Three Beautiful Little Numbers

Beauty, as the alliterative saying goes, is indeed in the eye of the beholder. Just as one person’s beauty queen is another’s Nora Batty, as one person’s Turner prize nomination is another’s slovenly Slumberland, so one person’s automotive art is another’s slab-sided barge.

But at the risk of coming over all evangelical, Oh My Word. They’ve done it again. Pardon me while I drool.

Ponders End

November wheezes to its inevitable end, the fizz and sparkle of fireworks long gone, and exits the calendar stage left, like a forgotten repertory actor about to be out-performed and outshone by a knight of the twenty-first century realm, shining like Sirius on a new month’s opening night.

December. Twenty-four days of high hopes, high jinks and high blood pressure, pagan hijackings, choirs of angels and quires of wishlists, leading us into more temptation and the day of puddings, presents and pressure cookers before the panto, the penance and the punishment of Auld Lang Syne. A time to ponder, a mixed bag of miscellany to mull.

Like what was the recently departed Norman Mailer thinking about when he wrote the passage that this week won him the Bad Sex Award by the Literary Review?

Like did anyone tell the erstwhile and reconvened Ginger, Baby, Sporty and Scary that the fifth of their number had evidently been kidnapped and replaced by a Bratz action figure?

Like how strange is the world when an anthropomorphically-named teddy bear is the cause of a diplomatic row and prison sentence, when a publisher is threatened with legal action for publishing a work widely renowned as both important and insightful, when a dog collar sports a price tag of a cool £500,000?

Like how is Santa ever going to get a 1098S and a bag of Jeffery-West goodies down my slim, hat-wearing chimney?

Triumph of Hope over Expectation

Ah, Triumph. The UK’s essential bike, British as cod and frites, overpaid footballers and the race to be the Christmas number one. I can’t help it, it never fails to disappoint me as a brand; so much heritage, so much goodwill, so much, um, heritage. Admittedly, I’ve read some great reviews of its latest crop of products, which (from memory alone, you understand) have likened the Sprint ST to the crown jewels, the Daytona 675 to a triple whammy of gold, frankincense and the one no one can spell and a ride on the Street Triple to winning a Lotto double-roll-over on your birthday. When your birthday falls on December 25th. And yet, in spite of these great sounding bikes (and the Scrambler is a truly great sounding bike in the acoustic sense), plus the cross-promotional efforts of Paul Smith and, latterly, Oliver Sweeney, which has a Scrambler parked within its delectable Bond Street store, a fondness for the Triumph brand feels like carrying a Maglite for great British car marques when they were produced by British Leyland.

Maybe that Leyland comparison is more apt than I realised, conjouring images of Harold Wilson’s pipe and the three-day week. Add to that Sid James and Benny Hill, and you get to the Triumph-penned lines, recounted by Highway Lass, which claim that (the bikes’) sleek lines are artfully set off by the equally svelte curves of the models - who seem to have forgotten their leathers. An ad in a 1973 copy of Mayfair? Nope. The 2008 Triumph calendar, no less.

Always the bridesmaid (or maybe that should be matron of honour), Triumph was longlisted on the Superbrand organisation’s CoolBrands list earlier this year. And whilst Ducati came roaring in as the twelfth coolest brand in the UK, Triumph failed to make the cut. Bike magazine recently commented that Skirting Milan on a 1098S makes you a hero, a patriot, a friend. It’s a passion that’s lacking in the UK – thread through London on a Triumph and you’re just another motorcyclist. Kind of sums it up for me. But is it the fault of a worn out, cynical nation or is it that we need a little inspiration, a little encouragement that Triumph singularly fails to provide? Even its new customer magazine, entitled, in a soft-testosteroned kind of a way TriuMPH, fails to ignite any shred of interest. Niceish pictures, humdrum journalism, and. Oops, sorry, I flicked through it and nodded off.

I have huge respect for Triumph’s latest machines and so, so want to love them. But without a little stardust sprinkled over the brand, it’d be like loving Z-Cars, when what you really want is the Sweeney. No, not you, Oliver.

Weather Beforecast

An imperial moon hangs brightly in a night sky filling with clouds as dry ice blown across a squid ink stage, hauled there by Orion’s chains, suspended across sprockets of constellations that spotlight the naked trees performing ballets in the wind.

Earlier, fine, wet rain had permeated everything, turning asphalt into a rink, bringing polished sheen to stones. The Monster hid under its scarlet cover, sulking, brooding, yearning for release. Later, the sky had cleared, becoming cold and brittle, a watery sun trickling down from the heavens, promising more than it could deliver. And hope prevailed, faith in the elements like an open bet. A dry tomorrow would unleash the Monster to the roads, seeking the sticky black paths, blown dry for its growling, malevolent journey.

Row, Row, Row Your Bike

Earlier this week, the rain fell constantly for best part of 36 hours, incessant, deliberate and pervading. The sky above was a bleached-out grey, like a white sheet that had been through a dark wash, a colour undeserving of a name. The lawn became a motley swamp of mossy green and muddy brown, studded with sodden, disconsolate leaves, and the bare branches of the trees randomly stabbed at the biting cold air. Roof slates glistened, tyres hissed along shining, weeping roads and in neighbouring houses electric light glowed apologetically, unaccustomed to shining during mid-afternoon hours. The meteorological gloom provided a fitting, funereal backdrop to England’s forlorn, failed attempt, if attempt it was, to avoid defeat against Croatia in the aforementioned Euro 2008 qualifier.

It was not the weather for riding bikes.

And yet in all this, someone did. Doff your caps.

England 1, Italy 1

Maybe it’s age, but the concept of nationality hangs heavy. Perhaps it’s exacerbated by the fact that England play another one of those “most important football matches for years” games tomorrow in an unexpected drink-in-the-last-chance-saloon attempt to qualify for the football-fest that will be Euro 2008, although I maintain that I’m a club-not-country kind of football supporter. “Nationality” struck me yesterday when watching a recording of the joyous predictability that was last weekend’s Top Gear on BBC2, as James May (the other tall one, the one in need of an hour in the company of Charles Worthington or Nicky Clarke) took an Alfa Romeo 159 out for a spin. “Mm,” I thought, pondering the Alfa’s pointy snout, plethora of gadgets and snarling top note, “now if I were looking to trade in the Saab tomorrow, I’d be straight down the ol’ Alfa dealer and no mistake.” Which led me to realise that all my automotive needs would then be taken care of by things Italian, the theoretical 159 joining the reality of the Monster on the drive.

Flights of fancy drove the concept further. In the event of a windfall, the Duke would gain a stablemate, the three favoured options for which currently stand at a second Ducati, the sublime 1098, an Aprilia RSV Mille or an MV Agusta F4. All Italian. If my lottery numbers came up (or Lotto numbers, or Superball numbers, or Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket numbers, or whatever the darned thing’s called in these days where everything gets fucked up by a marketing initiative) the imaginary Alfa would be joined by a Maserati Coupe, a concept only undermined by the fact that I don’t buy lottery tickets, but you see the connection?

This notion began to spiral. Lasagna. Risotto, raviolo, bruschetta, Gavi di Gavi, Barolo, panacotta, dolci e formaggi... At this rate I’d be turning Catholic before Christmas, a notion so unlikely that it pulled me up short (a huge admirer of Richard Dawkins, I sometimes get the as yet unfulfilled urge to graffiti “Richard Dawkins is God” on an unsuspecting wall, much in the way that Eric Clapton was deified in the 60s, in the hope that the jocular irony offsets the effects of wanton vandalism).

I’ve only even been to Italy twice, a short break on the shores of Lake Garda incorporating a day trip to Venice and a week in Sicily, and now I half expected North Yorkshire’s traffic police to be wearing white gloves. A determined backlash against this advance of a new Roman empire was required before I found myself incorporating Ciao into my vocabulary.

The resurgence of Triumph Motorcycles. Yes, that would be a start. Apparently the Daytona 675’s a complete thoroughbred, and I remember the ear-splitting sound that my friend Alex’s Scrambler made, as if composed during a collaboration between Edward Elgar and Guy Fawkes. Aston Martin, there’s another, now back under British ownership to boot. The BBC. A Full English. Black Sheep ale. Sir Ian McKellan, Ian McEwan, The Angel of the North, the London Eye, Sir Paul Smith…Warming to my theme, I began cross-referencing English and Italian like a demented translating dictionary, until I was confident that for every Dante there’s a Shakespeare, for every Michaelangelo there’s a Lutyens, for every Galileo, a Hawking, for each Monica Bellucci a, um, Keira Knightley.

Of course the fact that Italy has already qualified for next year’s European Championship by defeating Scotland last weekend holds no sway. Club not country, remember? And now, I’m off for a double espresso.

Poetry in (Andrew) Motion

How strange. And fabulous. No sooner have I claimed that books and bikes embrace each other, when they embrace at all, like a precious dilettante would the great unwashed, when I come across this article on the Guardian's books site. Truly, the world moves in mysterious ways. No doubt I shall be exploring the works of Diane Wakoski in more detail during the coming days. How marvelous indeed. A momentary inspiration upon discovering the piece delivered this -

Let Ducatis growl, let Fireblades scream,
let skies be blue, let poets dream
of words that chase down four-wheeled prey
and stanzas fit to ricochet
from traffic light to horizon,
to sanity, mi corazón.



Right. On with the day job.

Mad Dogs and an Englishman

Literature and bikes. Like I said, they’re unlikely bedfellows, rare as an honest politician or a hen’s dentist. Of course there was the late, rocket-propelled (literally and posthumously, if tales of the disposal of his ashes are to be believed) Hunter S Thompson. There’s turn of the century Tom Swift, Erika Lopez and her Mad Dog Rodriguez trilogy and a host of “my travels around the world on a Triumph/Norton/Vincent/KTM/Indian (delete as appropriate)” travelogues, but little that really celebrates in a true literary sense that sensation, familiar to anyone who’s ever thrown a leg over an upholstered frame, of unadulterated, Mandela-esque freedom.

Worse, there are many biking tomes out there that seem to treat inarticulacy as nothing more than an occupational hazard, to borrow from the judge’s summation of one Norman Stanley Fletcher’s attitude to incarceration. I’m thinking of the books that are written by riders to celebrate their on-track achievements, like Foggy, the autobiography of Carl Fogarty, co-written by a certain Neil Bramwell; evidently a secondary writer was required to record the fabulous career of Mr. F but it’s a pity that a real ghost writer couldn’t have been found. I’m thinking Marvell, Hardy, Dickens. Real ghosts.

Probably the best writing involving bikes in recent times has been contained in Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, a truly fabulous read that demonstrates the full etymological talents of the man. But for sheer Rich Tea-taking, glorious-as-an-early-morning-sunrise prose, Dan Walsh takes some usurping. Descriptive as an adjective in fancy dress, revealing as fake tan, Dan is a bike journalist, mostly for Bike magazine, and is the Marilyn Manson to the rest of the magazine’s McFly, the Bram Stoker to its Blyton.

Writing like an angel on mescalin, Dan’s bulletins about his across-the-Americas journey weave a tale of bikes, bars and bedlam, a brilliant bonanza of belles-lettres that ignite each page, a traveller’s torch song. Of late, his missives have become fewer and fewer – one gathers that there have been, um, issues – and they are sorely missed.

There are those misguided and snobbish fools out there who dismiss Dan as a posturing Hunter S wannabe, a jackanape amongst scribes. Not a bit of it. For Thompson, the bike was an accoutrement, an accessory to a lifestyle that, if his Vincent Black Shadow had been an ass, would still have found a way of injecting his soul with an illegal cocktail and spilling it onto a page. For Dan, the bike’s the release valve, the mental safety net, the reason, and his ability to transport the reader from saddle to salt flat to saloon with a writerly raised eyebrow, a wry observation and a host of satanic similes marks him out as the, or at least this, biker’s writer.

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Congestion Charge

When riding my old CBR in London’s dense, Livingstoned traffic, there were occasionally times when even a bike couldn’t penetrate the haphazard vehicular maze. Pincered by red walls of wheezing buses, or forced wide like a flexed horse preparing to canter by hatchbacks driven by moles, before the path was closed by an overlapping black cab, progress could be slow from red light to red light

Up north, a bike’s progress is rarely so hampered. A Sunday blast can take in sweeping passes through a landscape of russets and greens, dipping and climbing, hauling in stray cars like a sea-fisher would a marlin, then ducking past them with a cursory excuse-me blink of an indicator as the cinematic sky turns from duck-egg to cobalt with the lengthening day. Until.

They came from all sides, their faces black and determined, their bodies permed and matted, a jumble of motion, trotting, walking, skipping, tumbling down the hill until they surrounded me, an ovine river of wool and muttered calls that had burst its banks. At the rear of this phalanx of mutton, a farmer on a quad-bike and a border collie marshalling its troops. And where red lights induced frustration and blinkered buses tightened the stress-ratchet, what else could be done here but sit, and smile, and wait? There were bends and dips aplenty still to ride, but for now, these guys had right of way.

Babysitter Bike

“Am I glad to see you.” An unfamiliar voice, Scottish. I turned to see a slight, middle-aged man walking wearily towards me, a trio of shopping bags in one hand, the other clutching the arm of a small, blond boy.

“It’s him,” he said with a half smile, perhaps uncertain of his audience and indicating the child at his knees. “Twenty minutes it’s been now. Bike, bike, bike, while his mother’s in the shop. Now that you’re going, maybe I’ll get some peace.” The half smile broke into a grin as he indicated my bike , parked up on its side-stand, and as if on cue the child thrust a podgy digit forward in the direction of my Ducati and announced “Bike.” He looked like a mini- tifoso , his arm and pointed finger redolent of an altogether more threatening, political gesture, made ridiculous on one barely out of the pram.

“His first two words,” the man continued. “Dad and bike.” Obviously one destined to keep dad on his toes, the toddler turned to his father and said “Mum.”

They stood watching as I crammed my own shopping into my rucksack, struggled to put the bag, which kept catching on the sleeve of my jacket, over my shoulders, took off my glasses, put on my helmet, put my glasses back on, pulled on my gloves and, after what seemed an eternity – surely by now the child was bored with the whole notion of motorcycles, having seen them turned into an endless round of ritualistic paraphernalia – slung my right leg over the seat, turned the key and pressed the starter. A moment’s computer-driven whirr-whine and the engine barked impatiently into life. A glance over my shoulder showed me the infant laughing and clapping as the bike’s engine growled its twin-cylinder growl. After the man selling outsized balloons to the early Christmas shoppers, I was probably the best value distraction the kid had seen all afternoon. A couple of blips on the throttle by way of an encore, and the street entertainment pulled away with a wave of a leathered arm, into the Harrogate dusk.

To Begin at the Beginning

And with a cursory nod to the genius that was Dylan Thomas, we're off.

To blog, or not to blog. Not so much the question as an information technology dilemma; just because the technology exists, should the writer embrace it, like a previously-departed relative at the arrivals gate? Or should it be eschewed, condemned as a twenty-first century round robin, a self-aggrandising letter announcing exam results, self-satisfied work promotions and ballet grades, thrust upon rather than received at Yuletide from those slightly irritating people you met in Tuscany and whose existence you’d wiped from your limbic hard-drive?

I suppose the mere fact that I’m currently typing like a man possessed of both keyboard and the desire to spout renders the enquiry rhetorical.

Plus, this is Mark II, the second go, the shirt adorned with the number twelve. Son Of Blog. My previous blogging attempt disappeared up its own rather pretentious, self-analysing, timid fundament, condemned to reside in Another Place, never to trouble the emergency services. So why do it, why write, express, place one word after another in a considered, deliberate structure, take exercise in etymological gymnasia? Because the opportunity exists and to resist opportunity if compelled to set vowels and consonants on page, or screen, in sometimes elegant, often determined rows would be pointless.

And as for Erudite Bike...

It's like this. Two prominent passions, if, on the face of it, unlikely bedfellows. Literature and motorcycles. A relationship that will be explored at a later date. For now, though, I've been nursing a thought.

To many people in this green and debt-strewn land, earning the daily wholemeal has become about as satisfying as waiting in for the gas man. And to do a job that one has precious little interest in, and even less respect for, is ultimately a crushing experience. A life filled with pretentious, ladder-climbing colleagues and uncaring, intellectually-challenged clients whose minds have been rendered soft as economy sliced white, reared on a diet of company Vectra upgrades, ready meals, Eastenders and sensible shoes, can be as bereft of real meaning as a Turner Prize-nominated installation.

Worst of all, it’s a scenario of our own making, this nine to five-cum-seven, this drudgery. Because there came a point where we willingly slipped on the shackles so kindly supplied by Great Uncle Visa and young Master Card, convinced that today’s baubles could be paid for tomorrow, that we deserved and needed to consume, that the conveyor belt of credit was but an assistant to desires fulfilled. So, for now, we’re buggered.

One day, we promise ourselves, it’ll all be different. All debts paid, all lenders dispensed with, all outgoings settled from an ever-replenishing pile of royal portrait-toting notes. We have to believe this. We have to know it. It’s what keeps us fiscally aware types going. And while we believe, we dream.

Some dream from behind the covers of a well-thumbed novel. Others dream from the seat of a throbbing V-Twin or a Japanese race rocket. Me? I do both, although thankfully, rarely at the same time. Some dreams can combine the literary with the bike. Well, if not the literary, at least a book deal. I'm thinking of Ewan MacGregor and Charley Boorman’s Long Way Down, the biking buddy bio-serial of their attempt to ride from John O’Groats to Cape Town, following their previous escapade going round. And whilst the mugging to camera can be tiresome and the self-indulgent posturing that hey, we’re just two regular guys riding bikes can be more than a little disingenuous, it’s still fun tv, redolent of Ted Simon’s Jupiter laced with Che Guevara’s diaries . And what bike-riding, debt-slathered, duty-bound adventurer wouldn’t want to be with them? To see how far the sky stays blue, to know again that feeling of cocooned and all-encompassing freedom, with the additional Brucie-bonus that it doesn’t end in an hour, an afternoon, but that, for now, this is it. How glorious. Snicking through gears, leaning into late brakes, choosing lines and hunting down HP-financed cars like a Spitfire pilot seeking Bavarians, first stop a French village where the hotel’s run by Bardot and the Chablis’s been on ice all day…to dream, eh? Yet what good are dreams if we treat them as anything less than plans we’ve yet to make and fulfill?

Let us dream. And let us do so in the knowledge that the harder we dream, the more actions we’ll take. And the more we’ll live that life that’s out there waiting for us, not the one that’s offered up to us in a contract of regulatory indifference. Me, I intend to grab it. And I’m using both hands...