You can take the M road...
London writer Dave (CSD) Gurman's bike breaks in the Brecon Becons
My car pulled away with arms waving from every window, plus the sunroof. Fortunately it wasn't a bunch of teenage TWOC merchants taking the piss, it was just the family heading off on summer holiday. Becky was driving, while my four kids filled the other seats. I'd told her to go the way she knew best: down to Chelsea Bridge, round the Embankment, A4, M4, bosh bosh bosh, bridge, Wales! Not complicated, none of our usual last minute arguments, just a quick round of kisses and they'd gone.
And suddenly I was alone; sitting on my front doorstep, smoking while I moved my head to a different space. I wasn't on any Cinderella trip, nor was I planning to make Home Alone 7; the simple fact is, when it comes to long journeys, there simply isn't enough room for everyone in the car. I was going to join them, I was just taking a little time to drop out and tune in, before I began my solo mission.
I'm still enough of a DR to know the quickest route from SE19 to Dyfed, especially in a fully laden Citroën ZX. But I was going on my SRX6 and, while the M4 has never been my idea of biker's heaven, on a 16 year old, 53000K single, it would be a fucking eternity in purgatory. Nope, even though me and the family were heading for the same spot, we were on two completely different trips. If the M Snore had been the only route, I'd probably have settled for a cramped kip on a coach; but just as other despatch companies, mobile networks and ISPs are available, so are other roads West.
Any of you who've read Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (even the majority who gave up when it started "getting weird") will be familiar with the concept that when making a journey on a motorcycle, the bit between A & B is more significant than actually reaching your destination. Now I know this doesn't hold up so well when you're working. That the average controller, if you tell him to be more Zen, that the trip's the important bit and he shouldn't get so hung up on all that "arriving" shit, is likely to get a bit pissed off; especially if you've just delivered Herbert Smith's Colnbrook half an hour after the last flight. But when you're on your own time, it's a whole different story - the choice is yours. Forget about work, even David Beckham would get pissed off playing football from 9 till 7 each day, rain or shine; cast your mind back to biking in it's purest, most sublime form. When the journey really was the only point and the destination an incidental, as often as not decided by the fact that it was at the end of a particularly nice stretch of road.
OK on this occasion the finish line was preordained, but the choice of route was all mine. I pulled away from the Palace (that's Crystal, not my hutch) in the sort of sunshine that made me glad all over I hadn't bottled out when my half-arsed plans failed to arrange themselves. I'd kind of hoped that as this was my twenty-fifth Summer riding a bike, I might have scrounged something a bit sexier than my trusty oil-soaked Yam - something befitting a silver anniversary. But unfortunately I got caught out, forgetting that August follows on so close behind July and never quite got my shit together. As a consequence my work-and-back plodder never got the service it was overdue either. So on the morning I was setting off on a thousand Km round trip, I treated it to a tyre pressure check, chain tighten & lube and (as if in direct contradiction to the pool that always appears around it) topped up the comparatively fresh oil with a tiny amount of Motul - and that was it. Given the vintage of my bike and my maintenance regime, it was about the equivalent of me training for a Marathon by walking up to the shops to buy my fags, instead of riding like I normally do.
However, in spite of good reasons to question the 600's ability to maintain its mechanical integrity (i.e. not fall apart in any one of the many areas, it would have every right to give up the ghost in) I rode away feeling at peace with the Universe. In the balmy sunshine everything felt absolutely fine and groovy - almost too good to be true - and the blast to the Westway was as swift and slick as you'd expect, from a bike and rider both on home ground.
The Kamikaze pedestrians in Brixton provided the usual lively sport and MI6 got a great view of the oiliest bit of my bike (plus a throaty raspberry, courtesy of my lovely Superttrap exhaust) as I swept onto Vauxhall bridge. At Hyde Park Corner, Marble Arch and Lancaster Gate, I resisted the temptation to shout "Oy! Get out of my city!" to all the weekend drivers up from the sticks, although it was a laugh scaring the manure out of them, as I roared past while they circulated as if they were on tractors.
It was all fun and gently playing with the traffic, right the way to somewhere around Uxbridge. Once past there, the steady 75mph cruising speed I was maintaining (a figure I'd arrived at with my bike, when it bravely agreed to attempt the journey) meant I seemed to spend a lot of time looking back at the same old faces in Volvo 440s, Maestros and Skodas. There was little on the M40 to keep me interested, but I'd allowed for that little bit of tedium. After all there was no point in being masochistic and doing High Wycombe and all the other crap towns on the old A40 just to make a point. If by the time I reached the Irish Sea, the worst I'd had to put up with was a bit of drudgery with the herd between the M25 and Oxford, I'd be on a result.
The moment I rolled off the M40 at Oxford, the bike seemed tighter, more urgent and although it's dual carriageway right the way in and around the ring road, the roundabouts helped to blow away any motorway fuzziness long before I hit the old A40 proper. From the edge of the city on down towards Gloucester, with the exception of the odd bit of by-pass, the road is very much as it has been since long before the first bridge was built to allow a more direct route between the Capital and South Wales. I travelled it regularly in the Fifties & Sixties with my family (back when bench seats meant you could get two adults and a shit load of kids in a car).
It was on one of our holidays in Swansea, that I had my first bike ride, aged ten, on the back of my eighteen-year-old Uncle Paul's café racer. I still have a child's eye memory, of roaring up and around the hills and hairpins of the town. It was along the A40, that he and his friends used to thunder on Gold Stars, Triumph 110s, Venoms, Dominator 99s, or any one of another dozen or so (British) bikes and hybrids, that were up for a serious 200 mile blast. I sent Paul an e-mail, asking what sort of times they expected on the Swansea to London run and got this back:
"Individual times from the bottom of Wind Street, to the Ace cafe on the North Circular close to Hanger lane, were always bandied about and I personally completed that run two-up on several occasions, with the time of two and a half hours always being the decent time to match. This was always discounted a stop at the transport cafe in Gloucester which was sorely needed given the rough rides of that day. I'm talking here of 1965ish, on (the bikes listed above). Hard ride with one half-hour break. 3 hours, done by many, bettered by few...".
Funny when you think that now, a café racer is normally a bike which is mass-produced in Japan, tarted-up with plastic and sold to wannabe racers - who then use it to tear from KFC to the McDonald's drive-through and back again. Thirty-five years ago it was very much an individual machine: stripped down, tuned up, and usually drilled & wired to stop it shaking itself apart. Café racing was exactly what they were doing then and is therefore the perfect example of the ride as the whole point. Paul and the other ton-up boys (and girls), didn't race to the Ace because it served the best all day breakfast within a 200 mile radius; they did it because it lay at the other end of a testing ride (By the way, anyone who's unimpressed with the times quoted, ought to bear in my mind that although there wasn't the traffic then, by extension, there weren't any by-passes back then! So they had to go through Cardiff, Gloucester, Oxford, High Wycombe and a host of smaller towns and villages on the A40 & 48 en route to their egg, bacon, bubble and beans).
However on my trip, I was more interested in sharing their feeling of freedom, than taking a tilt at any licence shredding, pre-national speed limit, records. The 75mph which had been such a drone on the motorway, was a good pace on the pleasantly undulating A road; and a short blast to 85 or 90, was plenty to turn a trio of posing R1s into blurred history in the bar-end, as I rolled past the traffic and round the sweeping bends.
I pulled into Northleach well on reserve, and failing to find a petrol station, I stopped a Boost, a fag and a Tango, before heading back to the A40. But I didn't even make the quarter mile back to the main road, before the bike, going uphill on full throttle, coughed twice and trickled to a halt. As I looked up and down the road pathetically, a Land Rover pulled out of the dairy farm opposite and when I shouted across to the driver, he told me the closest petrol was a bit less than a mile back down the hill and up over the other side. What had been a glorious sunny day, looked like turning into its downside: a long sweaty push.
Fortunately the farmer turned out to be a genuine "milkman of human kindness", because as I took off my lid and started to push, he spotted me in his mirror and did a three-pointer. He apologised, saying he hadn't realised I was already dry and told me to wait there for a moment. I wasn't desperately disappointed at not having to push the bike, so I lit another fag and waited.
He was back from his farmyard with a can before I'd finished it and I gratefully tipped in the 5 quids worth of unleaded he informed was inside. It was no surprise when he said he rode a bike and as I gratefully handed over a fiver and waved him off, I couldn't help reflecting that considering I was trying to be very Zen about this journey, I had to be sitting on some seriously good karma. I'd gone from a severely burst bubble (i.e. the prospect of pushing my bike uphill under the hottest sun I'd felt all Summer) to back on the road rescued, in less time than it takes to suck a Silk Cut down to the butt.
After topping the bike up, I stayed on the A40 right through to Abergavenny and although it was dual carriageway all the way from Ross-on-Wye, it had the occasional roundabout and was never tedious with Monmouthshire as a backdrop. In Abergavenny I considered stopping at the cafe by the river, where there were thirty or forty bikes fanned around the car park; but I'd have felt like I'd turned up at a white tie and tails do, in Bermudas and sandals. Someone must have slaughtered a lot of very shiny multicoloured cows, because everyone, bar none, seemed to be wearing coordinated leathers, complete with knee sliders. I wasn't unduly ashamed of my jeans, lace up copy Caterpillars, black leather jacket and cheap black crash hat, but I didn't want to embarrass my trusty bike by exposing it to all that garish plastic.
Instead I chose the Abergavenny pizza, burger, kebab, fish & chips, Indian and Chinese take-away. I went for the burger and took it away to sit on the bike outside. There I had a great chat with the old guy whose wife cooked everything inside. "There's lovely the A40 is on a bike like that." he reassured me, while I dropped tomato and mayonnaise onto the flies that spattered the front of my jacket. When I was leaving, he told me to make sure I checked out an obelisk, which I'd find alongside the road just before Llandovery. It was erected in 18 something or the other and commemorates a mail coach crash where around a dozen people died. I promised to keep an eye out and reverberated out of town.
Of course he was right about the road, but then I knew that. The Romans thought they were real clever bastards, what with their baths and straight roads that go on forever; but what good are either of them to a biker? The Welsh have got it better sussed. They looked at the mountains and said: sod knocking that lot down, let's follow the rivers and chip a bit off the edge. A few years ago the Chief Inspector of some County in Mid Cymru, was complaining in the press about bikers coming to Wales and treating it like a racetrack. To which my friend Mark replied: "Serves them right for having such lovely roads and so much breathtaking fucking scenery running alongside them."
I pulled into Brecon to fill up exhilarated by the ride, but had a nasty start when I saw an excessive number of yellow jackets and blue pointy hats at the edge of town. It turned out they were there for the Jazz Festival rather than any sweep against bikers; but that didn't stop me from freaking a bit when I got caught in a diversion and went on a long Stephen King type loop, which, after two or three miles of riding, brought me back to ride noisily past them again. I got it right second time 'round and headed off in a light drizzle that looked like it might pass. By the time I reached the monument I'd been advised to check out, it seemed like a good time to put my waterproofs on. I read an inscription warning against the dangers of insobriety while driving and reached in my pocket for a smokeÉ Which was when I noticed the gap where my wallet should have been.
I'd used it in the petrol station, I remembered carrying it into the bog with my gloves... Shit! I scrubbed round the waterproofs, kicked the bike back to life and shot off back in the direction I'd just come from. The rain got heavier and I passed a number of bikes with a lot more rubber, but clearly less sense of urgency. I slowed down as I pulled into Brecon because the police had already had two opportunities to make a fuss about my exhaust and it seemed silly to push my luck. I'd ridden all the way back with all thoughts of happy hippy karma dissolving in the rain, but half a dozen words with the young guy behind the counter saw me beaming all over my face, not even pissed off that it required another £4.10 to restore the tank to where it had been three quarters of an hour earlier.
There was no point in putting my waterproofs on by then, my nuts were as wet as they were going to get and I didn't see much benefit in sealing everything in plastic. I waved to the obelisk as I passed it and waved goodbye to the A40 shortly after, when I headed up the A482 towards Lampeter. As I followed the river route, I couldn't help reflecting that if I hadn't listened to the guy in Abergavenny, I'd have been miles further, perhaps at my destination, before I discovered my cock-up. The thought of that kept me buoyed as the sun, which had been around throughout the rain, finally outran me.
When my headlight fell off, I was well and truly in the dark. One minute I was riding along with rain plopping through the canopy of trees and the river on my left; the next, there were a serious set of chevrons ahead and a road narrows sign, indicating I needed to peel off a lot of speed fast to swing over a humpback bridge and switch banks. I compressed the forks, hit a few bumps and my headlight, minus retaining bolts, leapt off its casing and dangled like a glow worm near the front wheel. Inwardly I screamed Shiiit!!! But I'd been riding at such a pitch due to the conditions, I managed to stop without dumping it or shearing off the cables that provided my lifeline.
I'd hit a rhythm that had allowed me to ignore the seeping dampness, and the night ride on unfamiliar wet roads had become perversely enjoyable. So I hooked the light back on at the top and pushed it back into place. With nothing to secure it, I decided I'd keep it on by the power of positive thought. I didn't do to bad either. After it had fallen off a second time, I realised it gave a wobbling warning flicker, before it dived for the floor; and three or four stops to push it back into place saw me in Fishguard asking directions from a quartet of young lovelies outside a pub. They stood there in their teeny dresses, oblivious to the steady rain, and directed me to my journeys end with their gorgeous Cerys Matthews accents.
Ten minutes later I was dripping at my destination - almost against the odds, but never against the grain. I could have taken the motorway and saved myself a load of time, but I've never understood how you do that. Where do you keep the time you've saved? And when do you get to use it? Half a day spent stimulating all your senses, meeting people and following the course of ancient roads and even older rivers on a willing bike, is like Alka-seltzer for the soul! Why would anyone want to foreshorten the experience? People pay good money on drugs to get to that sort of place. Three hours of mind numbing M4 is an eighth of a day pissed away, with absolutely nothing to show for it. Why waste any of your life? You never know when the odd eighth could make all the difference.
Nah, when it comes to a trip on a bike: You can take the M road; I'll take the Zen road.
Be careful out there - take it karma!
CSD
Fatal Attraction
I screeched to a full on emergency stop, narrowly avoiding a costly collision with an S class Mercedes. The driver, a woman of around fifty with the steely glint of an '84 Thatcher, turned her head slightly in my direction, before tilting her nose disdainfully and flooring the big V8. As I clunked my bike into neutral and kicked it back to life, I couldn't help reflecting that the overwhelming majority of the accidents and near misses I'd been involved in over the years, could be directly attributed to women. I'm not suggesting however that women have been responsible whenever danger has loomed - far from it. All I'm saying is that they have often been central to the overall drama. So much so, that I've realised, rather belatedly, just how unwise I'd been in the past, when I failed to consider such a potentially lethal factor.
As I see it danger comes in two varieties when you're riding a bike. There's the kind that are imposed on you by third parties or physical factors; and there's the other kind, the stuff that's your fault. The former are much easier to deal with, because they're the sort of constants wise riders always keep in mind: white van man, school run mums in battleships, drivers arguing on their mobile phones... the list goes on and on and on. It's the same with the physical bits: diesel slicks, pot holes, manhole covers, cow shit and - one I encountered personally in Mayfair - mint sauce slicks. The reality is you need to expect the unexpected and as long as you're on the ball, you're as safe as it's possible to be on a motorbike.
But what happens when you're distracted? This brings me to the second danger: The Enemy Within. OK when the Tories coined the phrase they were referring to the miners, but what they were talking about was an enemy that could seriously fuck them up. Which, if you think what a little internal sabotage can achieve on a motorbike, is entirely the same thing. Of course unless you're actually psychotic, you're unlikely to try to fuck yourself up, but it's funny how things turn out. A single moment's distraction at the wrong time on a bike, and you could easily find yourself relegated to a world of special parking privileges, or worse still find that your life insurance has matured prematurely.
Which brings me back to women. The battleaxe in the Benz had every right to look down her nose at me. Aside from the fact that merely riding a bike probably put me somewhere a few rungs beneath her contempt, I'd also shot straight across a give way line without even registering it. So no, it wasn't her who reminded me of the treacherous plot by womankind to get me, she was incidental. It was all the redhead's fault.
Actually that's not entirely fair either. She may well have been aware of how beautiful she was (she'd have had to have been pretty daft to have missed it!), but she couldn't possibly have imagined that as she strode across the street between two grey office blocks, the sun blazing through her hair would create a copper halo that seared my brain - searing any thought of roadcraft from my mind. If she hadn't stepped into the shadows when she did, I've no doubt I'd have gained intimate personal experience of Mercedes' legendary build quality.
Assuming I'd been lucky enough to retain the ability to communicate, how would I have explained that accident to my friends and family? I decided that I'd have had to call it a glitch. Glitches cause all sorts of disasters. A dodgy O-ring turned the tenth Challenger mission into a dramatic fireworks display. A mechanic forgets to bolt your callipers back to your forks... oops! Or the rails aren't checked properly on an 80mph bend on a railway line... D'oh
The trouble with these examples, is that they're all external enemies. Someone else screws up and the person on the receiving end cops it. The situation I'm describing is something completely different. My situation wasn't a glitch - "a sudden irregularity or malfunction" - but it was very nearly a GLITCH. A Gonad Led Intelligence Takeover & Consequential Horror.
I've never been sure about the idea that men think about sex every six seconds? I don't buy it personally, not consciously. However I do believe there's a department somewhere in the average man's brain that does nothing but. It's like an all male office, where Darren the lech sits at the window all day going: "Cor look at that! I wouldn't mind getting its heels behind its ears... Check the tits on that Doris; I'd give it one... What about the arse on that? You could park a Pan Euro up her Khyber..." He's there all the time, a constant background buzz. Annoying, but tolerated, because when Darren yells "Worrr!!" in a certain tone, everyone drops whatever they're doing and rushes to the window to press their nose against the glass.
That's how I think it works at a Numskulls level. Darren is obviously a gonadotrophin and it's his job to keep his eyes skinned for possible sperm banks. While your riding along he's going "Blonde left. Brunette right. Low top by the lights. Short skirt on the horizon." Most the time the rest of your functions stay on task and concentrate on the job in hand (i.e. tearing between two rows of traffic, skimming past mirrors and weaving past wobblers on their mobiles). Then all of a sudden Darren goes "Worrr!!" and that's it. In a fraction of a millisecond your brain is full of the boys from your bollocks. They wrench your eyes in the direction that Darren's pointing, just in time for all the lads in the hard pressed riding dept to glance over and see the white silk blouse billow once again, exposing a perfectly formed honeyed orb, tipped by the most... Which is when you whack the Ikea package that's sticking out the back window of a Cinquecento, high-side it and bounce towards the bull bars of an oncoming Vitara.
It's obvious that if you're not looking at the road, it's pot luck what happens next. I've been there enough times, particularly in my earlier years, to know just how lucky I've been not to have met any excessively sharp, or aggressively immovable objects in my various shunts and slides. On average, I've probably come off with little more than road rash, the occasional ruined pair of best jeans and a bill for thirty or so quid for indicators and levers from breakers.
For me, the greatest boon when I worked as a fleet rider at Mercury despatch, was that I didn't even have to pay to get my bike fixed. Which must have saved me a fortune, in my first summer on the road. As an in-town rider, I went from the West End to the City and back again, all day every day. And yes, I got distracted, I admit it. Constantly, beautifully and often memorably, but also rather too regularly, painfully. One momentous morning, early in June 1979, I managed to dump my company bike twice within the space of a couple of hundred yards and little more than five minutes - and both spills were classic GLITCHes.
The first was around 9:45am, and the most impressive thing about that one, is that I was stationary when it happened. I was on the sunny side of Harley Street, about twenty yards from the junction with Cavendish Square, waiting to pick up a regular ten o'clock booking from a clinic opposite. It was a glorious morning. My GT250 was on the centre-stand and I was reclined across it in a t-shirt, with my shoulders on the topbox and my feet resting on the clocks inside the handlebar fairing. I was half-reading a bike mag, but mainly I was checking out the steady stream of lightly dressed women passing by.
I'd arranged the right mirror to make sure I didn't miss anyone behind me; and sure enough a blonde and a redhead, both around 18 or 19, appeared in the reflected distance. They were a picture of summer beauty, Skimpily dressed, they leant on each other as they walked arm in arm, chatting and laughing. I waited until I thought they were right alongside and turned casually to show them my teeth. Sadly they weren't quite as close as I'd thought and as I turned to check my blind spot, the bike toppled. I tried to extricate my feet from the fairing without success, so I went down with my ship and tumbled in a heap at their feet. They giggled as they skipped 'round me and the redhead gave me a little finger wiggling wave as they crossed the road to walk through the gardens. Not a total loss then.
I'd no sooner sorted the bike out and settled down for another ten minutes bask, when yet another vision of loveliness wearing a calf length dress of fine white Indian cheesecloth, drifted across the lights and disappeared past the corner heading down Wigmore Street. At the same moment the lights ahead of me turned green and it occurred to Darren and the bollock boys (who more or less had the run of things while I was standing by) that if I tore round the block real quick, I could get another look at her with the sun behind her. I kicked the Suzuki into life, rocked it off the stand and the rear wheel hit the road spinning. I shot around the square and along Henrietta Place, scraped my pannier into Wimpole Street, then straightened momentarily, before throwing it over again as I screamed into Wigmore street on a very late amber. And there she was, still ten yards from the junction.
You've got to give it to Daz and the boys, they were spot on. Viewed from the West, backlit by the stark morning sunlight, she was a mind-blowing naked silhouette. There wasn't a single one of my brain cells who didn't have his nose pressed against my optical nerve; which, as it turned out, meant there was no bugger riding the bike and accounts for why it just kept on leaning until it broke away and scraped across the road to clatter into the gutter. I picked myself up and my bare right arm had a long black and red smear from the elbow to the wrist, while the mess on the palms of my hands, dissuaded me from trying to lead the excited onlookers in a spontaneous round of applause, for what was, when all's said and done, a pretty spectacular bit of street entertainment.
The vision stopped alongside me and although she was clearly oblivious to any culpability on her part, she looked terribly concerned. She was another Duracell (yeah, of course I know there's a pattern) sporting a short carrot coloured crop. When she opened her full-lipped mouth to speak I thought: "What the hell if my limbs smart and I've got yet another new pair of Levis with holes in the knee, I could be on a result here". But before she could speak, two lovely old dears swung to my rescue, offering me tissues, sympathy and words of advice against dashing around on motorbikes. The vision, seeing I was already well cared for, wrinkled her nose and twinkled her green eyes at me, before turning away and walking out of my life forever, leaving me with the girls explaining that they were up from Guildford for a recital at the Wigmore halls. I firmly, but somewhat belatedly bolted the barn door, by putting my jacket and gloves on top of my wounds, made my apologies to the Surrey Women's Institute and shot off for the ten o'clock.
These were just a two situations out of hundreds. Others included various Marilyn Monroe scenes above underground vents; stocking tops crossing Cheapside; even topless sunbathers in the central reservation on Park Lane! And if I was travelling fast when they happened, my survival was likely to involve an infinitely higher ratio of luck to judgment, than would normally be desirable.
I realise that, while some of you will share my fatal attraction, there'll be others who simply don't relate to any of this. If it's just a question of gender or sexual orientation, you can substitute diaphanous dresses, for overfilled cycle shorts, bare arsed chaps in chaps, or anything else that rings your bell. For a few of you it may be Ferrari Dinos, speckled throat warblers or even rare Routemaster buses, but most of us with a pulse have got an Achilles heel.
So how do you avoid or at least lower the risk factors in these situations? I'm afraid I can only talk authoritatively about GLITCHes from a male perspective, and the best advice I can offer is to get old! Your hormones eventually get too knackered to rush to your brain in the sort of numbers they used to, so there's a better chance of maintaining half an eye on the road. But for someone twenty-two, who's struggling to make twenty-three, I realise that's not a lot of help. So for the younger audience, I'd point you to the advice given to Ted when he was about to go out with Cameron Diaz in Something About Mary: "Never go on a date with a loaded gun!" OK, your not going out on a date, but the principal's the same and you've got to do something to stop them swarming across your brain and fucking you up.
So if you're reading this in sunshine and you're planning to get on a motorbike beware! You know how dangerous it's going to be out there, particularly in the cities where you're likely to come across acres and acres of lightly draped flesh, in all its wonderful variety. So give yourself an edge. Pop into the bog now before you get on your bike and empty that gun. Because regular pre-emptive strikes against the enemy within, may be the best shot you've got at surviving until the comparative safety of the ice and snow of yet another winter.
Carin' Sharin' Dave Gurman
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