It doesn’t take much to make me happy – an open road, a full tank, no deadlines and no particular place to go. I’m stuck at my desk, looking out on a beautiful summer day, and my to-do list is suddenly irrelevant. My job deals in the intangible but my taste in pleasure is simple and solid: a motorcycle, tarmac, time.
The growling purr of the engine, the feeling of endless raw power and the miles rolling by… There is a biker slogan, found on T-shirts, mugs, bumper-stickers, you name it: If I have to Explain, You Wouldn’t Understand.
I might be a writer by nature, but I’m a biker by blood. So call me a petrolhead, a rebel, dangerous, antisocial, anarchic - call me anything you want – I’ll just put my lid on, hook my comms to my iPod, and follow my heartbeat out onto the backroads: discovering new villages, monuments, forests, pubs – places I wouldn’t discover by train or plane or car, because on a bike there’s no metal between me and the environment. There’s a reason we call cars cages.
At the end of the day, when I park up and swing my feet back onto the ground, I’m tired, but exhilirated. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what’s important? That we enjoy the journey, the experience, so if the particular place we end up in isn’t quite the one we had in mind, at least we have that sense of satifisfaction, of simple pleasure, from the ride...
