High Hopes

1979 to 2000

In the spirit of full disclosure, the question of ‘Why do this trip at all?’ had its seeds sowed decades earlier and so should at least be fleetingly addressed.

I first clambered off the back of a Norton Commando 850, owned by the dad of my school pal Tom, on a freezing afternoon in March 1979. Chilled to the bone after barely six miles, I was hooked from that point. Hopelessly addicted…

My gateway drug was a £5 Honda SS50. I lavished hours of time and attention on it and swear I could still rebuild the tiny, single overhead cam engine blindfold. Today, examples are occasionally for sale at increasingly stupid prices as we lavishly-rewarded boomers with our child-rearing days far behind us, seek to re-capture our lost youth. But common sense, lack of garage space and a slight aversion to looking too far backwards have prevailed to date for me.

JAY495N was then, at least partly responsible for the paltry five ‘O’ levels I managed to scrape the first time around. And three of them were Art, Technical Drawing and Woodwork so scarcely respected as subjects by some. And I managed to fail at both English Language & Literature so ‘hardly academic’ and ‘barely literate’ were two of the kinder two-word epithets I richly deserved. Yet somehow, I  progressed into the sixth form.

But my new obsession managed, circuitously, to exert a positive effect on my squandered education via a birthday present of a subscription to Superbike magazine. Blending an understanding of the principal subject matter of motorcycling with a liberal tone and anti-authoritarian elan, Superbike carved out a niche as the enfant terrible in a crowded market and did so with some crackling prose.

Lyrical and anarchic by turns, the stable of writers assembled by editor Mike Scott conjured up a heady brew of freedom, hedonism, didacticism and all round smart-arsery, irresistible to a 16-year old perennial underachiever. The February 1980 issue titled ‘….At the Speed of Life’ absolutely nailed biking’s appeal with writers Dave Hamill and the late John Cutts chronicling two international odysseys.

One was a frantic dash around the original nine members of the then EEC. It captured the romanticism of the road trip, the optimism of the new decade and the opportunities that membership of the ‘Common Market’ promised, while remaining pluckily British. Dave Hamill’s preface to the article ‘Chasing dreams around Europe’ is pitch-perfect:

“Once, it was the battered preserve of the elegant and wealthy Victorians, all trains, trunks, hatboxes and baffled dignity…The kind of thing mannered upper-class children took during those empty months before going up to Oxbridge. Later, it became the easy-access Magic Bus route, over the Alps and on to Nirvana…Today, anyone with wheels and an inclination to travel can comfortably cover Western Europe inside a week. All you need is an appetite for miles of fast riding and a machine worthy of your ambition.”

Reading it again now, ‘The Continent’ is unrecognisable from today on every level. This is a world of showing passports at lonely checkpoints to uniformed guards; of changing currency every day. Before Sat Navs, just rain-soddened paper maps,. Before mobile phones, when frantic calls to find a lost companion meant mastering the local phone network rather than using Apple’s ‘FindMy’ app. Before ATMs that worked across countries leaving travellers at the mercy of bank cashiers with Carry-On film accents who had never heard of the “Netional Vestmunster Benk’…

The intrepid hacks conspired to get pissed on the ferry, be plagued by technical problems and lose each other. All within the first two hours. What followed was a tale of isolation, frustration, exhaustion, accidents, freak weather, getting drunk again and running out of money before finally limping home.

I faithfully re-created the route with Swith, my long-time touring companion, in 2019. This time, we had all the toys and trinkets available on modern BMWs and only a scant regard for budget. We stayed in decent hotels and ate only in good restaurants so the sharp edge of the experience was blunted. The lasting impression was anything but: “Things were better in the old days” though.

Quite the opposite: just a wistful acknowledgement that the United Kingdom had, vexatiously, given up membership of the European Club that inspired the original article, and things would never be quite the same again.

Elsewhere in the issue, John Cutts described his journey through California and Nevada.  Widescreen, Panavision evocations of San Francisco, the Pacific Coast Highway, Mojave Desert, Death Valley and more were a stark contrast to the Sixth Form Common Room and a dank East Midlands winter. He ended the piece with this high-octane, potpourri of non-sequiturs and mixed metaphors that lodged itself in my memory and has remained there since as a touchtone for a distant ambition:

“Meanwhile, 200 miles behind me, there’s a mile-long Strip of death-palaces. Abattoirs for the insanely-rich and richly-insane. A riotous fun-loving laughing academy for dinosaurs, pimps and for those who still believe in the nightmare orgy of the American Dream. The Dream - if it exists at all - lies on the road getting there… And maybe the real wilderness is Las Vegas itself. A city for the lost and the mad who have crawled in from the desert to place a bet on reality”

As many others before and since have found, a single teacher can have a disproportionate effect on the academic prospects of a recalcitrant student. To my eternal shame, I can’t remember the name of the one that did it for me. I can remember though that he was a ‘resting’ actor working as a supply cover for an infirm, pregnant or otherwise unavailable ‘A’ Level English Literature teacher.

Bearded and clad in cords, sweater and desert boots, he wasn’t particularly keen on some of the orotund Victorian nonsense he had to teach. Each week, he asked someone to submit something they had read and enjoyed so it could be analysed using the same techniques he was teaching for the set texts. So I suggested John Cutt’s closing paragraph.

He quite liked it and explained it was shamelessly channelling Hunter S Thompson’s ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’. He recommended I read it, his thesis being that quality writing can come in any form and you can do pretty much anything you like with language.

Criticise tedious books, by all means, was his message, but you can only do this with credibility if you’ve taken the time to study them properly. So all of a sudden, writing became more of a contact sport than some nerdy, solitary affair and an odds-on F for failure ended up a creditable ‘silver medal’, a B-grade when exam time came in the summer of 1981.

During this time, the Honda was sold for a tidy profit of £150 and a borderline unrideable, early Yamaha RD200 took its place. I hated the buzzy, two-stroke engine with a passion and the 27 MPG even more so it was sold quickly, without shedding any tears.

And so, for a while, that was that for me and bikes. College, work, marriage, and fatherhood followed and - in time - a series of really quite desirable cars. But none came close to filling the void…

I was travelling by air for work a fair bit at the time and in these early-internet, pre-WiFi days, that meant time hanging about in airports with not much to do. So I found myself often furtively perusing the motorcycle magazines in WHSmith, in the manner of a Toyota executive stocking up on soft-core porn at East Midlands airport, en route from their new factory near Derby, back to Osaka or wherever. My former mother-in-law used to work there and told me this so I know it to be true(ish).

Circuit Based Training, then based at Donnington Park race circuit, advertised in Bike magazine a four-day course for people like me who had some riding experience but had never taken the test to get their full licence. I made tentative enquiries and learned that, even in 1999, the course was over £1,000 so I declined. After all, it wasn’t like I was going to buy one again, was I? I then got a follow-up call from Sean, who ran the outfit, in early December of that year.

“We’re doin’ one 5th, 6th & 7th of January and it's only half full. It’ll be cold and bloody miserable and you’ll probably get piss-wet through so we’re selling the places off for £595”

Always a sucker for a sophisticated sales pitch, I found myself a month later, shivering in borrowed kit, and riding around cones in the car park behind the paddock. But the next day, I was on the very same roads I travailed on the moped twenty years previously, dreaming of the day I could ride a ‘proper’ bike.

And so late on the first Friday afternoon of the new century, at the West Bridgeford Test Centre, that dream suddenly crystalised. The avuncular examiner, who offered gentle encouragement throughout the test over the intercom, told me it was a very nice ride and I’d passed. On the drive back home to Essex, it dawned on me I was now licenced to ride ANY motorcycle…

So there you have it: that’s why I’m going on this trip.

And why am I writing about it?

Regardless that maybe only a few people will read these words, that’s all down to someone whose name I can’t remember from the Spring and Summer of 1980. If you’re still out there, friend, thank you.