Does this come with matching shoes?

I am still thinking about girl stuff. Specifically, how my wardrobe choices are dictated by my transport choices. This morning I cycled to work, even though my knee is still dodgy, because I am porking up to an unacceptable level. So this morning's question was, what will fit in the basket on the back of the pushbike, and look OK with trainers? Answer - vintage flowery sundress. On other days, the question is, what can I fit under all-weather bike trousers and wear with boots? And the answer to that is usually one of my posh Jaeger frocks, with tights.

There are days when I think how lovely it would be to choose an outfit based on mincing 5 feet from my front door to the car, and then the same from the car park to the office. How lovely it would be to arrange a hairdo and a face in the comfort of my own boudoir, not the office lavs, and not have to wory about helmet hair. 

More importantly I am wondering what I need to pack for the Simmer Dim. I am not sure I want to take my irreplaceable Crowtree jacket to a five-day drinking festival. Mainly because I can't get any jumpers under it.

The wisdom of crowds

Relationships are on my mind at the moment.

I live on my own and have done for 2 years. It is hard and often lonely, but the rewards are self- indulgence and freedom.

The risk that lurks at the back of my mind is that I am in danger of making a totem of solo living. It is not too far a step from believing that it is better to live alone than with the wrong person, to believing that it is better to live alone full stop.

The stern Scots who lurk in my family tree would have me believe that there is virtue in taking the stony path even if a comfy sedan chair were to be put on offer.

Part of my fear is that relationships involve unequal compromise. But that’s based on a very small sample of two, which both crashed and burned. So I asked twitter. As you do.

90% of these replies are from bikers. In a world where the media would have us believe that the most important things in a biker relationship are big tits and leather trousers, I love that Trust and Respect are the two words which most friends put at the top of their list.

These look like fantastic relationships. They might even be worth compromising for. But I still want to be able to sit and watch Eurovision in my pants.

This was my question:  Lady tweeps (and chaps?): what makes a relationship a good one? Bit of a challenge in 140 letters. But I'm interested. And #doomedtobesingle 

And these are the replies.

• finding the right person i think, the rest is simple : )
• late answer re: relationships: being able to talk, walk, etc. And a bit of a spark ; )
• Trust, commitment and a healthy sense of perspective
• Trust. Friendship. Similar likes/dislikes. Don't be a quitter. Work through the bad times. Sign up 4 the long haul. Cuddle.
• Trusty, loyal, bestfriend & lover, courageous, careful, respect for others. :-)
• Gosh, that's a big question. In my limited experience, it's having time apart and not being afraid of it.
• one thing's for sure: you do need a bolt of lightning at the start. I do believe that. Everything else is natural after that.
• Trust.
• Always remembering why you fell for the person in the first place, accepting who you both are and not trying to change them.
• Mutual respect, reciprocity, companionship all help
• Friendship, openness, compromise, give & take, lots given, little demanded, only positive games, sex, togetherness thru strife
• Realistic expectation and lots of give and take! Luck has a lot to do with it too!
• Absence of any need to compromise? #likemyownspace #menallrightbutwouldnthaveoneinthehouse. OK, compromise may be necessary, but the value of what you get back outweighs what you gave up. On both sides.
• make time for yourself ... it's important to take care of "you" so you can take care of "us" :)
• Starting as, and always remaining, friends. The rest comes and goes, but true friendship can make it through anything :-)
• Trust and respect.

Beer, bikes, bands....

Finally I get to write my triumphant "car is fixed" post. Bear with me, it's a long story.

This weekend I had three tasks - go to the BMF Show, go to the Fake MA Party with friends from work, and put a new fuel pump on the 2CV.  Friday, Saturday night and Sunday morning. Should have been simple.

I reckoned without the careful attention to detail of the people behind the BMF show. It was very good of them to provide excellent beer, great company, and a ZZ Top tribute band who (I think, but my memories may be confused by the beer here) rounded off their set with La Grange, which I absolutely love to dance to.

But the excellence of Friday night meant that Saturday morning started in a slightly wobbly and uncertain way.  I managed to chat to Sue and Uki from the Guzzi owners' club about camping, mainly because they provided coffee and ginger nuts; caught up with Andy and Sheila in the grandstands for the White Helmets;  and then tripped on my heels and fell arse over tit down the grandstand steps to land at the feet of Leon Mannings. I don' t think that was quite the entrance he was expecting me to make.

I have a dodgy left knee, I dislocated it dancing at one of my sister's housewarming party in the days when she liked renting cottages in very remote parts of Scotland. One minute I was throwing groovy shapes, the next I had crashed to the floor.  I think some of her friends thought this was just an extension of my startling moves. After only 12 months of physio I was able to walk on it again. I got married with a full-length support stocking on that leg, just in case it collapsed halfway up the aisle. So some sort of karmic echo has probably made it necessary that I get divorced in a similar state of immobility.

Knees are a bad design and when you bugger them up they really, really hurt, in a "putting a brave face on it but actually on the verge of throwing up" way. So I didn't see much of the show. I said hello to the Oval Motorcycle Centre,  and I joined the Trail Riding Fellowship so that when I go back to Australia I can ride the lovely red roads, and then I had to go and sit down.

Hell for me would be sitting in a room while all my friends are at a party and I am not. So you can imagine how happy I was on Saturday night to realise, after 20 minutes making small talk and eating excellent onion bhajis, that unless cold sweat had suddenly become what all the cool kids are wearing, I was going to have to admit my limitations and retire hurt.

This morning I woke up at 4.30, and it was raining. Attempting to remove a vital organ from the car in the rain seemed to be an unwise idea but by about half 10 the rain had decided that staying in the cloud would be fine so I lined up the instruments and got stuck in. "Oh dear, is the car still poorly?" asked the neighbours, to whom my endless struggle with machinery is a source of bafflement and entertainment.

My toolkit has expanded and the teeny-weeny sockets were a perfect fit. I find it interesting that when I start a job like this it seems impossible to wrestle past all the bits of engine to get a grip on the object of my desire but by the end of three hours the spaces feel twice the size  and I seem to have developed extra thumbs to hold the spacer, the washer, the bolt, the socket on the extension bar and the petrol hose. Although this may just be because I have been in the Fens too long and have acquired the local adaptation.

Having got everything off and the new bits lined up, greased up and stuffed into hoses, I had to persuade myself to take the final step and fit them. I think this was fear. If this didn't work, I would be out of ideas for what was wrong with the car.  But the great joy of a 2CV is that you can stick a starting handle in the front and turn the engine over with it. As the pump is mechanically-driven off the engine, I thought I would be able to tell whether it was working. It didn't chuck any petrol out of the top hose but it did make a magnificent sucky noise,  like wellies in mud. Which the other one hadn't.  Which gave me great confidence, which proved to be correct . The car now runs, the exhaust doesn't leak, and the boots? They're still shiny boots of rubber. All I need now is the MOT and it will be a success to be proud of.

* I don't have any good pictures from the show, so here is the Travelling Moose of happy memory.

Neverending Story

So it started with new boots, and then a new exhaust, and now I am trying to fit a new fuel pump, but to fit a fuel pump I need a smaller socket set, because my robust half-inch drive set, while good for driveshaft flange bolts, is too chunky to fit the fuel pump bolts. So I have spent 40 quid on a new set of slimmer, more elegant sockets.  I console myself with the thought that spending money on tools is never wasted. Until some low-life comes and nicks them. I used lots of cool tools fitting the exhaust, including my impact driver, and even though it was nicked in 2002 which means I've had the replacement for 10 years, it still pisses me off that I am using an impact driver the insurance company sent me and not my dad's, that he gave me along with a set of spanners when I started working on 2CVs in 1990.

The fuel pump came from a German company called Der Franzose. They are my new best friends, because not only has the lovely Jens answered all my questions about when the pump might be expected to land on my desk here in Blighty; and not only have they sent me a catalogue stuffed with every part my 2CV is likely ever to need (hopefully not immediately after the fuel pump, I would like a break from car maintenance); they sent me a small packet of Haribo 2CVs. They are not in the picture. I ate them.

Good things come to those who wait....

Thundersprint is go!

Very kind of Frank to make sure the sticker matches 2Moos.

Nikos has made pie :)

I am Chez Nikos for Thundersprint tomorrow. He has made a Hairy Bikers pie. We are making sure that enough wine has been quaffed that it will taste great. Tomkins Cosmos has made a 10 metre leap in defence of his feline territory and is hopeful of being allowed to join in the pie eating.

Specialised rubber #2

I have been shopping again. This is a replacement push rod, a gasket and a new length of fuel pipe.  I have consulted my 2CV guru, Mark McArthur-Christie,  on Facebook and he concurs with my diagnosis of bolloxed fuel pump. The pump itself is on its way from Germany. There was a good reason for this at the time which escapes me now. 

This weekend I shall be at The Thundersprint with Nikos which rules out any spannering, but Sunday 20th is earmarked as the day of reckoning. I have also got the offer of a lock-up from the Council so it may yet be that Hortense gets to remain a McQueen for a little longer. Particularly if I pursue my long-standing ambition to have a 2CV with flames down the side. I hope that the flames will be facilitated by KAS Racepaint in Kettering rather than an inadequately performed fuel line repair.

In other news, I have received the boot from 2 roles which I rather enjoyed. I am no longer the Floor Manager at the Willingham Jam Club, and I am displaced as Area Assembly Manager for Hopp Rider Training at Cadwell Park.  

I worry that it is something I have done, or failed to do, which resulted in my ousting.

More rationally,  I hope that it is, in the one case, that I had to miss three jams in a row so they were forced to come up with an alternative, and for HRT, that in straitened economic times it makes more sense to have a Paddock Manager who can also instruct. 

I believe that one of my weaknesses is to seek out helpful roles so that I can be liked for what I am doing, not who I am being. Losing these two will force me out of that comfort zone. And give me more time to spend on stage myself rather than helping other people to get up into the bright lights.

If I didn't have bad luck...

At 3pm this was going to be a triumphant post about how brilliantly I had fitted a new exhaust to the 2CV. The only thing remaining to do was to start the car and run the engine for a short while to cure the assembly paste in the joints.

And that remains the only thing to do because, despite trying for a significant amount of time, there is no fuel getting through to the carburettor and so no chance of ignition.

It looks like the fuel pump has died. There is fuel in the line beneath it but none above. If I had a spare body I would get them to turn the engine over while I stuck my finger on the end of the pipe to test for suction. But there isn't one handy.

Instead of booking the car in for an MOT next week and getting back onto the road I am going to have to phone the garage, ask them to send a tow truck, give them lots of money to investigate the problem, and then, and I really do mean it this time, I am going to sell the bastard thing.

Events like this make me realise how fragile my mood is. I am trying hard not to take it personally. I have done 2 good jobs on the car. The fact that something else has failed is not because I am a Bad Person. It is because the car is almost 30 years old. But at the end of a few days which included dropping 2Moos in Wales and having to work out whether it is me, or the person who declared himself to be in everlasting love with me after one blind date and then promised to "wait for me" until I was ready to reciprocate, who wass being unreasonable, another failure is proving difficult to cope with.

Here’s our Graham with a quick reminder

Across the open countryside,
Into the walls of rain I ride. 
It beats my cheek, drenches my knees, 
But I am being what I please.
 
The Moos is loaded and I am off to ride all over Wales in the company of Panamaniac. As usual, I am fleeing a trauma and hope to find solace in the beat of a 750 twin and the drumming of the rain on my lid. The white noise will stop me from dwelling.

I have lived 2 years as a solo person with occasional bursts of company. Last week I attempted a blind date, set up by some well-intentioned friends. Although on paper all looked good – 6 foot 4, biker, guitarist – I have decided not to pursue the project.

Although I hope that I aspire to relationships with Happy, Sleepy or Bashful, my recent track record includes Psycho, Pisshead and Pervert. One took from me everything I held of value with the argument that I ought to love him more than living in the city, having an amazing job or spending time with my friends. One drank himself to death; one updated his Facebook status from his girlfriend’s bed less than 12 hours after being in mine.

I have achieved a certain level of peace in my life. I am quietly proud of what I have managed to salvage from a lengthy period of poor weather. It takes a lot of effort to keep the balance and it seems I have some way to go before I am ready to put this back at risk.

So I shall get on my bike and ride through the walls of rain, and all shall be well.

Paddles Up!

This is JD. He is one of my favourite people in the world. And I'm not just saying this because he keeps me supplied with bacon sarnies at Hayfield. (It is a false rumour put about by Mr Flint that I prefer sausage). Last year at Hayfield he was wearing a T-shirt which declared "Anything is possible with the right attitude and a hammer." He has an adventurous past which seems to have involved driving vehicles very fast on roads not fit for anything more than walking pace, and he has an accent which baffles antipodeans.

Later this month he is going to paddle a canoe along the Leeds and Liverpool canal in aid of Help for Heroes.

I know money is tight for everyone these days but if you are looking for a good cause to improve your karmic standing with the universe, do consider pledging a tenner.