Although this blog’s primary aim is to cover entrepreneurship, innovation and business information you may have noticed my other interests popping up from time to time.
However, I didn’t want to burden you with my sad loss of my beloved motorbike last Autumn. She didn’t crash or self-destruct (a common 2-stroke phenomenon) but when a coil failed it was the end of the road until I could get a replacement. Given her age and rarity it took me until last week to find a suitable part on eBay and actually win the bidding.
Today she came back to life and is now back in my life and I couldn’t resist sharing the good news here. For those very few of you who are actually interested ‘she’ is a Kawasaki KR-1S 250cc two-stroke twin from 1991.
Many people have tried to explain the attraction and excitement of motorcycling with perhaps T E Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) coming towards the top. Here is a snippet from his RAF journals called The Mint (summary below from here and full text from here)
“Another bend: and I have the honour of one of England’ straightest and fastest roads. The burble of my exhaust unwound like a long cord behind me. Soon my speed snapped it, and I heard only the cry of the wind which my battering head split and fended aside. The cry rose with my speed to a shriek: while the air’s coldness streamed like two jets of iced water into my dissolving eyes. I screwed them to slits, and focused my sight two hundred yards ahead of me on the empty mosaic of the tar’s gravelled undulations.
Like arrows the tiny flies pricked my cheeks: and sometimes a heavier body, some house-fly or beetle, would crash into face or lips like a spent bullet. A glance at the speedometer: seventy-eight. Boanerges is warming up. I pull the throttle right open, on the top of the slope, and we swoop flying across the dip, and up-down up-down the switchback beyond: the weighty machine launching itself like a projectile with a whirr of wheels into the air at the take-off of each rise, to land lurchingly with such a snatch of the driving chain as jerks my spine like a rictus.”
There is even a DVD of Lawrence on his cherished Brough Superior SS80 SS100 Boanerges