Motor-cycle Diaries


My motor-cycle diaries have been gathering dust in my cupboards for over two decades and yet not only do they represent my ‘mis-spent’ youth, but they have also helped me to create a dream that I have for the future. I bought my first moped when I was only fifteen, but I would have to wait another four months until I was sixteen, to be able to ride it legally on the road. Every night after school I would walk with the bike to a nearby disused school yard, where I would ride it around in circles until after dark, trying to do all sorts of crazy stunts, like kneeling and standing on the seat, riding backwards and so on, which invariably left me landing on my back-side on the tarmac, leaving the bike to spin around in circles on the floor beside me!


As soon as I turned that magic age, I became greedy and suddenly this single seated ‘Puch Maxi’, which I had paid £25 for, was no longer suitable for my needs, because the era of the Japanese ‘super-mopeds’ had arrived – and of course I just had to have one. However, paying for one of these twin-seated Yamaha ‘FS1E Deluxe’ models was going to set me back all of £260, so how the hell was I going to afford that kind of money? Dad told me that he had only paid £440 for our house - so there was no way that he was going to put his name to any finance agreement for such a princely sum – and as for paying for the vehicle in cash, well that was totally out of the question, simply because my parents had never had such vast amounts of available capital to call their own – as a matter of fact they didn’t even have a bank account!



There was only one thing for it – I would have to make the ultimate sacrifice. I had been training in Karate for two years and during that time I had amassed a stack of magazines, books, training equipment - and a lethal concoction of weaponry that would put most martial arts movies to shame, but if I truly wanted this bike then I would have to sell it all. I had worked so hard to build up my collection, doing two paper-rounds each morning and one in the evening, before stacking shelves in a grocery store two nights a week and working in an off-licence at weekends, to pay for it all, but flogging the lot was the only way I was going to be able to afford to buy my beautiful ‘dream machine’. As luck would have it, there was a Karate tournament coming up the following weekend and a guy whom I was friendly with - who also happened to own the local martial arts shop, was having a stall there – (even though he never really had that much to sell), and so he was happy for me to bring along my library of books and my massive assortment of swords and daggers and my various sets of nunchaku sticks (rice flails), as it made his shop display look rather good. I made just over £200 pounds on that weekend, which was a lot of money back in 1975 -and when I presented this to my father, he agreed to sign as guarantor for the other £60 on a finance agreement over one year. Suffice it to say that it was not long afterwards when I received my first fine and an endorsement on my licence (no points around then) for going through a red light, with no ‘L’ plates showing -and also for carrying an illegal pillion passenger at the time! Shortly after that I was hospitalised after my first serious crash, which left me with my right foot swathed in bandages and a few nasty-looking chunks taken out of my knees and elbows! On my 17th birthday I passed my ‘motor-cycle’ test, after simply replacing the push-bike type pedals on my moped for a set of foot-rests and enduring a half-an-hour riding examination. (There was no written test in those days!)


Having a secure job with British Gas and my own bank account, it was easy to get a loan and so I part-exchanged my moped for a brand new Yamaha 650cc twin and put myself back in debt for another two years. On the 17th June 1977, shortly before my eighteenth birthday, I was involved in a near-fatal head-on collision with a car, which left me with a broken back (coccyx) a crushed foot and a snapped femur, but it never deterred me from riding at all. During the course of the next few years I would have half-a-dozen more crashes, receive the same amount of speeding fines and lose my licence on two occasions - and all because of my erratic riding – the perils of youth. In 1981 I decided to ride my motor-cycle in a more positive manner and so I set off to discover Europe.


Once one has ridden through the Pyrenees Mountains, crossed the Sierra Nevada desert, climbed and descended the Swiss, Italian, Austrian and French Alps, visited the Coliseum in Rome and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and seen Venice ‘and died’, then one realises what life is all about.. I had caught the travel bug so bad that even my short stays in Morocco and Tunisia had made me want to go out and see the whole continent in its rawest state, and as I sit here looking at my photos and reminiscing about those wonderful journeys, I know that I should either finally write a book about those amazing escapades – or do like Ted Simon did after twenty-seven years, and get out on a bike - then do it all over again!