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Humberbug

March 29, 2010 / Richard / 1 Comment

Firstly, a disclaimer: I don’t live in Humberside. Now that’s neither for nor against the place, simply a statement of elsewhereness. But hold that thought while I digress. I’m also a considerable fan of road safety, having desire to neither kill nor be killed on the public roads. But – and this is a big one – I’m like most of us, in that the more threatening and authoritarian the message, the more likely I am to start taking the piss. That’s not big and not clever, but is pretty basic psychology — engage with me and I’ll listen, behave like a fascist and I’ll start fomenting revolution.

Where I now live, things seem to be generally sensible: no fixed cameras, strong enforcement of urban limits and a high days-and-holidays police presence at biker gathering spots like the Green Welly, where they’re promoting Bikesafe courses and wandering around mumbling slightly abashed comments like, “Take care out there lads…”. Several plain clothes plodmobiles (cars and bikes) tend to be out and about at similar times, but I’ve seen relatively little bad behaviour or general numptiness by the local Police.

Go for a long ride though and, as you pass from force to force, you’ll see a wide variety of approaches: from the engagement-driven attitude of places like Durham and North Yorkshire (both of which have amongst the best safety trends in the country) to the outright hostility and bullying control freak mentality of places like North Wales and Northamptonshire. When I ride into the latter County, with its huge “You ARE Being Watched” signs everywhere, I am seized with a near uncontrollable desire to behave in a manner outrageous, illegal and undignified (not necessarily in that order). On the same ride, I’ll then cross into Buckinghamshire and find signs along the nicer roads that tell me what the accident rate for that road is for a given period. Thanks, you’ve treated me like an adult, given me information and I’ll act on it. All is then peace and light.

Nothing for Years…

February 1, 2010 / Richard / 0 Comments

Seven years. Seven years? That’s 45,000 miles and but a single breakdown on my ST4s — my matt grey STealth machine — and it’s not even clear whether that breakdown was component failure or dealer-induced (another story too long in the telling). And once again going strong, even after three years of enduro use on our so-called drive — a kilometre of potholed track, with bombholes and mudbaths enough to please the most discerning hippo. Fully serviced suspension has brought the dear old thing back into an extended prime, but the world moves on and its time to see where to go next. Or rather, “as well”, as I’ve no intention of getting rid of the ST4s. But what to get?

Now things have changed. A lot. Motorcycles are very different from what they were in the early Noughties, as is my life. They’re faster, more sophisticated and more expensive. My life is has probably managed two of those three, but with a complete transplant from the depths of the overcrowded Home Counties to the wilds of a Highland Glen. New life, new places, but still with love and mammals. What hasn’t changed is that I still live on some of the finest biking roads on the planet, so the basic need hasn’t changed:

I still want a SPORTS tourer. More than ever I need the virtues of comfort, adaptability and a decent tank range — the last of these being utterly essential, given the distances between filling stations hereabouts — Highland Scotland is several times the size of Wales, but with the population of Cardiff. That makes for a lot of empty roads, motorcyclists for the entertainment of…

And heated grips have gone from being a luxury to a necessity.

Lots More on the A84…

August 18, 2007 / Richard / 3 Comments

I’ve mentioned before that I live next to one of THE great biking roads, the A84 from Callander to Killin. That’s all of 20 miles of fast, wide sweeping bends that every so often turn into narrow, bumpy, twisty complexes that test machine set-up and rider anticipation, skill and basic sense. And far too bloody many people are failing that test: we’ve just had what (I think) is the third biking fatality of the year — and all of these on the mere eight miles between Callander and Strathyre, particularly through the twisties of the Falls of Leny, just North of Kilmahog and at the notorious “Doctor’s Bend” a couple of miles further North.

The consequences of this aren’t just limited to the motorcyclist and his or her (almost always ‘his’) family and friends but affect the local community: firstly, this is the only road South from here (without a 50-mile detour), so when it’s closed for most of a day it has a real local impact. Secondly, and mostly importantly, people here are genuinely upset about the sheer bloody waste of life that’s going — I haven’t spoken to a single person who’s anti-motorcycling in any way, but to many who are affected by the knowledge that another life has been needlessly lost on our doorstep and who genuinely feel the sense of lost humanity. While writing this blog entry, I’ve been approached by several friends and neighbours, each asking me if there’s anything at all I can do to raise awareness of the specific risks of this road. So here it is.

A821 Dukes Pass

May 3, 2007 / Richard / 0 Comments

Today I should most definitely have been working — too much to do, too little time, yada yada… But by 11 o’clock the temperature was about 23° and not a cloud in the sky. I also tripped over my Arai on the way to make a coffee, which was an omen not to be ignored, so the concept of ‘early lunch break’ had its definition rather stretched. Besides, I wanted to test out a new toy — a little Sony GPS that records everywhere you’ve been — the downloaded results then being used to tag the photos you’ve taken along the way, before mapping them in Google Maps or Google Earth. And where should I go to test this but a second (and third) pass at a road I discovered last weekend — the A821 from Kilmahog (I kid you not) to Aberfoyle, via the Duke’s pass. That’s the Duke of Montrose, not the Duke of Bologna, which would have been so much more appropriate. This road is something else — it starts with a couple of fast sweepers that throw in a decreasing radius 120° corner at the last moment, then into a switchback straight which has self and machine airborne at anything over about 70mph, even with the new suspension. A large number of sump gouges and suspicious stains along this stretch tell their own tale. The road is a mixture of old and broken surface (with the occasional pothole and patch of loose gravel) and brand new shiny tarmac — overall, not too bad by Belgian standards, and less than brilliant by anyone else’s.

Pass Wide and Slow — Bikes and Horses

April 30, 2007 / Richard / 0 Comments

Here in the National Park, we’ve got pretty much every category of road user — bikes, bicycles, cars, walkers, horses and the occasional tap-dancing Pine Marten, all trying to do their own thing at their own speed, and often at the same time. While there’s a wider concern about how all of these can share the roads (in like peace, light and harmony, man…) the technique for passing large, hairy quadrupeds does seem to cause some stress amongst all parties. So here, reprinted with the author’s permission from our local community rag is a small plea on behalf of horsey folk everywhere:

“Honey, I Spent The Aga Budget…”

April 9, 2007 / Richard / 1 Comment

Time for a new toy. My old faithful STealth — my ST4s — has served me well for four years and it’s a keeper, as a supremely capable all-round machine, so I’m looking for something more specific and more focussed for play on the local roads. Which is where the first of many dilemmas kicks in — which toy for which roads? Around here there are ballistically-fast, sweeping A-roads with sudden sections of tight twisties: that’ll be a Ducati 1098S then. Then there are the smaller glen roads – rising and falling, twisting and turning back on themselves as they follow the edges of the lochs: much more Monster or KTM SuperDuke territory. Finally, there are bikes that seek the best compromise for all of these, plus my kilometre of potholed Belgium-on-a-bad-day drive: possibly a Multistrada 1100S – in fact if the Multistrada had the Testastretta engine, it would have been a shoo-in – I’ve ridden the earlier incarnation enough to know just how good a chassis they’ve got. But hang on, we’re not talking about looking for an all-rounder here: we’re looking for the maximum of engagement, hoot-inducing fun and the ability to get from A to B, usually via C to Z, with as much flair as possible and a decent tank range, given the distance between filling stations hereabouts. So I’m off to Ducati Glasgow to sample a selection of their range.

When You’ve Had Your Kicks On Route 66…

December 8, 2006 / Richard / 0 Comments

…Then Get Some More On The A84

Been a bit quiet of late, haven’t I? There’s a reason for that and, I hope, a good one: self, partner, our businesses and the cats have all been busily uprooting ourselves from our past lives — in my case, twenty years in the hinterlands of Surrey and replanting ourselves in our new demesne, the Highlands of Scotland. We’ve been here for two weeks today, and I’m typing this whilst looking out over the local Loch as the low Winter sun glows off the hills opposite. Which isn’t a bad way to start the day, and a distinct improvement on the absolutely solid rainfall of the last fortnight. And, if the viciously incompetent British Telecom ever starts keeping its broken promises to provide us with our landlines, things will be just perfect. The lack of photographs in current posting (since updated) are just a reflection of the very limited bandwidth I have here via my mobile.

Safety Last

December 8, 2006 / Richard / 0 Comments

My mother doesn’t change her car very often: her last change was in 1991, from a thirteen-year-old Fiat 128 to her still-current, Zen-basic, 1-litre Peugeot 205. So basic in fact, that it doesn’t even possess a clock, let alone advanced toys like a radio. The upside of this is that it represents motoring at its most focussed and basic, with nothing to distract you from the act of driving — and with such skinny tyres, you can have huge fun at very low and genuinely legal speeds. The late James Hunt used to drive an old Austin A30 van for exactly the same reasons. The Pug also possesses supremely good all-round visibility from narrow pillars and a low waistline. Its absolutely direct handling is a delight and the only downside is its criminally heavy steering, making three-point turns an exercise in forearm-pumping and giving my mother a seriously dangerous left hook. That little Peugeot is now fifteen years old and, despite its only having 25,000 miles on the clock, is starting to show signs of incipient decreptitude.

Scott of the West Midlands

November 22, 2006 / Richard / 0 Comments

Warning: Gratuitous and rambling nostalgia ahead: In 1981 I was living and working in Warwick, in my first ‘proper’ job after graduating — my prior history as a ski bum didn’t really count. Now Warwick is a very beautiful olde towne in the English Midlands, but it is some 330 miles from my semi-ancestral home of Edinburgh, which is where I was intending to be for Christmas. Now I could have done the sensible thing and taken the train from Birmingham, sitting (or at least standing) in a semi-comfortable fug of other people’s colds, second-hand cigarette smoke and generalised flatulence. But somehow that didn’t sufficiently appeal to the masochist in me. My newly acquired pride and joy at this time was my Honda 400/4 — a finely crafted jewel of a motorcycle and an utter paragon of reliability after my upbringing on (and off) old British iron. I guess there was a mindset here that said, “I’m on a wonderful piece of to-the-minute japanese engineering. I am therefore invulnerable to the vicissitudes of the world”. Which in turn led me to think, “So I’ll just leap onto my machine and ride to Edinburgh for Christmas”.

Boxer Rebellion

July 31, 2006 / Richard / 0 Comments

I like BMWs. Or rather, I’ve always tried to like BMWs — they plough their own furrow (sometimes literally) and are distinctive and different in appearance, ride and attitude, offering an intriguing alternative to the ubiquity of across-the-frame four-cylinder machines. My earliest vicarious experience with the marque was in the mid-seventies, with Bike magazine’s breathless review of the rip-snorting R90S, which heavily implied that only those stout of both heart and sinew could be expected to master the mighty beast — quite a heady concept to an impressionable student who was just then coming to terms with the unbridled power of a newly-restored Royal Enfield 250. The fact that the R90S actually put out something like 60bhp on a good day was neither here nor there — it was the shock and awe that counted.

In the early eighties, I occasionally knocked around on an R90/6 and on one of the first K100s to hit these shores (“What shores?” — “Mine’s a gin & tonic, thank you…”) — compared to my Pantah, it was like riding a fast-spin washing machine that was attached to the world by rubber bands. Slack rubber bands. Thankfully chassis and suspension have improved over the years and BMW, after a short-lived attempt to abandon the Boxer twin layout, still offer a range composed predominantly of the twins plus four-cylinder heavyweights. I’ve ridden several of the current generation of both and am generally of the opinion that there are some truly excellent chassis here, all however desperately in search of decent engines.

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