My introduction to motorcycles came at age 15 when I stayed at a chum’s house for the weekend. Tim’s elder brother was very proficient at rescuing old british bikes from scrap yards and getting them going again. This was 1970 and as well as living on a farm with fields to ride, there was a couple of miles of decommissioned railway track to thrash along too. I was instantly hooked but my parents were completely against me getting a bike so I had to get my fixes during stopovers at Tim’s until I left home and started work. I began with a Honda CD175 and fondly remember how the knackered suspension allowed the centre stand to drag during enthusiastic cornering, sparking and grinding spectacularly. Well I thought so.

A change of career at 25 saw me follow my father into the RAF and training and frequent moves saw me hang up my leathers for some years until, now married, I needed a second set of wheels to commute to the MOD offices in Harrogate. So I got my first and only stroker, a 125cc Suzuki. I even enrolled on the Star Rider training scheme but never got round to taking the full bike test. A posting to Germany followed and my biking was parked up as the family grew but we racked up 27,000 miles touring in our VW Camper (always had the urge to explore). Posted back to the MOD in London, I soon tired of strap-hanging on the northern line from NW4 to our offices in WC2, and decided to nail a full licence through the direct access scheme. With 3 kids under 5 we were having to mind the pennies and so funding a bike was proving a challenge. So I started doing MCN and other mags ‘spot the motoball’, you know, where the ball is blanked out on a game of football on scrambler bikes. After a couple of fruitless months I got a call from a dealer in Edgware to say I’d won a competition. I scoffed and said it would be a keyring or somesuch. No, said he, come and see. So I stacked work early, rattled home on the tube and we all scooted off to the shop in the family car.