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...