FROM THE FRONT
Do you ever suffer from An Appalling Understanding? A moment of sheer frustration with yourself that you’ve done something daft? It used to happen to me a lot, then it sortof faded away, and now it’s back in full shout. Just in time for Summer. Hurrah, of course.
About what am I rambling? About the foolish sale of machines that I really, really liked. We’ve all done this, so do not bother to deny it. And if you genuinely have never stumbled in this way on the path to the perfected motorcycle, award yourself a putty medal and make a donation to your favourite charity. Such perfection is rare indeed. Putty medal? My old grammar school Maths teacher awarded them to swots like … ah … other pupils who had done well in tests. Think I’ll change the subject right there.
As you might expect, we have a vast (and I do mean vast) collection of photos of bikes, both bikes we’ve owned, bikes we’ve borrowed and bikes we’ve been interested in buying (but not interested enough in most cases). Occasionally, while diligently searching through thousands of images (not an exaggeration) and cursing myself out loud for not labelling the images in any sensible way, I stumble across photos of bikes which passed through our hands in the quarter century or so that Rowena and I have been together – and in the quarter century before we met. Most of the latter are faded prints or unscannable 35mm slides, which can be challenging.
And in with the horror stories, the occasional bargains and mighty achievements (bikes bought for 2/6d as non-runners which needed only fuel and a plug change), there are a few beauties which I genuinely and increasingly regret selling. In all cases the regret is because although there was always the traditional genuine reason for sale, once that reason (usually financial but also occasionally health) has passed it is impossible to replace the things. Or rather, it is impossible to replace them at a price I am prepared to pay. That price is a personal thing, nothing to do with actual value.
The photo which inspired this line of thinking is of two Norton Commandos, parked up together at Roadford Lake, a favourite lunching spot in distant Devon. The Nortons lived side by side in The Shed for quite a while, until I sold the old one for an entirely sensible reason, and parked up the new one simply because I’d bought it new and wanted to keep it. I didn’t. Of course not.
Like many of us, I am prone to wild bouts of nostalgia, when the lenses in my glasses decorate everything in view with a rosetinted hue. I stared at this photo – and several others taken around the same day, as most of my photos are filed by my computer by date and by the file name given to the pics by the camera. I have a couple of thousand pics whose name begins with ‘DSC…’. Hmmm.
It was an effort, but in both cases I managed to reflect upon my perfectly valid reasons for selling them. Both of them. But times change. I no longer insist that my on-the-road bikes – as opposed to ‘project’ bikes – are capable of carting me quickly and comfortably for a couple of hundred miles a day should I want them to. These days, as old age gallops along, most of my rides are much shorter than that – a hundredmile round trip for lunch is a good thing.
So I decided that I need a self-starting Norton again. Something with a big beefy engine and lazy road manners. Of course I do. It will take me the whole of the summer to find one and by then it will be too late in the year to buy it. Which may of course be a good thing, as neither bikes nor their riders necessarily improve with age…
Ride safely