It all started in May 2011 on the way home from ice skating in Coventry with my daughters’ ex-boyfriend. I like to go skating once a week if I can and for company I offer to drive Rob as well as he enjoys skating. It is a fair old drive, some 55 minutes door-to-door one way – ice rinks are few and far between in the UK you know!
Anyway….. Oh hell, it really started back in 1982! I had just changed jobs from my first job (which I did for 8 years) in central London to a new job near Shepherd Bush, on the outskirts of London. Well, I hadn’t bothered to learn to drive beyond a few lessons, what with my involvement with the Territorial Army, which left me with little free time at weekends. So I got the train into Central London everyday and walked to and from the station, I simply didn’t need a car.
Then the job in Shepherds Bush came along.
I took the job and handed my one months notice in. Then I thought ‘how do I get there every day’. Well I could do a train into London then a tube out, but that would cost a fortune. Driving was out partly due to the traffic in London but mainly because I didn’t have a licence!
I know! Genius! I’ll buy a motorbike, stick ‘L’ plates on and commute that way! Yeah, I lived in Weybridge so it was already on the same side of London as Shepherds Bush, so I’ll do that – how tough can it be?
Only 20 miles one way through rush hour London traffic and a packed three lane A road with 70 mph traffic jams!
Now in those days, you didn’t need any of this CBT basic training nonsense. In fact they had only just lowered the maximum spec of a learner motorbike from 250cc to 125cc. All you had to do was get a provisional licence, get a 125cc motorbike, stick ‘L’ plates front and back, get it insured and a tax disk and off you go!
I bought a Suzuki GP125 on the Friday, practiced on disused roads where the prefabs used to be on Sunday and went off to drive from Weybridge to Shepherds Bush up the A3 in the rush hour on the following Monday morning – smart move eh?
Anyway, I didn’t kill myself. I rode the bike like that in all weathers day in and day out for two years. No leathers, just a one piece ‘shower-resistant’ over-suit which of course leaked badly in the crotch region!
In all that time, I only came off twice. Once when I decided on a very cold a frosty morning in January (I guess you can see what’s coming!) to take a short cut through the back roads in Bushy Park off the A3 near Roehampton. Yep – black ice. I was sliding along my side at 35mph thinking ‘this is a really stupid way to break my leg!’. Well I didn’t. I got up, shook myself off, picked up the bike, straightened the bent bits and carried on. The second time I was literally blown off riding around Feltham in very high winds, I just passed a tall office block when a funnelled and very strong gust blew the bike into the curb and I bounced off. Both me and the bike were fine.
Well for me at the time, the bike was a means to an end. A way of getting cheaply and conveniently from A to B. I got promoted, took my car licence then bought a brand new Opel Manta as my first car. What of anything I have written so far make you think that I do the smart thing – huh?
So I sold the bike and moved onwards and upwards into cars. So that was damned near 30 years ago and that was the last time I rode a bike.
Anyway, Rob and I got to talking on the way back from skating in the car, ……well, skating in Coventry, not actually IN the car, but you knew that didn’t you?
He is a young man of 23-odd and a very keen biker. So he said why don’t you get a motorbike? Well, I went through a few reasons, like I would have to do that PITA new series of tests, I already had an expensive hobby, I didn’t have much free time etc. etc.
But the more I thought about the more I thought, ‘y’know, it would be a fun project to get your teeth stuck into, why not just get the licence and sit on it, then when the time was right in a year or two, get a bike’. So that is kinda what I thought I would do.
We only have one life and I would hate to get to age 75 and think ‘you know, I really wish I had done XXXX (whatever XXXXX is)’. So I suppose if you call that a mid-life crisis, then yep – that’s what I’ve got! But hey – I have had it since I was I was aged 45 in 2000 – that is when I started making lists – lists of places I wanted to see, lists of things I wanted to do, lists of things I wanted to achieve etc. Damn Tony Robbins and ‘Awaken the Giant Within’ – damn him I say!!!
So that was the plan. Get my motorbike direct access licence and sit on it for a couple of years as a preparation step.
But plans have a habit of morphing and changing don’t they?
