Born to be Mild

I took my motorcycle test in 1968, riding a semi-automatic Honda 50. It went like shit off a carpet.

In those days, you could pass your test on a little machine like this, then go straight out and buy the biggest, fastest super-bike of the day (which was - before the Japanese got serious - a BSA Gold Star 500 cc single). The test itself was very basic too.

The Ministry of Transport inspector would stand by the side of the road, craning his neck to see if you were indicating correctly, etc. then ask you to look at a little booklet containing images of road-signs. A score of about 50% was a pass. I passed.

These days, I think I might have failed, not only because of incorrect identification of road signage, but also because I ran over the inspector on my final run. Like I said, it was very basic.

The final task set by the inspector was 'bringing the bike to a controlled stop during an emergency'. This involved me driving around the block whilst he positioned himself somewhere by the side of the road, then - seeing me approaching - stepping into it and holding his hand up in a 'stop' gesture.

I went around the block and returned to the same road, crawling along at about 5 MPH, but could see no sign of him anywhere, so I sped up to legal maximum thinking he must have meant the other road around the corner. Just as I got half way down, he leapt out from between a couple of parked cars that I was about 10 feet away from, waving his hand frantically. I hit the brakes and swerved as much as I could, but the front wheel of my Honda ran over his foot, and it took me about 20 yards to stop.

I turned around to see him come hobbling up to me, expecting a bollocking followed by a fail, but what I got was an apology (he had been day-dreaming) and a pass. Right. Now for a real motorcycle!

My first real bike was a Triumph, single cylinder, 350 cc Tiger 80 dating from 1938, which was old even in those days. I loved it - it was a classic with weird-looking front suspension in the form of a dampened parallelogram, and absolutely no suspension on the back whatsoever. It would do about 80 (as the name suggested) if you abused it, and made a wonderful, punchy engine note which could be adjusted to suit via a manual advance and retard ignition lever on the handlebar. If this lever was not set properly before kick-starting, the resulting back-fire would be transmitted through the kick start pedal and up your leg, so if you didn't adopt a slight bend in your knee when kicking it, you could be thrown over the handlebar very easily with a back-fire. It also gave you a bit of extra oomph when going up steep hills by sparking a millisecond earlier if required. No computors on this thing.

The only real set-back with the Tiger 80 was when stopping in a town or village. Being the late 1960s, there was always an old man who came up to you to reminisce about the one he had from new, and this usually added about half an hour to the shortest journey.

My dad was extremely good at procuring things at an advantageous price, and when I told him I wanted a bigger bike, he set to looking for one for me. He had been a keen biker himself, and tried to calm my mother down about the obvious dangers of riding them. Soon we were on our way to a London suburb to meet an Indian Sikh gentleman who sold dad a 1958 Triumph, twin cylinder, 650 cc Tiger 110 for £45, and soon I was driving it home with my father close behind in the car.

The next day, I wanted (being stupidly young) to see how fast this thing would go, so I set out onto the A3 toward London - this time without my father following behind at a steady 35 MPH.

There was one basic fault with this machine which I never got around to rectifying, despite it nearly killing me on a number of occasions. The two front forks were fitted with dampers which ran through a large spring, and the rods of these dampers ran through a small, bronze bush to keep them straight. My left-hand bush was horribly worn and needed replacing, so I would lean into a steady left-hand bend, then - without warning - the fork would suddenly bend an extra quarter of an inch, tipping me over just that few degrees more than required for the speed. Most disconcerting, especially since tyre-technology in those days meant that the thing had a hard enough job sticking to the road anyway, and Triumph frames always flexed at high speed - even to the point of building up a rhythmic pulse which would actually make the back wheel hop an inch at a time when going round a bend at 100 MPH. Extremely disconcerting.

Anyway, I was doing about 80 MPH in the outside lane of the A3, about 15 feet behind a MG sports car which would not get out of the way. Eventually it did though, and I twisted my right wrist to be rewarded with a gratifying roar as the bike took off and passed the car with power to spare.

The panel-mounted speedometer was calibrated up to 150 miles per hour, but I knew the bike would not go anywhere near as fast as that, so I was pleased when - struggling to focus on the wildly vibrating dial - the needle just touched the 120 mark.

The trouble was that I had been struggling to focus on the dial for so long, that I had not noticed a busy roundabout which suddenly appeared 50 yards ahead of me - too close to actually stop for.

I began crashing my way down through the gears at the same time as hitting both brakes as hard as I dared, and managed to reduce my speed to 80 MPH as I reached the roundabout.

There was a queue of slow-moving traffic crossing it in both directions right to left and, to my utter amazement, a little gap opened up in it on both sides - just enough for me to throw the bike through as I flashed over and disappeared toward central London. How I did not drop the bike, hit a car, spin off, or shit myself remains a mystery to me to this day.

You would have thought that I learnt a lesson from this, but - knowing myself to be immortal at the time - I.... well, what do you think?