illusion.

Baliffs, on the other hand, I do not like. They are a separate species and should be treated as such. But it was me that was challenged when I got on the phone to try and sort this out. By the time their rep had said two words to me, I was spitting so hard I had considerable difficulty getting the words out of my mouth. In the end, it turned out to be a relatively painless process, not the long-drawn out fight I had expected. They would send me a form, they said. All I have to do is to fill it in and return it to them (No doubt revealing to another agency a lot more personal details.) And yet... And yet, I'm not completely convinced that once I give them what they ask for, it will be the end of the matter.

It seems that it is not only my blogging identity that is public property, but my personal info and possibly even my goods and chattels as well.

...sign me up for of your spare chattels.

noodlenoggin wrote:...sign me up for of your spare chattels.

Hi Nick

Does this mean you have discovered your 'inner baliff'. Perhaps you should. Maybe there is something you have been missing all this while.

Alternatively, if you could finally bring yourself to abandon your life in the half-frozen wastes of the semi-north and get yourself over here, I'd do you a good deal on the Daytona.

(If you stick around and read my next blog entry - shortly to come steaming off the presses - you might think twice about that offer.)

Cheers

Richard

sv-wolf wrote:


Alternatively, if you could finally bring yourself to abandon your life in the half-frozen wastes of the semi-north and get yourself over here, I'd do you a good deal on the Daytona.

(If you stick around and read my next blog entry - shortly to come steaming off the presses - you might think twice about that offer.)

Cheers

Richard

Oh you tease you.......we are waiting with baited breath.


Does this mean you're finally getting a cruiser?

blues2cruise wrote:

sv-wolf wrote:


Alternatively, if you could finally bring yourself to abandon your life in the half-frozen wastes of the semi-north and get yourself over here, I'd do you a good deal on the Daytona.

(If you stick around and read my next blog entry - shortly to come steaming off the presses - you might think twice about that offer.)

Cheers

Richard

Oh you tease you.......we are waiting with baited breath.


Does this mean you're finally getting a cruiser?

You mean a real motorcycle???

dr_bar wrote:

blues2cruise wrote:

sv-wolf wrote:


Alternatively, if you could finally bring yourself to abandon your life in the half-frozen wastes of the semi-north and get yourself over here, I'd do you a good deal on the Daytona.

(If you stick around and read my next blog entry - shortly to come steaming off the presses - you might think twice about that offer.)

Cheers

Richard

Oh you tease you.......we are waiting with baited breath.


Does this mean you're finally getting a cruiser?

You mean a real motorcycle???

'real' as in real slow, you mean?

sv-wolf wrote:'real' as in real slow, you mean?

Slow? Yes it is if you're comparing it to a sport bike.

Well, the "old" bike did 180kph (indicated) once or twice or???
The new one has easily managed 160kph (indicated) on occasion as well...

Yes, yes 180kph is only about 112mph but on a cruiser, that's quite fine for my likings...

Something about 800+ lbs of bike plus passenger seems to put speed in a different light, lol.

dr_bar wrote:

sv-wolf wrote:'real' as in real slow, you mean?

Slow? Yes it is if you're comparing it to a sport bike.

Well, the "old" bike did 180kph (indicated) once or twice or???
The new one has easily managed 160kph (indicated) on occasion as well...

Yes, yes 180kph is only about 112mph but on a cruiser, that's quite fine for my likings...

Something about 800+ lbs of bike plus passenger seems to put speed in a different light, lol.

LOL.

At 800lb you're riding two Daytonas in one (and the Daytona is already a heavyweight in its class.) Given also that I weigh in at a mere 10.5 stone and travel light, I imagine you're regularly carrying a larger payload too. This all adds up to one big MFer. Hats off to you, Doc. I wouldn't like to heft that amount of weight around.

But then again, I wouldn't want to.

What draws people to cruisers, anyway? I've never understood this. (Seriously. It puzzles me.) Is it because they are large and heavy? (I don't know about Canadians, but Americans seem to love weighing themselves down in one way or another. Is gravity thinner over on your side of the pond, perhaps?) Or is it a comfort thing? That too seems to be a particularly New World cultural value. I've noticed that when West Ponders go out into the wilderness to reconnect with the pioneering spirit they tend to take half their lounge with them.

Does big equate with affluence and status? If it does, it surely flies in the face of everything the motorcycle has stood for, at least since the end of the Second World War. In the UK at least, the image of biking is still counter-cultural, not a sign of upward social mobility (not overtly anyway). And, superficial creature that I am, that's part of what attracts me to two wheels. So what is it with you guys ?

In my world, 30% of the fun you can have on a motorcycle comes from making a fast overtake ; the remaining 70% comes from leaning the bike over hard and fast in a corner - it's the sensation that does it, like flying . Sharp and nimble with my feet behind me - that's what I like.

I can't see any road to Damascus for me yet awhile.