I blame my partner. Then again, I usually do. This time however, I claim, it’s with good cause. Over Christmas, I’d been clearing my study out and the detritus was accumulating as a large pile of incipient compost in the hall. I hadn’t really paid too much attention to its contents, being immersed somewhere about the Lower Cretaceous of my desk. It’s was Jane’s passing comment as she climbed over the heap that did it — “If you’d taken the money you’d spent on motorcycle mags over the last couple of years, you could have bought the bike of your choice and kept it in the garage, rather than just creating heaps of crap in the house!”. Sub-text: “What sort of sad bastard are you?”

Good point. I’d sold my last Ducati for the usual reasons — car and mortgage, always, of course, with the intention of getting another bike just as soon as I could. That was 14 years ago… Besides, it was a rhetorical question — she knows exactly the sort of sad bastard I am.

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