Thank you for those words of sanity, noodle, from the university of life.
Henceforth I shall include you on my list of wise men to be consulted on all things loud and shiny. (It takes a poet to be able to express these matters so succinctly.)
And I'll take your further advice as well.
The bikes...
First, the Daytona
Putting this as prosaically as possible, the Daytona is sitting idle in my back garden because she has problems with power delivery. She's not charging the battery. I stuck a multimeter on her. The voltage is low, but more to the point it doesn't respond when I rev her. Perhaps the regulator has gone? Perhaps it's something else. I need to know more about these things.
Putting this less prosaically, the Daytona is a big bag of dodo which f*ucks me up every few months with some new problem.
Other than that, she is running beautifully.
Now the SV
The SV, to put this as prosaically as possible, had developed a bothersome rattle in her clutch. And it is getting louder. Also, when I got home from a rideout last Sunday I noticed that the clutch reservoir was pretty much empty. There was also a pile of carbonated gunky stuff all over the engine casing below the slave vale to the hydraulics. This has all happened before. I'm living in a world of deja vu.
Putting this less prosaically, the SV is a great bike but right now I would like get hold of a f*ucking welding torch and eviscerate her.
Other than that, she's a sweet machine and I love her dearly.
The SV is booked into SDC, dealers in Stevenage for some TLC and remedial engineering this coming Thursday. I have to ring OnyerTriumph in Aston Clinton tomorrow (they are closed on Mondays) to arrange to get the Daytona back to them (or for them to come and collect the Daytona) as soon as possibe and certainly before the National Rally on 4th and 5th July.
So there is no chance of me doing any wild spending or partying this month.
The Daytona's story
When I arrived to pick up the Daytona from the dealers in Aston Clinton where I'd taken her for a service last Friday, I was hoping that all my miseries had been soothed away by the healing balm of Jeremy's mechanical genius. And for a while I thought they had. I paid the bill (ouch!), set off down the Aston Clinton High Street, and was immediately wowed by the huge improvement in the Daytona's power delivery. She was like a new bike.
At that moment, I can tell you, Hud was a very happy man. The smile survived all the way down the A41, and didn't even quiver as I wound my way through the ordered chaos of the 'magic roundabout' at Hemel Hempsted. It grew briefly bigger on the long swooping curve to the motorway. And it continued all the way along the M10 till I neared the big roundabout at St Albans. It was then that I first heard the clicking sound.
Before I fully had time to take in what was happening, the digital gauges on the dashboard caught my alarmed attention. As I watched, they fluttered briefly and then died. The empty grey-green surface of a digital screen on a moving bike is a terrible thing to behold. Fifteen seconds later, as I slowed up behind the bunching traffic at the junction, I heard the engine die too. It was a meek and painless death in the larger scale of things, but with that death my smile uncurled at last, and in the spirit of the moment - died. I pulled up onto the last bit of hard shoulder before the roundabout, dismounted, poked at a few exposed bits of wiring half-heartedly and wondered what to do.
You see, I was in something of a pickle.
Earlier that afternoon I'd left work on the courtesy bike (a repro Bonneville) that the dealers had lent me, and rode her over to Aston Clinton as fast as I could in the heavy traffic. I'd been delayed by a meeting that had gone on far, far too long and I was in a blinding hurry to get to the dealers before they closed. In my haste I'd left my document wallet locked in my desk drawer.
This wasn't a big problem - at least, it wasn't a big problem until the Daytona's battery died. It suddenly became a big problem at that moment because it had the telephone number of my insurance rescue service in it. That gave me pause for thought. But as I came to realise, even then, it wasn't perhaps my biggest problem. I only discovered what that was when I tried to ring a friend and found that, perhaps out of some strange electro-mechanical sympathy, the battery in my mobile phone had died too. There was an awful lot of dying going on by the side of the A414 near St Albans that Friday afternoon.
When I considered my situation, I decided that there was one and only one thing I could do, and that was to sit down on the grass by the bike, look miserable and wait.
Fortunately, I had to wait no more than five minutes. While I was looking in the opposite direction, I heard the sound of a big sportsbike pull up behind me.
Enter Trevor.
"You alrite mate?" he said.
Don't you just love bikers?
Not only did Trevor have a mobile phone that worked, but he was also with the same insurance company and had their telephone number handy in his wallet. The insurance company, with consummate efficiency, assured me that someone would be with me within an hour - standard practice. In fact, a mechanic arrived in his van within fifteen minutes. Trevor waited with me all that time - just in case - and in that time we discussed the merits of his R1 and my Daytona. He was a big Triumph fan, he said. I did think about asking him if he wanted to do a swap but thought better of it.
The mechanic poked around with the Daytona's electrics rather more efficiently than I had done, pronounced her no less-decisively as dead and loaded the bike into the back of his van before driving us back to Hitchin.
So, looking on the bright side, if I hadn't broken down I wouldn't have had the opportunity of experiencing fifteen minutes of camaraderie. It was fifteen minutes which restored my faith in humanity - but it tarnished my faith in bikes. Big time!
But I'm largely over that now and am feeling much more at peace.
Now, where's that welding torch!
I was educated in linguistic philosophy - that was many years ago, I hasten to add - before I realised there were more entertaining things to do in life. Is this fact beginning to show? I fear so. I'm beginning to feel like someone who has just realised his trousers are falling down and he's been displaying what in the UK is known as 'builders' crack". 
) Not everyone in the US agrees, but as long as the U.S. exists as a separate political entity then yes, thankfully, this is an American problem. I see it the same way as you: horses for courses - so the longer the problem stays on your side of the Atlantic, the better. 
