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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