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Back in the day (that day being some time around 1987), one of my flatmates owned a particularly nasty example of Yamaha’s XS650. It was so awful that it gave rat bikes a bad name. It had been painted matt black and was congenitally bad tempered. It ran straight-through pipes and sounded like a dying dinosaur. At the time, the UJM reigned supreme and British bikes had a poor reputation for reliability. That XS650 did its best to make any Meriden Triumph look especially attractive.

The XS was so awful that when the AA would still provide breakdown cover for it (they refused after the umpteenth episode) and it was recovered to Happy Hamrax for life-saving surgery, the doughty fellows at Hamrax assembled a special emergency repair kit for future incidents… that kit consisting of a bungee cord, a large elastic band and a packet of cables ties.

My, how we laughed.

That XS was so awful that when we towed it home after the AA finally declined to do the honours

– my boyfriend’s Suzuki GS550 was doing the towing – something substantial detached itself from the front suspension. There was a loud CRACK!, the Suzi’s pace suddenly picked up and the front end of the XS went all akimbo. Yet the impossibly awful XS somehow contrived to be back on commuting duties just two days later.

The XS was called Olga. I have no idea why it was called Olga. It just was.

Another pal subsequently owned a Kawasaki Z750 twin in a similarly ghastly state. It was called ‘Olga Killer’ which probably spoke more to the maturity of the owner than the performance of the Kawasaki

I’ve never been a great one for giving ‘people names’ to motorcycles, although I know that many folk like to personalise their bikes that way. Some people choose witty nicknames – one of RC’S earliest contributors, Graham Ham, called his old Triumph Speed Twin ‘Daisy’, because it was (begging your pardon) a bit of a cow.

TE Lawrence famously referred to his many Broughs collectively as ‘Boanerges’ and individually as ‘George I’, ‘George II’ and so on. The Biblical name translates to something like ‘sons of wrath’ and was revised to the less contentious term ‘sons of thunder’ halfway through the 20th century. It’s become accepted as a term for a fiery preacher who speaks with a powerful voice – not a bad description of the original intention for the SS100, in fact.

Me, I also lean towards the descriptive approach. Hence Frank’s T25 Blazer SS is known – if only to me – as ‘The Riumph’, because that’s what the badge on the tank now says. Similarly, his current T120 is fixed in my mind as King Bonneville V, because that’s what one sidepanel seems to suggest. We’ve owned the Black Tracker, the Red Rotator, the Ginger Spyder and – variously – ‘that hideous pile of worthless scrap’. That last one seems to keep coming back, no matter how many times we sell it.

I once owned a motorcycle named ‘Merlin’. It was a Yamaha XS250, taken out to 400. Even with the capacity bump, it was not a magical experience. I did not refer to it as Merlin and we did not have a wizard time together. It did cast one peculiar spell; when I spent too long in the saddle I found myself mysteriously drifting off to sleep. Thankfully I got shut of the thing before Prince Charming had to waken me from an enchanted slumber.

Frank and I once came close to giving a motorcycle a ‘people name’ with ‘Harry Matchless’, a weak pun on ‘Harris Matchless’. I might’ve called it Harry once or twice. Similarly, my MT350 military machine was known as The Snarley. It was badged as a Harley and indeed assembled in Milwaukee. Hence ‘issanarley, innit?’

But most of the time I tend to think of the motorcycle of the moment as little more than ‘the bike’

– I know which one I’m thinking about and my riding experience does not seem to have been diminished by the lack of a specific title. I confess that things can get a bit confusing when Frank says he’s going out for a ride on the CSR – but usually only one of them stands a chance of starting, so that issue pretty quickly resolves itself.

Motorcycle manufacturers appear to be equally conflicted when it comes to giving their machines individual

Take Frank’s various AJS and Matchless machines (not literally, he’d cry) for instance. AMC made a half-hearted attempt to attach aspirational labels to their stodgy model designations – Monarch, Monitor, Matador and so on – but they never really caught on. If I say ‘Hurricane’, you think of the Triumph X-75, not the AJS, don’t you?

Yet for some motorcycles, it’s all about the name. Bonneville, Dominator, Gold Star. Would those icons blaze quite so brightly if we’d only known them as a T120, Model 88 or CB32? I think not.

John Bloor obviously believed that the ‘Bonneville’ brand was so influential it should be reserved for exactly the right bike – although I’m not entirely convinced that the Hinckley-built 790cc twin really lived up to the expectations associated with the Bonneville.

Turner’s twin was known as a world-beating record-breaker and became the most desirable streetbike on the scene. The Bonneville launched in 2000 was based around an entry-level middleweight prototype – hardly the fire-breathing beast of yore. But the name got our attention and ensured that twin received more press coverage and customer test rides than its modest specification might’ve otherwise warranted…

So. What’s in a name? What’s your motorcycle called? And did anyone buy a particularly horrible XS650 named Olga at the end of the 1980s? If so, what happened to it? Photographic evidence, please!