Downsizing

I was tetchy this morning for no very good reason, though it may have been a combination of not enough sleep and making the mistake of reading this column in the Guardian defending cycling on the pavement. In the comments to which many cyclists declare their right to cycle on the pavement if it makes them feel safer without apparently having any awareness of the fact that it's very intimidating for pedestrians. When I was waiting for the repairman to come and jumpstart Ruby I was sitting on the pavement - for lack of anywhere else to wait - and cyclists shot past at speed only a few inches from my head.

I was also tetchy because I was rather lost - trying to take the Triumph back to Cambridge Motorcycles to have her leaks stopped. But now I'm in a much better mood. To save me from a long walk to work Phil lent me this very fine Suzuki 125. Looking like a frog on a matchbox I zipped up the Newmarket Road laughing my head off and feeling 26 all over again.

Motorcycles - making the world less tetchy, one rider at a time :)

The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom.

This morning I got the park-and-ride in to work. Because I was planning on going to a do in London, and the Triumph doesn't have anywhere safe to leave a helmet. (I didn't go in the end, which is interesting in its own right - perhaps I am leaving London behind at last.)

Now, it was all very trouble free, but it was also a rather stony-faced experience. Bus drivers in Cambridge don't talk, they just nod gnomically and take your money. The other four people on the bus sat in gloomy silence as we travelled a roundabout route to the centre of town. So I had to buy myself a Pain au Chocolate from Christine just to get a smile and a cheeful hello.

Yesterday I rode the Triumph to work. "New bike?" asked the man from the cycle shop, after watching me park up and give the bike a farewell pat. No, I said. Old bike. New tyre.

And we talked for a bit about the unbreakable bonds we have to our first bikes, the horror when they get nicked, and the sense of pride from being able to do work on them. And then I went to work.

On Saturday the Triumph and I went to Cambridge Motorcycles to get the new tyre put on - for I can do some simple things, but I can't do tyres yet. And when I was walking back to the workshop, having wandered way too far along the river, a car pulled up, and a bald man with tattoos said "are you heading to Cambridge Motorcycles, love? Hop in, I'll give you a lift. We work just opposite."

And I got into a car with two strange men. And yes, I did pause to wonder if that was the last the world would see of me.

But on a day when terrible things were happening in another country, sometimes it is necessary to do unwise things in order to prove that the world is, most of the time and for most of us, a good place full of good people. A stranger made a kind offer because he recognised me as a biker. I got a lift down the road, and picked up the bike in time to go to Barney's graduation party.

And this is why riding motorcycles will always be better than taking the bus. Because I ride a bike, people I don't know talk to me. And that makes my life more interesting. And for as long as life is interesting, it will be worth living.

"Om én mann kan vise så mye hat, tenk hvor mye kjærlighet vi alle kan vise sammen". Stine Renate Håheim

Still Crazy After All These Years

I met my old lover
In the street last night
She seemed so glad to see me
I just smiled
And we talked about some old times
And I kicked her into gear...

Still crazy after all these years.

This is a Triumph with a decent battery and a back tyre that doesn't have any cracks in it, parked in the sunshine while I go off to a small graduation party. Posh frock on top, jeans and German army boots below. Too long on the sidestand has caused her to spring another leak, but it's nothing that can't be fixed.

I have too many motorcycles and they all make me happy, but this is the only one that makes me grin like a loon.

Catching them young

It's a lovely evening in the Flatlands. Which is good, because I had to spend 40 minutes of it waiting for a man from ETA to come and jumpstart Ruby. We stopped for chips on the way home and when I tried to make a dashing exit with chips and a battered sausage in my top box I got nothing but clicks instead of her usual cheerful rumble, and the occasional flash of "EWS" on the screen. I was a bit worried that she'd suffered permanent collapse after her adventures with the Hyundai, but Peter at Lind listened down the phone and diagnosed a flat battery. Which was bang on.

I think the bike has more brain than I do. We've both had a blow to the head recently and 40 minutes with nothing to do but wait in the sun were actually very welcome.

But I hadn't planned to tell you about this. I was actually going to say that an even more interesting piece of two-wheel exotica was parked in the bike bay this morning. It's a Kickstart moped - loaned to young people so that they can get to work, or to college. What a brilliant thing to spend my taxes on :)

How to win friends and influence people

My dad used to have a special gift. (He may still have it but it's a long time since we've been shopping together). He could walk into a shop that was so empty that the goods would be dusted to a shine and lined up not only by name, but also by size and colour, and within ten minutes the place would be rammed. (He also had the gift of arriving at the chip shop just as they ran out of chips, but that's a side issue).

I appear to have the same talent with motorcycle parking. When I started parking here Ruby had the entire bay to herself bar a 125cc Japanese cruiser that appeared to be entirely ornamental judging by the pile of blossoms drifting around the wheels.

Now I have to squeeze in between an array of exotica including a Goldwing and, today, a rather nice Ducati with French plates.

The box on the back is my tipi, which is going back to the importers so they can help me work out why it leaks in the rain. Some people might think this was over-ambitious to strap on the back of a bike, but I have taken lessons from Kevin Ash who once carried a fish tank on the back of his GS. He wasn't specific about whether it had fish in at the time.

Slippery when wet

My head hurts. This should perhaps be unusual for a Monday morning but it doesn't hurt because I didn't take enough water with it, it hurts because on Saturday morning I slipped on a wet path and bounced my face off a railway sleeper. Given a choice of taking an eye out, losing some teeth or having a bruised cheekbone I do accept that the latter is the least worst option, but it made getting my helmet on this morning a rather unpleasant experience. Also I have a bruise the size of a palm on my left hip. Which made putting my foot down at the lights an experience which required lengthy and voluminous swearing to cope with.

So I am going back to the doctors at 5.30 to see if I've done anything serious to my face, my head or my neck. This makes it the second time in three years I've had to have my head officially examined. Two weeks ago I had to go to the doctors with a gardening wound.

Some people think motorcycling is a dangerous hobby.

Green eyed monster?

I've found to my cost before that Ruby is a jealous girl.

Now it may be that the dropping of a media bomb at 9.52 this morning, which required me to drop everything else, slap the Emergency PR beacon onto my desktop and run around like a blue-arsed fly for the rest of the day, was a complete coincidence and nothing to do with the fact that I declared on Facebook last night that I intended to head up to Hayfield this evening by car (via a work conference in Manchester).

I'm sure Ruby had no interest at all in the fact that, since dealing with the issue pushed all the stuff I was going to do today back into the pile marked "tomorrow's problem," neatly requiring me to be in the office tomorrow not in Manchester, I will need to scorch up the country on Friday afternoon in order to reach The Sportsman in time for my dinner.

And lovely as my 2CV is, "scorch" is not in her vocabulary in the same way that it is in Ruby's.

We think we are evolved into independent thinking humans. What we actually are is a detachable opposeable thumb for Bavarian twin-cylinder manipulatrixes. When she learns to pay for her own petrol I'll be toast.....

Oldest story in the book....

It's not a very original plot, I'm afraid. Girl-biker meets man-biker on holiday. Rides with him for a few days and starts to think, finally I have met a man I could ride round the world with, for he is friendly, and funny, and big, and capable, and rides at the back of the group to make sure she stays safe, and likes beer, and riding to interesting places, and knows how to tease her without hurting, a trick which none of her other men ever cracked. She offers her honour, he honours her offer, leaves on his next adventure and promises to come back soon. He changes his mind, which is his prerogative, and lets her know once by text, which is rescinded the next morning, and once by email, which has proved permanent. The sound of an inexperienced heart breaking echoes through the twittersphere.

For reasons which my counsellor used to enjoy earning a significant fee per month exploring, I have the body of a 40-year old but the emotional maturity of an 18 year old. Which seems to be a rather unfair way round. This rollercoaster is supposed to be ridden early in life by teenagers who fall for elegantly wasted lead singers, or the bad lad at the back of the class: who grow giddy with excitement when he smiles at them and weep buckets when he ignores them in the bus queue. To get Shakespearean for a moment, at my age the hey-day in the blood is supposed to be tame. And I wasn't ever the one with the hopeless crushes at school either. I was the loyal, slightly puzzled friend standing by with the tissues and with a part-share in the long-suffering dog who was happy to do laps around the estate where the object of my friend's affections lived, so we could casually pretend to be just passing if we bumped into him heading to the corner shop for some ciggies.

So this level of emotional suffering has been an unprecedented experience and it would be fair to say I have not coped well. In place of girls in grey polyester skirts, tumbledown socks and kitten heels forming a protective huddle round the sinks in the girls' loos, the job of providing moral support and passing the metaphorical tissues has been amply upheld by my twitter army, who have made me laugh and cry in equal measure with their messages and replies. And with the continuing but so far unsuccesful campaign to #findfruitybikerabikerchick.

Thanks from me to you all, and a special mention to @ibikerapp. His mission in life is to improve biker safety with an iPhone app featuring James Toseland and safe riding tips. I'm not sure how sending me DMs helping me to keep breathing fits in with this mission statement but I'm very glad it does.

My smartphone runs Symbian, while the app comes in Android or iPhone versions. So I can't tell you whether the app is any good. But I'm certain that the bloke that built it is.