Born again
biker
These pages tell the story of how I came to buy another motorbike, to join the
ranks of the born-agains, and to become involved in road safety
organisations,
the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM), and the Royal Society for the
Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA).
Links to these organisations
(nationally and in the Derby area) are on the next page. After that come the
Musings, a series I wrote during my training for the car
tests, which I took
after passing on the bike.
Putting pen to paper, or fingers to
keyboard, for the Musings proved a habit hard to stop, so I
turned to further essays on a variety of topics, which you will
find on the Jottings and Further Jottings pages. There are some
quizzes in there too.
Let me know what you think of them via the Feedback
page. Replies, other than the merely abusive ones, will be posted.
 
My first motorcycle
In Oxford in the
1970's I needed transport to get to work while my wife kept the car, and bought
myself a 175 cc Honda, a little twin-cylinder jewel of engineering which made
it immediately obvious why British motorcycles had taken a nosedive.
However, it ran out of puff
on the hill towards High Wycombe, and I moved on after my test to a Honda 350.
Harold the Honda was (relatively) muscular at 33 hp, and he took me to Germany
when I started in a new job there. Unfortunately he became prohibitively
expensive to insure (no, not after an accident; they changed the insurance
classifications in Germany at that time so that everything over 27 hp was rated
as superbike), so I got rid of him.
My first big bike
Many years later, I was
casting envious glances at my neighbour's Suzuki. It came from the local BMW
dealer, Pidcocks of Long Eaton, near Nottingham,. I went to look around and
was hooked…
Pidcocks kindly agreed to relieve
me of the cash for an elderly but still sprightly BMW R80RT, the model I had been
yearning for all along. It soon became known as Berthold, after a friend of
mine, because both he and the bike were
Better learn to ride it
properly, though.
Riding with the IAM
I joined the Institute of
Advanced Motorists as an Associate with the Derby branch (Derbyshire Advanced
Motorcyclists). They are a good bunch, very tolerant of novices such as
myself.
They have a club night once a month on a Wednesday and go for a
group run on the next Sunday. After one of these runs, to Lyme Park to watch a
vintage motorcycle sprint event, which was a mind-blowing outing for me, I was
taken in hand by Mike, our Chief Observer, and put forward for the test, which
somewhat to my surprise, I passed. Roy, the examiner, is a serving traffic
policeman, but he was really good at putting people at ease, and the test
itself was a learning experience rather than an ordeal.
To those that say they are
good enough already and do not need any further training, all I would say is
"Just demonstrate your skills to a policeman who can really ride".
Driving with the
IAM and RoSPA
Fired up by passing
the test on the bike, what about taking the test on four wheels? The local car
branches of the IAM and RoSPA meet on alternate Sundays and sends observers out
with the fledgling associates to give them experience and confidence to face
the examiner.
It took me much longer than I wanted to pass these next
tests, but that is a story for later pages... Update
2003
 The
R80 RT gave way to a K1200 RS, which has rather more breath for
spirited Continental touring, yet serves me well for
everyday commuting in everything but the wintriest of weather.
For
the last 2 years I have served as the chairman of Derbyshire
Advanced Motorcyclists.
This website
was produced using Microsoft FrontPage 2000, and is hosted by
|
