Are you a young teen looking for the route to rebellion, or in your balding 50s looking for a street back to your youth? Then let Mike Kay lend you an A-Z and help you find that bike that makes your heart go va-va vroom!
For everyone I know who rides, motorcycling is more than a mode of transport. It’s a code that entails helping bikers in need of assistance. It’s the moment when you ride side by side with your closest friends down a motorway, streaming past lumbering trucks and grovelling station wagons. It’s a way of life. From the Motocross Championships to the Long Way Down, bikes complete us, grow with us but more to the point, they change us.
I understand how you might be attached to your shoddy little Fiat, with its blinking light in the dashboard (which you probably have no idea about what it’s trying to tell you is broken now) and that you don’t really want all that money that is draining away down that petrol stained plug hole. I mean, I can just see that the money you would save on fuel when you bought the bike-you’ve-always-wanted is just going to be a hindrance. Professor Joseph Blogs of Peckham University states that, “Motorbikes can use as little as 50% of the fuel a car would in the same journey.” All that money would just clog up your brain, as you struggle to think of new ways to spend. And I know that you just love to get stuck in those traffic jams, making you late for work, while your air-con packs in. I see everywhere I look, as I weave my way in and out of your lethargic beasts, the smug smiles on everyone’s lips. Isn’t it just the best feeling when you arrive at the office before anyone else? Oh, wait. You wouldn’t know!
I remember when I was trying to persuade my parents to buy me my first motorbike that one of my primary arguments was that of freedom. “With a bike, I could get to my technical college,” I told them, “and you wouldn’t have to taxi me about between my social events.” At