It was bloody cold this morning and I couldn’t help but think of Bob’s brother-in-law picking his bike up off the bank and jumping it down the lane. I’m still waiting for a letter from the DVLA, so sadly the Black Bullet hasn’t seen the light for a few days. The summer’s gone and those bright days of autumn are in short supply.
Back at the Olympic Park today, witnessing testing to cladding systems. The savvy London commuters have shuffled me to the back of the pack and I’m looking at standing on the train all the way in. Even the buffet car is chokka, every surface guarded by elbows and sullen morning faces (if I could see them, they’ve all got their backs to me).
I wander up through First and find a place on the floor in a lobby, by the bin. It’s one better than by the toilet and I can sit on my site helmet and use my laptop - First Class indeed.
When I get my registration number and tax disc, I want to do an inaugural ride to Enfield Road, Redditch, where this bike was made. I thought about Cairo to Cape Town but straight away I could see difficulties. The wife would never sign my timesheet. The likelihood of enduring some terminal breakdown, roadside banditry, or kidnap scenario en route dawned only afterwards.
It was the same adolescent tendency for exaggeration that led me to think I could make it across the Sahara, un-escorted, in a 1962 SWB Petrol Land Rover. I thought I was over it but as I watch my son at play I think perhaps it’s a boy thing and we never really get over it.
Certainly my girlfriend at the time wasn’t on the same wavelength when we launched ourselves down the M20 to Dover some 25 years ago. I didn’t realise this at the time, but I found out when our 4WD failed on Perpignan beach and we had to be rescued. “You and your stupid bloody adventure,” she shouted, storming off. I knew then that I should have listened to her dad and taken her camping along the Riviera. “What’s wrong with Europe?” he’d said. I had no immediate answer to this, except it wasn’t the Sahara.
Kenichi saw this in me and called it ‘e-conjo’, which means courage, or something, but then he was a drinker of Banzai spirit and perhaps not the best role model for an impressionable young man.
There was a distinct lack of any adult guidance present in my life at the time of the Africa trip and headstrong though I was, it wasn’t until a ragged ex French Legionnaire grabbed me by the throat at a campsite in southern France and spelled it out to me that I began to understand the enormity of the undertaking.
The guy was rough and he held a knife to my throat to demonstrate how easy it would be to divest me of all my worldly goods, I was truly helpless and the blade burned my skin. He then pushed me back down by the campfire and laughed, clicking the lock knife shut and waving at our roof rack stacked with petrol cans. “You need a diesel anyway,” he said (imagine a thick accent). “Zat way, when you run out you can beg some off ze truckers. Ze gaz is sheeet anyway.”
The next morning our new trip advisor had gone, leaving all his worldly goods behind. “He was on the run from the legion,” shrugged one of the French boys. “said we should take all his stuff, like he was not even here.” I bartered with the lad for the knife and kept it for many years. I think my mum eventually found it among my things in the loft and threw it out.
In the depths of a recession, a trip abroad, out of the way if you like, is an attractive proposition. But these days it’s not wholly my decision and to be honest I’d cry by the roadside for missing my family. So Redditch it is. I might give The Redditch Standard a call and see if they’re interested in a photo opportunity.
