The good ole days? Rubbish!

When was the best time to be a motorcyclist? You might as well ask what oil to use, or which tyres are best for your Spagforth Flying Lemming.

If you’d asked my Granny Nora, she’d have said the early 1920s, when she was belting round the West End of London on her Levis 250 in a flapper dress, breaking young men's hearts.

Others might say the early 1960s, when there was no 70mph speed limit, and when motorcycles had started getting faster. Thanks to £5 down and 17/6 a week, you could have almost anything you wanted – as long as you didn't mind not eating.

You could still buy a Vincent Rapide for £100. Motorcycling started to be roguishly stylish rather than the preserve of the impoverished working stiff. Riders became folk-devils, and what self-respecting young person didn't want to be a folk-devil?

Personally, I would (of course) say the best time to be a motorcyclist was the late 1970s and early 1980s, when bikes were getting more reliable and sophisticated. You'd often find they would start most mornings. You could spend a lot of money, or a little money, and get mobile. I bought a new MZ150 for a miserly £299, which was, to be fair, four months' wages at the time. In Exchange and Mart there were still dealers selling WD surplus BSA M20s and hyper-sophisticated Triumph TRW side valve twins for buttons. Dealers could get you replacement parts, and sometimes it took less than a month.

If you were a serious motorcyclist, it was unlikely that you would be viewed as anything other than a social pariah, and that suited a lot of us just fine. Riding a motorcycle was sometimes a magnet for a certain kind of person of the opposite sex, and that suited us fine, too. Being a “biker” did mean that you couldn't go into certain pubs, and you'd have to put up with some drive-by tutting from the owners of Morris Marinas as you parked up on Skegness seafront or outside the cider shops of Cheddar Gorge, while whiffing of patchouli and outraging public decency. The folkdevilry remained a badge of honour.

True, we learners of the late 1970s couldn't ride British. I do recall searching for something from a UK manufacturer that I could tie my L-plates to, finding only ex-police Velocette LEs and the odd worn-out BSA C15. All the 250 Starfires had exploded by then and weren't worth enough to rebuild.

I had a friend with a Triumph

Trailblazer that none of us, including him, could start. The rest of us, the sensible ones, bought electric start-equipped Japanese bikes. Then we broke them, and they broke us... regularly.

It was the best of times. The roads were empty. Policemen sometimes let you off if you weren't too cheeky. Yes, the late 1970s and early 1980s were the best time to ride a motorcycle.

And by the late 1980s, it was the worst of times. The money had run out, and so had the supply of rusty 1970s Kawasaki Z400s. Motorcycles suddenly got complicated. No one in their right mind would try to home-service a Honda VF400, for a start. The machines also got very ugly indeed; so much so that many of us slipped back into our own pasts and began to hunt down ancient twins and singles.

And today? Today is the best time to be a motorcyclist. Now, the new bikes are better. You get warranties worthy of the name, at least. The old bikes, the ones that have survived, are better, too. You can buy most of the parts you need and thanks to the magic of the internet, you can get them tomorrow. The days of “wait 28 days for delivery” have happily passed. And the parts you want are about the same price as they were 20 years ago. The last leather jacket I bought, packed as it is with body armour and the like, was cheaper than my first, which was purchased in 1980 and was just a jacket made of leather. My last crash helmet was the same price as the Nolan Guardsman I bought from my mum's Freemans catalogue. The same goes for my boots.

Thanks to smartphones and sat navs it's awfully hard to get lost, though I do try. Yes, we must put up with nonnegotiable speed cameras, and ethanol, and discovering that the bargain part you bought from eBay is junk. If you are a younger person living in a city, you'll pay three times what you did for your bike to insure it.

But by comparison to what we had to put up with, these are golden days. Put this magazine down, check the weather on your smartphone, grab your keys, and hit the road. Because now, as it always has been, the best time to ride a motorcycle is right now.