Scenic Route

Today I'm working out of a Cotswold ambulance station about fifteen miles from home. It's very picturesque round these parts. Very scenic.

Being a one car family means I usually travel on my motorbike when working a bit of a distance away, a faster, cheaper and usually more fun mode of transport than driving. I say faster but that doesn't include getting togged up at the beginning which takes ages especially if, like me, you've built up your riding kit piece by black leathery piece over the years and can't just slip on a nifty bright onesie and go straight out. It also doesn't include getting undressed at the other end which consists of jerking around like a man changing into a werewolf in a black and white film, only with a more startling transformation resulting.

Apart from that, much faster.

My trip to this ambulance station is usually cursed with discomfort though. Rain is often the order of the day, with lashings of horizontal wet lasers probing my seams with the sole intention, it appears, of getting my undercrackers wet, and not in a good way. The beautiful scenery that flashes by, green and wooded, gentle hills, fields bordered by ancient walls, the honey-coloured stone of Cotswold dwellings nestling in cute villages are completely unavailable to me as I try to clear my visor. Last "spring", I got caught in a blizzard riding home and was reduced to a crawl, stopping every few minutes to shake snow off my jacket and peel ice off my helmet. Cars meandered by unconcerned and it occurred to me for the first time ever that I might have to swap my trusty old Suzuki for the all-weather comfort of a second car.

No one would blame me. Cars are easier, warmer, and you can go out in your pyjamas if you want. They have hot and cold running music, comfy seats and you can scratch yourself wherever you want.You can even  indulge in a beverage or snack with relative ease. 

Currently however, the only option I have is the bike. Dutifully I donned armour, secured my work kit on the back with the help of overstretched bungees and growled off, fully expecting a sudden chilly, utterly unpredicted monsoon to plague me en route.

But no! The journey this morning was gorgeous. The temperature was admittedly low and the roads icy, so I was forced to take it easy, but the emerging sun made every verge a diamond carpet, the dark silhouettes of the hills just magnifying the aesthetic effect of a marmalade cloudscape. The nearly full moon was still out and I could even see the bright dot of Jupiter in the dawn sky to my right.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I remember Robert Pirsig suggesting that one difference between riding and driving was that being on a bike moves you through the scenery, as a part of it, whereas being in a car you simply go past as a separate, insulated observer. Having been to too many incidences where a vicious tree has attacked a car and suddenly made both vehicle and occupants very much part of the scenery, I've never been particularly convinced by this.

Today though, I got it. I felt the freshness of the cold, heard the roar of the wind, could smell the air and feel the changing vibrations of tyre on road beneath me with an immediacy not duplicated in a car. My fingers were a bit numb because I hadn't put my inner gloves on underneath, I had to think about every corner, every icy patch of frozen flood water yet to drain away after our recent rains, even the slush of leaves in the car park as I arrived at work. On the way, my innards felt the surge of acceleration as I overtook a line of traffic, my inner ear enjoyed the long sinuous bends through the woods and I finally got it because this morning I really had to be there.

I still danced the undignified transmogrifying dance of the changing biker at the end, but it seems well worth it. I may change to a car in the future, but not for a while yet if I can help it and you can be damn sure that if I do there will be times I'll regret it.

Bet it pisses down on my way home though.

The Last Temptation of Bikes

I drive like an old lady on Zopiclone these days. If I'm on a long journey, on the motorway perhaps, where the legal limit of 70mph is seen as a conservative guideline, I often find myself pootling along at about 64. It causes the missus some anxiety, as she's still in the flush of youth and likes to attempt speeds not seen since the donkeys on Pendine sands were hassled by Donald Campbell in the Bluebird. She often points out that I am turning into a Dad-driver which, considering my car is a Ford Focus C-Max with a two-year-old child and kaleidoscopic seat stains as non-optional extras, is possibly an accurate description.

But there is a reason for this. We are a one car family. I get my thrills from my other form of vehicular propulsion; my Suzuki Bandit motorcycle. I like it. It goes vrum in a very loud way, and moves along at a fair old lick. It's a middle-of-the-range bike with a 600cc engine, so it's not going to get nods of admiration from those thousand-plus capacity, colour-coordinated summer racing types who put flint on their knees so they get sparks when they corner, but it's good enough for me. I can ride all day on it and not get back-ache or a calloused perineum.

I'm the one on the left, blue bike with two headlights:

The other bloke is my mate Pete who, like me, is an all-weather rider. Our clothes are practical, warm and waterproof. We aren't afraid of rain, wind, snow or ice because we know how to go slow and steady if conditions are less that perfect. There are a couple of differences. Pete likes vibrant colours whilst I'm boring and buy black or navy blue clothes, and Pete has an MP3 player wired into his jacket and helmet, whereas I make do with the music in my head, which is good because it drowns out those wiseass voices and their constant calls to obey them.

No, I'm writing my blog. We'll kill later.

There's not much to beat opening the throttle on a warm day and leaning into the corners as you skidaddle through the cundryside. If you ride a bike, you'll know why dogs hang their heads out of car windows, and you might recognise that speed does tend to increase rather than decrease if you're having fun. You have to watch that twitchy right wrist action.

Of course, even when I'm giving it some welly, I'm never going to out-accelerate some of those shiny, huge-engined monsters that scream past startled pedestrians at breakneck speed, hoping not to embed themselves in trees when they overcook a corner. I take comfort from the fact that, come October, when they are cosied up in their Audis, their Hayabusas tucked up in the garage for the winter, I become one of the fastest riders on the road by default. Get in.

Of course, there's no getting away from the fact that I am a Daddy (not in a 'who's the Daddy!' sort of way, but as in the kind who has photos in his wallet where his money used to be), and I've noted with concern that my little boy loves motorbikes. He points them out, laughs when he sees them and last night spent forty minutes just sitting in my saddle shouting "Vroom Vroom" a lot. This worries me, which is ironic as my own Father, who has owned a few bikes over the years, recently admitted that he'd never let on how much fun riding was for fear of one of his own sons getting into it.

Bikes are not as safe as cars.

There. I said it. Took some doing. Thank you. Yes, I will have a cup of tea, It's nice to get these things in the open. I've never been to Bikers Anonymous before. Is that cake?

For me, this is fine. I am indestructible to everything except man-flu (terrible curse), but I don't like the thought of my little boy ever getting one.

It seems odd then, that we pandered to his fascination for motorbikes and bought him this for his second birthday:

Cool, innit?

Okay, so it has no motor, is made of wood, and is propelled using the power of feet-scooting, but it is recognisably based on the motorbike.

He loves it, and as soon as his feet can touch the ground on it, I predict many hours of happy scooting. But the fact remains that we are encouraging his love of things two-wheeled and perhaps a bit dangerous. For whatever reasons, being a biker does command a modicum of respect, so you can see why kids hanker after them.

So, how to discourage getting a bike till he's old and sensible, like what I all am?

I could show him graphic pictures of injury, but knowing kids he'll think they're cool. I could say he might end up with a scar . . no that's cool too. Broken limbs? They like the idea of plaster casts. Expense? They're cheaper than cars in every way.

It would appear bikes are cool, no matter what the naysayers might think. Even the downsides have a bit of the "Yeah, it's bad, but it's good" motif going on.

Happily, I think I have the answer. It is based on how vulnerable you are as a biker, but not through injury, or cold, or wetness.

It's because of your friends and workmates can take advantage of the fact that you must leave your biking clothes unattended, ready to don at the end of a long, hard shift. For example, I was getting ready to go home last week and found someone had taken time out of their busy day to do this to my helmet and gloves:

Raiding the shredder and poking the bits into every finger of the gloves and every crevice of the helmet must've construed a good fifteen minutes of their time, so kudos for that. It took me longer to get all the big bits out, and I was itching like I'd got fleas with headlice when I got home, thanks to the paper dust that was coating my ears.

In the past I have also arrived in the works garage to find my bike cellophaned, including my helmet, trousers and jacket.

Is that a good advert for not having a motorbike? Don't do it son, you've got mates!

Motorpsyche.

Much to my mum and wife's disappointment, I enjoy a spot of two-wheeled conveyance. My wife thinks I got a motorbike by stealth. I had a knackered old Metro that wouldn't pass it's MOT if you got it reconditioned by Bugatti and then got Pimp My Ride to polish it and stick a Playstation 3 in it. And a fountain.

So, the car went off to the knackers yard and I was down a mode of transport. If you don't live in the UK, you might suggest public transport as a reasonable replacement, but for those of us that have to use it every now and then, it's like paying to be frustrated. Unreliable, expensive, dirty, inconvenient and 75 pee for a Kitkat. It's almost like they're trying to put you off. As an alternative to the car, well . . . it ain't.

I did notice that scooters were quite cheap and efficient, so I decided to purchase one forthwith and do the one day CBT test which would allow me to ride bikes up to 125cc. This was fun for a few months going to and from work, and I even did a trip or two to Birmingham and Oxford to visit mates. Of course, the first time I took it on the motorway I thought I was going to die. It reacted to a passing lorry like a kite in a typhoon.

After nearly a year, I thought it might be safer to do my full bike test (you can justify anything to yourself if you've got the motive). Then I would be fully qualified in the ways of the motorized velocipede. It was a four day course which I did, then took my test, then took it again after some idiot in a Toyota Bikerammer rear-ended me and knocked my L-plate off, passed it and immediately bought a medium-sized geared bike from a popular online auction website.

Apparently, that's stealth that is.
"You were only going to get a scooter."

Anyway, I've now owned a couple of bikes and am currenlty on my latest all-rounder, a 600cc Suzuki Bandit. Mine's the blue one with 2 headlights on the left:

One reason I like bikes is that they're far more fun to ride than driving a car. As Robert Persig notes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (in which he rides far too slowly), you feel like you're actually part of the landscape, rather than simply driving through it. I think that's the best description of the feeling I've come across. Because of this, I took a trip with my mate on another Bandit through some conveniently available landscape. We chose Scotland because . . . well, we could ride to it. No boat or air trips required.

Obviously, Scotland has been on the receiving end of some divine biking intervention. It's scenic with roads that must have been created by a committee consisting of Thor, Odin, Freya, Apollo, Mars, Nut, Bastet, Bacchus, El-Dorado, Hanuman and Aeolu, although not Jesus because he was a hippy. There were forests and lakes, and single track tarmac roads with visibility you could measure in miles, and when you stopped for a hearty bikers snack of snickers and lukewarm coffee, there was almost perfect silence:

Even when it was cloudy, nature still made sure the cloud merely topped the peaks of nearby hills like a tasteful wig:


We were truly blessed, and I feel like saying that in the daft two-syllablled way that the devout prefer; we was bless-ed!

It was made extra special because we went in September and, apart from the odd drop of the wet stuff, we had perfect weather for the whole week, although a friend of mine who went on almost the same trip in August had to come home halfway through as they were rained out. With not a small amount of schadenfreude, I was pleased with our result.