Burger vans and instant coffee... holding onto the old ways

I'd missed breakfast. When I say missed, what I mean is the pub I'd stayed in wasn't providing it because of you-know-what.

It wasn’t a problem though. I had about 40 miles to ride on main roads before my next appointment, so there was bound to be a trucker's pull-in somewhere on route, right? Somewhere to stop for a bacon sandwich and a cuppa early doors.

And after a spirited blast across the Cotswolds I found… nothing. In the end, after a ten-mile detour and a fruitless search on the A40, I resorted to stopping at one of a well-known chain of coffee shops, where they extracted a month's mortgage payments from me for a pre-packed bacon roll containing two small rashers of streaky and a teaspoon of scrambled eggs. Took them 15 minutes to microwave it. No problem though, I had another 100 miles to go... I could get lunch elsewhere, surely?

Except the only place I could find that wasn't a homogenous coffee stop or fast-food joint was a falafel stall outside Stroud. Not that there's anything wrong with a falafel, it's just that after a hard ride it's not the fuel I'm looking for. Where do truckers stop these days? It's a mystery.

What, though, does my inability to buy a couple of slices of fried pork in a bun have to do with riding a classic motorcycle? Well, for me, the stop at a burger van is as an authentic a part of the motorcycling experience as spotting an unexpected oil leak or realising something is vibrating loose. Standing by the roadside, polystyrene cup of instant coffee in one hand and playing the egg banjo with the other while trucks hurtle past, sheltering by the van from the drizzle, is all part of the fun.

And the kind of people I know who ride classic motorcycles tend to prefer the rough and ready to the soulless corporate offerings we get served up at the highwayman – I mean, coffee shop.

It's what we grew up with. The same goes for bike shops. Yes, a two or three-storey mega dealership, all smoked glass and people in suits, might be the modern way but lots of people don't like it. The traditional high street bike shops of blessed memory might have vanished, pushed out to the outskirts of town by rapacious property developers. But there they are, keeping going in industrial units that aren't quite big enough.

I don't know about where you are, but the few great bike shops round my way have hard-working owners, bikes lined up outside and mechanics with long hair and grease on their foreheads. Or there will be a venerable white-haired gentleman in spotless overalls with a pencil behind his ear and an encyclopaedic knowledge of everything.

One local shop has all of these, and a 19-year-old apprentice to back them up as well – a young chap who actually wants to learn what a magneto is. We are told you should not judge a book by its cover, and a couple of the major shops do seem to care. For some, it's not just about the money. And, funnily enough, those are the ones still flourishing.

As I type this, we are being given dark warnings about the delay to ending the you-know-what restrictions. There must be burger van owners worrying about reopening and autojumblers in the same boat, and show organisers biting their nails. And if you are a pub landlord, the future doesn't bear thinking about. My personal fear is that so many of these things won't return; that we'll end up in a society where everything is bland and corporate, even more than it was two years ago.

So, I'll stop at the burger van when I can find one. I'll buy my oil from my local bike shop. And I'll buy my next bike from someone who cares, who cares about me, and who cares about my bike.

You don't know what you've got ‘til it's gone.

“So, I’ll stop at the burger van when I can find one. I’ll buy my oil from my local bike shop. And I’ll buy my next bike from someone who cares, who cares about me, and who cares about my bike.”