Quote of the Biennium

To celebrate two years in the blogging saddle, and because I am in That Kinda Mood after a superb weekend, I am posting my favourite ever motorcycling quotation, which sums up the whole thing for me. From Robert M Pirsig's seminal Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it, you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer, and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on. It's right there, so blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.

Riding down the A487 on a sunny Sunday afternoon, with the sparkling china blue of the Irish Sea to my right, the green rolling hills of Ceredigion to my left, and my little girl pretty in pink on the pillion, is the closest a flawed and compromised old misfit like me will ever get to Heaven.

New Motorcycling Quote

Via the excellent Highwaylass, this quotation from Theresa Wallach, in her Easy Motorcycle Riding, published in 1970.

You are on your own. You are not protected by two tons of steel, rubber, foam padding and safety glass. Neither are you steering two tons of guided missile toward other cars, people and property. If you are prepared to accept the responsibility of your own actions, then motorcycling can be both safe and thrilling. Riding is an art as well as a craft and no amount of explanation can take the place of experience.

That pretty well encapsulates in a single paragraph what I have been saying on here from time to time for the last two years.

Theresa Wallach was a true pioneer. She rode at Brooklands (lapping at over 100 mph on a 350cc Norton single and winning the British Motorcycle Racing Club's Gold Star in 1939) and rode in trials. Best of all, she crossed the Sahara in 1935 on a Panther with sidecar, in the company of another ballsy female, Florence Blenkiron. No film crew, no team doctor, no back-up truck with factory mechanics, no satellite phone.

She understood. I leave you with more words of hers, which again strike a chord with me:

When I first saw a motorcycle, I got a message from it. It was a feeling - the kind of thing that makes a person burst into tears hearing a piece of music or standing awestruck in front of a fine work of art. Motorcycling is a tool with which you can accomplish something meaningful in your life. It is an art.

Happy Birthday, Driving Licence

I'm not sure of the exact date (it might have been the 23rd), but it was in February 1971 that I passed my driving test. I passed my bike test the following year. So I have now been driving (legally) for 40 years.

Bloody hell.

In that time, I reckon I have driven about 650,000 miles on four wheels, and about 150,000 on two wheels. The difference is down to the usual reasons - newly married and only able to run one vehicle, young children ditto - and a ten-year gap when illness prevented me from riding at all. But if you add it all up, it's almost to the Moon and back, twice. Or 32 times round the world.

In that time, I have owned 20 cars, from a Citroen 2CV to a 4.6 V8 Range Rover, and 17 bikes, from a wrecked Triumph Tina scooter that I ran in the fields at age 15 to a Honda Pan European ST1300. The worst car I ever drove was a Moskvitch (it wasn't mine, just a loaner while one of mine was in for service), which was truly horrible. There have been no bad bikes. Even the Jawa 350 that I owned in the early 70s was fun at times, and I don't regret having it, although it did perform the greatest service to me by making everything since feel like a luxury.

I've had a few minor swaps of paint, but only one serious accident, when a car turned across my path on a dual carriageway and we met head-on. Luckily it was wet and wintry and I wasn't going fast. My passenger had whiplash which has troubled her all her life since then, whereas I walked away with nothing more than a permanent twitch of the braking muscles whenever I see a car waiting on a central reservation. The 2CV was repaired and back on the road in a week. The Triumph Dolomite that wandered into its path was a write-off.

I've had a few close calls on the bike, but have only fallen off three times, each time due to my own over-enthusiasm and lack of self-restraint. I like to think each one was a learning experience that I will not repeat. I hope I am right. Scrapes and bruises, but no broken bones or worse. Have I been lucky, or just careful? Who knows.

My Dad always enjoyed driving, and he was happy for me to learn because he knew I would enjoy it too. Neither he nor my Mum were very keen on motorbikes, but to their credit they never stopped me once I was 18, and never made me feel guilty or wrong about what I did. (They did utterly forbid me from having a bike when I was 16 and was hankering after a black Honda CB72 which a mate was selling. I moaned at the time, but looking back it was absolutely the right thing to do. I had no sense at all.)

So, 40 years and the best part of a million miles. A few moments of anger and stress. A few hours of boredom in traffic jams. But in all, hugely life-enhancing. I dread to think of the cost of it all, if you put it together into one sum, but mobility has let me do things that previous generations could only dream of: find work that suited me, even though it wasn't within walking distance of my home; meet people and do things on a whim that would have been impossible without personal transport; just go out and drive or ride because I wanted to.

I'm often rude about cars in this blog, but in all honesty I still get a kick out of driving and would set off on a thousand-mile journey at the drop of a hat, with the same sense of adventure I had when I was 17 (but with a much better chance of getting there in one piece). Bikes, though, are something else. I can never swing a leg over a two-wheeler without a faint memory of that first thrilling ride on a mate's Lambretta when I was about 14, wobbling helmetless down the road trying to juggle clutch and brakes, and wondering why my cigarette had torched down to the filter in half a mile, while the paper was still intact.

Happy days, all of them.