Real world rides, real world riders

I love an Alfred Hitchcock film but...

Oh, and I clearly ride too fast if I can’t avoid a pothole. Basically, the letter writer said, I was a motorcycle moron who should ride off-road if I wanted to know what real potholes were.

Hmmmm. Couple of points here really wound me up. The first was the implication that I should shut up and just ride around the problem (effectively, letting councils and Highways Agencies off their obligation to provide us all with roads that won’t kill us because they have all the integrity and structural staying power of a stale meringue) and that there’s much worse to deal with off-road than a pothole that could snatch a front wheel from under you.

Now, I don’t know about you but the absolutely last thing I want to do is let those that take my road tax every year for what they like to remind me is for the upkeep of our roads off the hook. After all, if you got to, let’s say, the middle of this magazine and there was a few blank pages because I hadn’t been doing my job then would you let me off? I’d hope not.

So no, sorry, I won’t let the roads people off the hook. I, like you, are paying for these roads’ upkeep and I want them up-kept in a proper state.

And as for going off-road well, yes, the letter writer was quite right. If you do ride off-road then there’s a lot worse that you have to deal with. That’s why when I was an eager motocross hound I rode bikes with huge amounts of suspension travel, the right tyres, a punchy engine and was riding in the frame of mind to be ready for such things.

Funnily enough, when I’m riding a roadbike and having to watch out for other things that might cause a bit of a headache should they plough into me (you know the type of thing; cars, trucks, lorries, vans, stray dogs, pedestrians or tractors) then I don’t have the machinery or the room to deal with holes in the riding surface. Holes that shouldn’t even be there.

So I am sorry Mr Letter Writer, but I wholeheartedly do not agree with you. What I want is the Government to sort out the roads situation promptly and give me one less thing to have to navigate when I ride.

What sparked me to write about this letter was something somewhat related that happened to me on the way into Morton Towers last week.

It was a glorious summer’s morning. The sun was high and warm, I’d stopped off at my friend Steve Plater’s house en route to see how he was getting on with the broken arm and neck he suffered after a fall at the NorthWest 200 during practice. We’d had a laugh over a cup of tea as we poked and prodded the badly swollen left limb.

The road from Steve’s house to the MSL offices is a combination of fast, sweeping bends. Set in the middle of the rolling countryside of the Lincolnshire Wolds there are acres of lush, green field and ancient plots of trees and large, established hedges. If you ask a foreign person to paint an image of what Britain is like in summer time, then this is pretty much it.

I was riding at a somewhat spirited pace as befits those sorts of conditions when I happened to come across a suicidal Blackbird (or Thrush or some bird about that size) which flew directly into my head. The bang was so loud and my head was snapped back with such force that it felt like I’d been hit with a baseball bat. The car driver that I had overtaken a short while before must have had quite a dramatic view as a ball of bird feathers and insides exploded while I was nearly pitched off the bike, the Triumph being sent into a violent tank-slapper.

Thankfully, things settled down quickly enough and I made it into work a little shook up but none the worse for wear. Shame the bird can’t say the same. Some feathers lodged in my lid’s top vent and a smear of bird intestines inside the visor along with internals smeared over the helmet’s shell were the only visible things to show for the impact.

So now I have to add kamikaze birds to the list of things to keep an eye on! Any of you MSL readers out there have similar experiences?

Have a safe ride.

Tony Carter
Editor