The Black Bullet 6.8 - MIles Covered 224.0

I set out to write stories with pithy, veiled meanings, thinking I’m almost 50-years-old and have as much right as anyone to put my experience down. Apart from the ugly egotism, the persistent naivety, and the dubious craftsmanship, I’d like to think I’ve done okay. But recently things took a turn for the worse.

I was sitting outside a pub holding forth on one of my favourite subjects, Fatherhood, and had just got through telling a gay friend about the three ages of personal development:

1. Child - being looked after;
2. Adult - looking after oneself, followed by;
3. Parent - looking after someone else.

When I was gently but fundamentally chastised, learning that his mother had been an alcoholic when he was little and often this foisted on him the role of child-carer. My shoulders sagged and I slid into my pint, and stayed there for the remainder of the evening. Feeling glum, I lamented the demise of this pet theory to Poz’s mum when I got home, asking her to adopt a classically unfair partner's role and ‘please tell me when I’m being a pompous arse’.

“Really?” she said, dropping her book to the duvet and peering over at me.

“Really,” I said, toeing off my shoes and flipping them into a corner.

“Well I could start by suggesting you leave off your lecture on fatherhood to gay men. You know what I mean?”

It all started out so well-meaning, how did I get it so wrong? I pretended to tidy up my clothes by moving them from one place to another as I absorbed this double blow. And then I’d only made it worse by fessing up to my stupid stupidity. Three strikes and you're out. Looking for vindication but I just kept digging that hole.

It’s fortunate for me that a lot of gay people have had a lot worse from supposedly liberal heterosexuals. I remember once telling a female colleague about the changing rooms at Brixton Leisure Centre:

“I have nothing against gays," I rounded up emphatically, "as long as they’re not waving their cocks in my face.”

My colleague smiled a knowing smile, at the clear them-and-us demarcation, and came out the following week.

The Black Bullet 6.7 - Miles Covered 224.0

The baby had a restless night and an overlong nap at lunchtime (one of the huge benefits of living near the office) made me feel sick. It was worth it though, pointless sitting at your desk yawning with deep down tiredness just to keep up appearances. If I get pulled for erratic time keeping I'll just tell the truth, I’m target oriented not a clock-watcher. The point is surely how efficient you are, not how long you can sit at your desk dreaming about walking out while appearing to be useful. Anyway, I must have been sponge diving in my sleep, I dropped like a stone, which is probably why I feel a bit sick.

When I woke I heard Undertow, by Warpaint, drifting up the stairs from the kitchen radio. Their debut album, The Fool [Rough Trade, 2010], is a slow burner but well worth the effort in my view. Rob and I went to see them in London a while back - I felt a bit sick that night too, for a completely different and slightly weird reason. The air was thick with the smell of oestrogen and I swear it started to wash over me, in noxious waves. There’s only so much a straight guy can take in the land of purple velvet. Or as Jane indelicately put it, "it’s rock minus the cock, right?"

The required days off and ferry to St Malo are booked so the Black Bullet is going to Le Mans. It is 80 miles to Portsmouth and another 140 on the other side, avoiding motorways. I am satisfied with this. It’s far enough for openers and, provided I don’t nail the throttle too long down the dual carriageways, it’s surely not too much to ask. There will be a spare seat in the back of Tony’s camper should the Bullet go 'Kapow'. I have to phone the insurer and check if I must go back with the bike.

Spares to carry include mostly things I can fit myself, and if I don’t get round to doing the de-coke, and therefore the head gasket, I suppose I might take a kit along. Need to talk to the insurer first. If they pick the bike up and take it all the way back home, leaving me in France, I’ll be less inclined to try and fix it out there. It would be a shame to be caught out by a busted bulb, or cable, though, so these things need to be ordered and packed. I think it’s against the law in France to be without spare bulbs in any case.

When our old Series II Land Rover blew a piston near Agen, back in the day, we had no Plan B. We limped to a campsite and walked miles into town to talk to some guys in a freight agency. We were desperate and strapped for cash, our entire fund would get the Land Rover back to Dover, where we’d have to sell it, or borrow money to get it fixed. In the end the vehicle was too tall by a few centimetres to train back to the UK anyway, and they wouldn’t allow me to let down the tyres to conform with the height restriction.

We visited a local Jag dealer who said it would cost thousands of Francs to fix and basically laughed us out of his shop. Back at the campsite we drank a bottle of Pastis with this guy called Max, who was labouring with a road building company, and decided to have a go at it ourselves. We were worried that the owner of the Chateau would not look kindly on a couple of itinerant youths turning their classy campsite into a tented workshop, so the disassembly went slowly at first, at dawn and at dusk. We stashed the parts in the tent and slept in the back of the wagon.

A week later the site manager came over and asked how it was going. She was sympathetic and told us the owner’s brother-in-law had a farm vehicle workshop down the lane. Without those guys we would have struggled to make this plan work, they really bailed us out. I had little experience and no training as a mechanic, just a box of Imperial spanners and a Haynes Manual. Fortunately, a 1962 Land Rover is like Meccano for adults, with very few special tools required.

Once we’d pulled the pistons, they came by with a digger and lifted the engine out of the bay on a strap. We did a bit of back-breaking work on the neighbouring farm and waited for the pots to be skimmed by an engineering works. The gasket set and assorted parts arrived and the workshop guys gave me a bench for a couple of weeks. It's funny to recall the giant tools in that place. Big tools for big machines. I was like a man from Lilliput taking a job at Gulliver's Garage.

I set about looking like I knew what I was doing but was often stuck and relied on assistance. One particular guy was in charge of making sure we didn’t take up the bench longer than necessary and when he realised I was pretty clueless he gave me as much help as he could, to chivvy things along. Then disaster struck one day when he noticed the head was cracked and told me a new one would have to be found.

My girlfriend’s dad, the guy I wouldn’t listen to [TBB 6.6], gave us some minor bull on the phone about a business trip he had to make to nearby Toulouse and that he’d located a replacement head (of which there were none in France) which he would deliver to us at Toulouse airport. He was looking out for us alright, but typically I didn’t see this at the time. I kept being bailed out but insisted on keeping my pride intact. I think Max must have given us a lift over there to pick it up, I’d never been so happy to see Old Brian, I can tell you.

So, I’ve had some experience of blowing up in France, and the stage is set for my inglorious return on yet another form of even more ancient transport. It might be better to have a timely chat with Old Pete about the de-coke. It will surely be a confidence booster but I’m just a little bit worried I might build in more trouble than this preventative maintenance is meant to fix.

The Black Bullet 6.6 – Miles Covered 224.0

Plans are being hatched to take the Black Bullet to France. It’s not quite a ride into the Arctic Circle but that was beginning to feel like the failed expedition to North Africa. In fact, the new plan is just what my girlfriend’s dad suggested when he first heard about the Africa trip. “What’s wrong with Europe?” he said. What indeed. I wouldn’t consider the old man’s advice because Europe didn’t offer enough of a challenge, in my mind, to prove all the things I felt needed proving. Beware the ego is what I’ve learned in the thirty years since. I suppose it’s like nerves, ego adds edge but too much of it turns your brain to jelly.

In six months another little baby will arrive and my wanderlust will be on hold, at least in the motorcycling sense. My shares have all dived so there’s no extra cash to spend on a big push north and I’ve only ridden a couple of hundred miles since the Black Bullet was pulled out of storage, so a proper trial of our relationship can only be a good thing. There are lots of sensible reasons why I’ve downgraded my ambitions and if hard is part of the glory of achievement, well, this has been hard. Learning from your mistakes is an awful lot harder when your ego is invested in the outcome.

By putting your balls to one side and using your brain, it is possible to change tack without pain. My cheap-as-chips vintage bike insurance policy includes repatriation of the machine from Europe - a big tick for the new plan. A bunch of friends are going down to Le Mans for the 24Hrs and I intend to ride down with them. I will be the only biker in the bunch but going with friends is another boon. It’ll cost less, be less time consuming and I’ll be able to get into the circuit without having to sit in traffic, perfect. This is a good starting point, more than enough potential to build confidence in touring the bike. I like France too, it’s a blessed land.

I need to order a few bits from Hitchcocks; spare points, inner tube, headlight bulb, that kind of thing. The kickstart needs a new rubber, although this is non-critical, and I guess I should schedule in a de-coke. Luggage will be minimal, with cars going, but i'll need some basics in case we get seperated. Bruce recommended a tank bag with a map window and I'd like to get the Jerry can fitted if possible. The more I think of it the better I feel. I'd set my heart on Iceland but if the bike's got any surprises in store, it'll be better to find them in France.

I have a new improved portal www.theblackbullet.net

The Black Bullet 6.5 - Miles Covered 224.0

I suppose I keep banging on about technology because like many people I still haven’t settled arguments about it within myself. Snaking past vast shining office blocks in London’s Docklands, on the DLR, reminds me how far we’ve come, but it’s also imposing, overbearing even.

There’s a man with one of those cheesy looking digital books sitting opposite and a girl sweeping her fingertips over a glossy phone, playing Bounce, apparently, Digital Book Guy just asked her. And, yes, that’s right, you guessed it, I’m going to complain a bit and say it’s kind of annoying. Not just the dumb sounds it makes but that an adult would choose to do this rather than remain attentive and responsive to her environment.

That’s what I was going to say, before Digital Book Guy blew my theory away. Ms Bounce is clearly still with us and she treats him to a smile as he gets off. As he gets off, McGirl gets on, and for a moment I hope but can’t believe she’s not going to do it, then she does. She opens the paper bag in her lap and the carriage slowly fills with the smell of burger and fries. We all sit and silently watch her stuff her once pretty face.

I haven’t eaten for hours so now I really am a bit narked. Even so, in the middle of my silent orgy of resentment I’m grateful for the demonstration that it’s not technology that I have a problem with at all, it’s seeing inside strangers lives, whether I want to or not. There’s something selfish about this - I’m me doing my thing here and I don’t care who sees me or what they may think - which is ugly. My life is practically an open book, if you're reading this, but you've chosen to do so. I'm not making a phone call in your face or forcing you to watch me troughing.

Now on the third leg of my journey home from this late test at the Greenwich Maritime Museum. I still haven’t had anything to eat and the exec next to me is tucking into his second packet of sandwiches. In Indonesia, or somewhere like that, I feel pretty sure he would have offered me one by now, been a bit embarrassed by his own good fortune. If Two Dinners is thinking anything about his good fortune, he's looking pretty pleased with himself. The guy sitting right next to him? Well, on a good day, he’d like as not think that by offering to share his food he’d be calling me a loser. I DON’T CARE, TD, I’M HUNGRY!

A few minutes later, he’s surely on the final stretch and boy I could use a bite of his juicy red apple. I imagine blowing these words up to 90 points and shoving the screen under his nose, proving that I’ve lost the plot. Too hungry, too tired. I should have stopped for something to eat in London. It’s my own fault that I feel this way. Poor decisions make bad things happen. Oh my god, he’s got fucking biscuits as well.

The Black Bullet 6.4 – Miles Covered 224.0

You’ll find John Martyn’s seminal album, Solid Air (Island Records, 1973), in the folk jazz category if you can find a record shop to look for it in. It has a cool persona and pungent memories for me, although I vastly prefer the acoustic tracks to the electric ones. He never bettered this album, like so many musicians the first is a distillation of everything that has gone before, the subsequent ones are generated on a different timescale, in a different space. Often this makes the first one special.

Other special first albums released about that time are Lonesome Crow by The Scorpions (Metronome, 1972) and Dire Straits' Dire Straits (Phonogram, 1978). Like Solid Air they both have an interesting jazz influence which takes the edges off the base musical style. Rock and folk tend to be pretty straight up and down without the swing provided by a dolop of jazz.

Scorpions guitarist, Michael Schenker, was a teenager when Lonesome Crow was recorded. It's really gritty, he attacks his sections with gusto and you can hear him clicking his pedals on and off as he jumps around - it's like you're there in the studio with headphones on. Interestingly enough both these bands changed drummers between first and second albums, and lost their jazz influence.

My girlfriend’s older brother used to get stoned when their parents were out and play John Martyn, Led Zeppelin and Hendrix on this state-of-the-art system her dad had installed, to listen to classical music. We’d flop on giant Italian leather settees in front of the stereo, or go up to her bedroom for some privacy, as the music and then the dad shouting drifted upstairs. This was the house in the dell that I drove by the other day [TBB 6.2], which made me feel so nostalgic.

The property was a little unkempt, don’t know who lives there now, maybe it’s still her parents and the place has just outgrown them. It could have been anywhere, I supposed, as I crawled past. I’d been listening to Solid Air on the way over but had to turn it off as I drew near. It was cold and rainy and after couple of circuits I’d actually had enough, I flicked on Kasabian to lift my spirits and bring me back to the present.

I sat up and said to myself, I’m a father now, with a second child on the way, and, thankfully, this is where my luck and experience has brought me, but it was nice to remember being so excited about things, and to think it played out right down there, thirty years and a few car lengths away.

Some old friends have popped up on Facebook, which has enhanced this dreamy springtime feeling. I realise how important old friends are in watering your connections with the past, and what this means as you get older. Now I've got more years behind me than ahead. Nearly there, I tell myself, nearly there.

The Black Bullet 6.3 - Miles Covered 203.6

We tend to think of cars and motorbikes as ‘stable’ arrangements of parts and processes. Stability, reliability and robust-ness are selling points after all, which is curiously at odds with the needs of industry and the wider economy to keep selling us these things. It's no great secret that despite the publicity machines are not stable, they wear out and the encapsulated processes degrade with time. In some cases, obsolescence and degradation are even designed in, to sustain demand.

The Black Bullet comes from a less knowing time, which is one reason why it still ferries me to work, while the newer vehicles I’ve owned previously are probably all dead. This is not to say the bike is more robust than these other vehicles and it couldn’t compare on performance, or efficiency, but it is simple and reasonably effective and above all, user serviceable. For all the marvel and magic of the latest machines, which seem to bend the laws of nature, it seems to me the underlying penalty is relegation, not empowerment, of the user. Even the term ‘user’ is a bit of an insult but if you can't change it, or fix it, all you can do is use it.

Shaking off the mantle of user feels like rebellion, it tastes of freedom, and so what if we lose some of the sophistication in the process. If you want the tropics without the bugs, the arctic without the cold, the beach without sand in your crack, you’re going to have to accept paying and staying as a user of some service or other. It may feel like you’ve ‘arrived', as my mum would have said, and I suppose you're supporting some part of the economy, but it’s a Faustian deal overall. Unless of course it's pure time off you're after, with no learning through experience required.

The question of the time it takes to learn things for yourself is another matter, and whether you are lucky enough to do this with a little guidance. This can be crucial to a positive outcome (see previous gaffes like the carb ferrago TBB 1.0). So, each situation should be taken in context. Still, odd thought, that, paying to sidestep experience, it's like working hard to not learn anything.

Thursday Night Pint Club, well, Old Pete, has been persuading me to de-coke the Black Bullet. I’ve learned that oil gets sucked down the valve guides and builds up in a burnt, congealed mess on the valves and in the ports. This restricts the flow of air into (and out of) the cylinder and cuts engine efficiency. The clock says I'm only getting 55mph, top whack, and Pete thinks this is wrong. It's worth noting that Old George doesn't agree, he thinks 55mph is okay. I should find out what Old Bob thinks.

Anyway, the facsimile 1950s Instruction Book I bought from Hitchcocks sets out the procedure and recommends it every 5000 miles. I don't know how many miles this engine has done, as the provenance of the bike is uncertain but it’s an opportunity to get to know it better, learn something new, be an owner not a user and improve the riding experience. It's also a furrowed brow, chipped nails, oil ground into the skin and some moderate cursing, but these are merely side effects.

As noted, it’s time that I need to find but with the evenings drawing out and the shed now warm inside, it’s possible that I could do this without neglecting family life. It’s also the one important thing I didn’t do before setting off on that failed expedition to the Sahara [TBB 3.4/5]. I kept my head firmly in the sand over the condition of the engine, and we never made it as a result. I have revised my plans for a trip on the Black Bullet and if I’m finally old enough to learn my lessons, this would be the right sequence.

The Black Bullet 6.2 - Miles Covered 176.0

One night I lay in a small patch of fortunate moonlight, waiting the interminable wait of youth, when the door at the top of the stairs creaked open and a figure padded gently down. It skipped off the bottom step in the half light and almost fell onto the makeshift bed. “Come on then,” she whispered excitedly, pulling her nightdress up over her head. The basement was about as far as you could be from my girlfriend’s bedroom, not that this mattered any, whenever I stayed there, or she with me, there was always creeping about in the small hours.

We were nearly caught out once or twice but the parents on both sides seemed reluctant to go there, even though we could have used some frank advice, particularly about contraception. What did they think would happen as they slept? It’s strange to me now to think they’d let embarrassment get the better of them, when you think of the likely consequences, but back then we were thankful they left us alone. We were seventeen and tantalisingly almost beyond their reach, flushed with daring and excitement.

Nowadays I creep off to do a little night time pee and return to lie in bed restlessly. I tell myself off for wandering around the overpriced shop of worry, in the motorway services of midnight, as my little family sleeps in the fast lane. If I don’t get after them soon, they’ll get to Wake Up Junction before me and then I’ll be knackered for the rest of the day.

The basement I mentioned is a couple of hundred metres away from the site I will be visiting this afternoon, which is the reason for this fit of nostalgia. I’m not in 2011 anymore, I’m in 1980 and just the memory of the excitement of sexual awakening has got me in a fidget. It’s one thing to imagine Jimi Hendrix and Kathy Etchingham tripping through the streets of London [TBB 6.1], quite another to conjure up your very own ghosts.

I thought I would ride over on the Black Bullet, as I think this was once even a dream of mine. That one day I would reappear on that driveway, a knight in shining armour on rampant white charger, to sweep my pining princess away. It’s raining though, and I don’t remember it raining in the dream. Indeed, the grown up version of the dream is a disappointment on many fronts, not least that it features, by necessity, some old bloke in fluorescent jacket on a, er, rusty Bullet, ready to vibrate his by now middle-aged ex-girlfriend to the Bird in Hand for half a cider. But you get the picture, and the very thought of it brings me back to 2011.

Yesterday I parked up on a visit to the Oxford Wine Company and was drawn into an army surplus shop. I realised that the gear in there was very much the type of thing I could use to kit myself out for a trip, on a tight budget. I will revisit this but for now I bought a small (five litre) Czechoslovakian Jerry Can which could be strapped to the side of the bike to increase my range. I will need some help to fashion a bracket for it and, luckily, I know just the man.

The Black Bullet 6.1 – Miles Covered 176.0

Robin Trower released a brilliant blues rock album in 1974 called Bridge of Sighs [TBB 5.10], full of Hendrix style guitar noises. Poz and I wig out to this in the car on the way to nursery. It wasn’t until years after I first got into it that I realised Trower himself wasn’t the singer. Voice and guitar were always the same man in my mind and it was a bit of a struggle to divorce them after years of listening, and to then accept the beardy bass man who was the true source of that gravelly voice.

If YouTube had existed, this wouldn’t have happened and it made me wonder what else I’d misinterpreted. Then I remembered thinking Jimi Hendrix was a white man for the first month I had him on tape.

At the the end of summer 2010 I read an article about Hendrix which was notable in being mercifully devoid of all the usual platitudes, possibly because it came out of an interview with his girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham, who eschewed publicity after his death. The article cast some moving vignettes of Jimi’s lifestyle in London.

I read the article on the train into London and went find the blue plaque they finally put up for him in Brook Street - near the one for Handel, who had the crib next door and down one. I stood there in the dusk and just imagined what it must have been like back then, fluid and uncertain, with all of grubby London at their feet. There’s a powerful moment to be had in this, even though Kathy and Jimi's flat is now an admin office for the Handel Museum. Nice to imagine them setting off from here, arm in arm, for a night out in the West End.

A scant 20 years after his death I often visited cramped and lopsided offices in Soho, as a courier, where promoters and porn barons sat like fat ticks on the back of some heaving beast. There are only so many buildings in that square half kilometre and I must have been in most of them. Somewhere there, years before, I surely would have crossed the path of Jimi and his peers, maybe sharing coffee and ciggies over fresh album artwork, discussing fees, dates, The Scene.

Given the state of some of these places you could be pretty sure that there had been little or no refurbishment since then. Did Jimi once place a big hand against this flock wallpaper? I used to think. Dropping his head and smiling while Chas Chandler explained the problems they would have with Polydor if they did an album sleeve covered in naked girls? I'm probably well wide of the mark, Electric Ladyland was a New York thing, but it was fun to think that some of their day-to-day business was acted out in these same grotty spaces.

It's also the small details that give the best clues about the nature of things. In a historical context, they're more likely to be overlooked by power brokers and myth makers and provided they're not lost in the mix, or forgotten, they remain as lonely signposts to the truth. Apparently, Hendrix played cheap Hofner guitars on his first tour round the UK, it's all he could afford. This didn't stop him from achieving iconic status in rock and that's an inspiration for anyone like him who can't afford a Fender Strat.

The Custom Shop Les Paul I bought is a trophy and the realisation of a dream. One day it will get played, properly, and I won't mind it getting knocked about, I tell myself. Provided it is fulfilling its real purpose. A beautiful instrument needs to be played.