That’s good enough for me.

I had to drop our entry fee for the Village Quiz in at a neighbour’s house so thought I’d call by on the Ural.

As I set off, there was still enough light not to worry the eccentric Ural electrics and the lanes beckoned.  The edges of the sky were just starting to crinkle and dim, but that was it.

Living in Bampton has a tendency to resemble The Archers from time to time.  This was one of them.

I arrived on Helene’s doorstep just as another neighbour and fellow rider, Reece, got there too.  Both of us clutched our Quiz cash in our hands. I knocked.  We exchanged bike chat as we waited for Helene to answer the door.

After a few minutes, Helene flung the door open, clearly somewhat flustered.  There she stood, in her nightgown with a towel around her head, obviously straight out of the bath.  And to find two men at her door, holding out a handful of notes each.

“Oooh, I was expecting someone else!” she said.

The same thought clearly occurred to all of us at the same time.

A few more minutes passed while we struggled – hard – to recover from the laughter.  Negotiations were made as the complexities of change from the various notes was worked out.  Then, goodnights exchanged, Reece invited me over to see his new machine.  This was an old barn-find Divvy 600 he’d just finished restoring.  And what a job he’d made of it.  Remember those wonderful black and gold JPS Lotus F1 cars from the 1970s? Same colour.  Same coachlines.  Gorgeous.

We were chatting away when we both turned to listen to the lampost-shooting thump of a big single.  The whump-whump-whump got closer and a Yamaha SRX600 pulled up.

“Evening Mike. How’s things?”

So now there’s me, the Ural, Reece and his Divvy and Mike and the SRX.  Bikes and helmets littering the lane, chatting away where the Downton Abbey production team had been ragging Lady Mary Crawley’s wedding coach just a couple of weeks earlier.  If only the viewers could see it now.

So much for a quiet early evening ride.  By the time we’d finished yarning, the sky was purpling and the stars were clocking in for the night.  I like riding at night, so quite happily thumbed the starter and headed into the lanes.  Ural therapy.

The Ural is no motorway machine.  Its natural habitat is backlanes and B roads.  Suits me.  I hate motorways on a bike.

This evening, the inhabitants came out to watch the silly man on the combo.  Lost count of the rabbits, two foxes sitting in the verge, clearly sniggering. And, best of all, an two-owl formation flypast.

I ended up between Bampton and the wonderfully named Chimney, just by the old WWII decoy site for RAF Brize Norton.  A neat idea – string a series of electric lights to resemble a runway’s flightpath just a few miles from the real base.  The idea was to decoy enemy bombers away from the real target towards the fake field.  I wonder what action it saw.  The bunker is still there, although full of rubbish now.

It was a clear night and a clear sky.  I stopped by the signpost and turned the lights off and looked up.  I always love seeing the Plough – it was the first constellation I learned to recognise as a child and I always look for it.  It’s a sort of constant for me.

There it shone, just as it had at my first winter evensong as Head Chorister, my first night at University when I was utterly petrified and the evening of the day I started my own business when I was so scared I simply sat on a bench and shook.  And so many evenings since.

I grinned as a thought hit me and the day’s stress drained like a lock.

I raised a hand in salute, turned the lights on and turned the bars for home.  Somehow the stuff that scares me doesn’t come close to sitting in a concrete bunker in a field on a darkened flood plane waiting to get bombed.  By deliberate mistake.

I take life far too seriously sometimes.

I’d raided the Oxford Wine Company for a crate of Shotover Brewery’s “Scholar” and thought the least I could do was head it Matt and Stuart’s way. The Ural needed a run, and I thought it would be suitably inappropriate to park it outside the polished temple to techno-transport that is North Oxford BMW. So I loaded the beer into the sidecar, put the key in the ignition and turned the petrol tap.

Why is it always that the hard-to-get-to carb in the canyon between bike and sidecar is the one to play up? It was leaking petrol at the rate of about £1.30 a second.  C’est normal – probably a bit of grit in the needle chamber.

So, the ubiquitous Ural tool kit out, a bit of advanced contortionism from me, and the two screws holding the floatbowls were off. I emptied the bowl, checked the float and all seemed well. Nipped up the screws and headed for Oxford.

There are words one hopes not to hear while waiting for traffic lights to change. Eight of the least popular are “Is your bike supposed to be leaking petrol?” from a motorist in the parallel queue.

No, it’s not. And it’s really not supposed to be leaking onto a hot exhaust pipe. Fuel tap and ignition off – rapidly. I reckon I can make it about 100 yards with no more fuel than is in the floatbowls, so dodge the lights and pull over.

Toolkit out again. More circus-skills getting the screwdriver onto the nearest screw. Floatbowl off again. All fine – but the float isn’t coming up far enough to cut off the flow, hence the mini Torrey Canyon of fuel.

This is a new problem. I have no idea what to do, so just stay there, arse up, head down near the carb, thinking.

“How’s the bike? Would you like a drink?”

Those eight words washed away the anxiety of the previous eight in a flood of kindness. From one of the houses I’ve crash-landed outside has come a girl to offer me a cuppa or see if I needed any help. How kind is that? If you’re reading this (highly unlikely) thank you – you did more than you know to restore my faith in people after a rather gnarly few weeks.

I suggest that although I’d love a cup of tea, I’d love a can of petrol and a box of Swan Vestas even more. She looks slightly confused, then gets the joke and – thankfully – laughs. I press on with wondering how the hell I’m going to stop a small fortune in inflammability draining onto the A415.

I start stripping the carb. This is new territory. Bowl and float are already off. Float anchor pin out (and safely put somewhere where it can’t get lost). Float needle and main jet out. Still no clue.

The best thing to do with problems like these (‘adaptive challenges’ my good friend Peter calls them) is to fill your head with the problem, then stop, do nothing and wait. Your brain will re-assemble the necessary bits and give you an answer. Works every time.

And, of course, it did this time too.

That little brass tang on the bottom of the float… if I bend it up a tad, it should make the float sit higher in the fuel bowl and cut off the flow from the jet. I give it just enough of a tweak to make it sit up and take notice. Then I start reassembling everything. Fortunately, the Ural’s designers equipped the bike with a tool roll that rolls out into a mat. Handy for kneeling on and a fine place to put delicate carb bits when you’re on the roadside.

Finally, everything is stuffed back – broadly – into the holes whence it came. I turn the petrol tap. I wait. It’ll take a few seconds for the floatbowl to fill again. I wait. A few seconds drags past. I wait.

No leak.

YEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!! That’s one of the reasons I love my misbegotten heap of a Ural so much. Yes, it does something annoying now and then, but, sooner or later and with a bit of thinking you can fix it. And you’ll have learned something.

I deliver the beer to Matt and ride back – leakless and smiling contentedly – to Witney. And, as I pass The Leys, there’s a group of young lads waving at the traffic, hoping for a wave back. They’re getting a few waves from the drivers, but when they see the Ural they go beserk, jumping and waving and whooping. I wave back. Of course. And I might have hiked the chair up for a few yards.  Maybe.

It’s a fine day.

I’m pretty used to disused hangers, cracked and pocked runways with more grass than gravel. But RAF Little Rissington (‘Rissy’ to its friends) is, unusually, still at least partially, active. 637 Volunteer Gliding Squadron are based here, flying Grob 109s and training air cadets. All rather a long way from the Red Arrows, heavyweight C130 Hercules and C5 Galaxies that used to rumble down the runways.

Most of the technical site has been ‘developed’ and is now a housing estate. Homes fit for heroes, with satellite TV. The Officer’s Mess (a gorgeous piece of faux-Georgian architecture) is now boarded up to stop any more vandalism. Cleverly, someone had left a pot of anti-climb paint in one of the halls before the place was made secure. It seemed someone had made good use of it – “666″ and various anarchy symbols now cover the walls.

As I’d pulled up and switched off the Ural there was something a little more unusual overhead. OK, actually a lot more than unusual. Generally, one doesn’t see too many Focke Wulf 190s in the Cotswolds – at least, not nowadays. The FW190 was one of the Axis’ most effective warplanes. Even so, just clearing the west end of the runway was – apparently – an FW190.

That’s a bit like nipping down to the shops and seeing Senna’s JPS Lotus Renault pulling into a parking space.

It seems I wasn’t hallucinating – although I hadn’t actually seen a wartime FW. If you’ve got around £20,000 you can even pick up a second hand one. A replica. Usually a fully working and pilotable scale model of the real thing.

I don’t quite get it. Yes, I can see the point of the hours spent restoring an original. There’s magic to that; bringing the past to life again. But a smaller, modern replica? That’s like Senna’s JPS Lotus turning out to be an MR2 with a body kit. I’ll bet it gives its owner a huge amount of pleasure though, and who the hell am I to criticise?

The same runway that had seen Spitfires, Hurricanes and the odd Lancaster was now hosting planes that were very much made in Germany. One, a training plane for the modern RAF, the other, a replica of one of the RAF’s sworn enemies. Just a little smaller. I couldn’t help smiling at the irony.

I fired up the very genuine Ural and clacka-clacka’ed into Stow. It was time for a cuppa.

At this time of year the coach loads of travel-myopic, Bath-Stonehenge-Bibury-Shakespeare n’ Stratford-inna-day tourists are still tucked up and posting acid on TripAdvisor. Instead, Bibury was free for the ducks, the cold and huddled bundles of legged scarves, hats and Barbours. And motorcyclists. Two of us.

Keith was riding an old favourite of mine. A patinaed K75RT sat at the kerb, a few feet away from him as his eyes tracked the ripples in the river moving past. Busy with his thoughts.

He looked up as I cut the Ural’s engine and said hello, as one does to a fellow rider.

“I’m 70 next week.”

The statement hung like his breath in the cold air before it dissipated.

“I’m 70. Time to give this up. My nephew says he’ll have the bike, although he doesn’t understand it like I do.”

I suggested that seventy wasn’t much of an age to hang up one’s helmet and gloves. But my words bounced off him like grains of rice off a tortoise shell. Keith was determined. It was as though some Calvinist feeling drove him to seek penance for the hours of real life in the saddle in the de-coupled, de-sensitised prison of a nice, sensible car.

“I love riding – can’t do enough.” he replied, shuffling the keys around in his gloved hand. “But I’m too bloody old. Time to stop.”

“Says who?”, I asked, thinking of pressure from family, perhaps Mrs Keith if there was one. But no. Keith had simply decided that, at 70, one gave up riding. That was that. It was how it was done.

He was no fair-weather man. He’d ridden four-seasons, snow and sun since he was 16. There was no logic, just a feeling as if a pre-ordained switch had tripped.

Problem was, If he gave away his bike there would be more than a motorcycle-shaped hole left behind for him. He’d had Bonnevilles, Bantams, triples, twins, R90 airheads, and now the K. He guessed he’d ridden half a million miles and he tipped me off about lanes in the Cotswolds I’d never heard of or even seen signs for. Without his bike, Keith knew he was bowing, turning the lights off and shuffling quietly into the wings.

We sat in silence for a few minutes, both watching the river ripple by.

I wish I could say I persuaded him to hang on to the K, clearly loved as it was. But I didn’t. I rode away leaving him as blindly determined as before. The bike would go. I wish I could say something satisfyingly concluding, but I can’t.

For me, there is no date set for hanging up helmet and gloves. No time to hand a cared-for and mile-polished machine to a nephew who won’t understand the story, the ride or the road.

I hope perhaps Keith will realise that dates and ages are arbitrary before he gives up and hands his keys on.

I’ll keep looking out for a blue K75 in my mirrors. It’d be more than the usual pleasure to give him a wave and stand him a cuppa at the tea wagon.

I had nowhere to go. That always makes for a good ride if I can actually enjoy the lack of focus rather than being troubled by it. It leaves all the possibilities open. That, in itself, is exercise for the soul. No targets. No deadlines. Just a Cotswold-wide web of lanes, single tracks and winding. And it was perfect for unpicking my rather over-tired, stressed and snarly mood.

I turned the bars for Minster Lovell, thinking a pint and a prod through the Sunday papers by the winter fire in the Swan might do. But the car park was full of midrange BMWs and shiny, snarl-grilled Audis. I couldn’t face the idea of a barful of chinos, polo shirts and blather about KPIs, so I rode on.

The lanes jinked through Field Assarts, Fulbrook, Swinbrook, Asthall Leigh, Mount Skippett. Village names that deserve their own stanza. And, as I rode along the ridge by Field Assarts, I was suddenly grateful to the corporadoes for repelling me from The Swan.

The winter sun was starting to lower in the sky, turning the whole of the ridgetop russet. As one can do on a combo, I put the sidecar wheel on the verge, snicked the ‘box into reverse to hold it and stopped the engine. And did a bit of being.

Apart from a desultory chorus of light baa-ing from the sheep working their way against gravity on the ridgeside, there was just the ticking of the cooling engine. By now, the filigree of the winter trees was picked out against the reddening sun. The sheep, clearly with more interesting things to do than gaze at sunsets, baa-ed on.

I’d like to be able to claim this simple stop, just a few minutes of peace, of beauty, restored me to equilibrium and good nature. What it did was give me a sense that’s been missing for a couple of months. A sense of balance. Rather ironic on a combo.

“For God’s sake!”

For the third time that evening, Squadron Leader Martin Delaheye cursed his decision to ride the BMW. Even in mid-summer it was hopeless. You’d think, in June, you had a chance of getting home without half-drowning. But no, the rain had got to the electrics and and that was it – the bike was spluttering, coughing and regularly dying by the roadside.

With that bogging, helpless sensation known to every motorcyclist who’s run a classic, the 1959 R50‘s engine coughed and stalled. No power. Delaheye coasted to a stop, realising as soon as the water started filling his boot that he’d put his left foot in a puddle the size of the Channel.

German reliability. Right.

He pulled his helmet and misted goggles off and wondered where the hell he was. He eschewed GPSs – particularly on classic bikes – but now, at nearly midnight, in hacking rain and dark, he was regretting not slipping his Garmin into the panniers. There was no point in getting the map out, it already resembled papier mache. He rummaged around for his headtorch, only to find it glowing dully at the bottom of the pannier. He realised the switch must have got knocked on. The light faded and died.

“Bugger. Bugger. Bugger.” He thought.

The ride had started beautifully. Summer country lanes, dappled leaf patterns on the tarmac from the sun. All the way up through Dorset and Hampshire had been the very English motorcycling idyll, even on a German bike. Then, just after Wantage it had started. The sort of rain he just knew would start dribbling coldly down between his flight jacket and scarf. The sort of rain that was going to cause a short somewhere in the ancient wiring loom and strand him on some lane somewhere in Oxfordshire.

He guessed he was just south of Burford, near one of the old WWII bases that litter that part of the county. RAF Broadwell? RAF Southrop? Windrush? Could have been any of them.

From recent experience, he knew what came next. A wait of about twenty minutes for the thing to cool down, then kick, kick, kick and it would fire and run for maybe another half an hour. With a bit of luck he might make RAF Brize Norton before 1am and a glass of whisky in the mess before bed. He couldn’t be that far away. Assuming he could find the problem without his headtorch…

Delayheye kicked the back wheel, more for want of anything better to do than out of malice, and leaned on the saddle. He wished he still smoked.

A light flickered in the right-hand mirror. At first, barely a glow, then as it got closer, a narrow slit of light casting a vague puddle on the wet road as the rider approached. Over the rain, Delaheye could sense – rather than hear – the regular beat of the single cylinder. British, almost certainly. His money was on a BSA, probably one of the early post-war singles. But whatever he was riding, another rider would surely stop. He might even have a torch. An Imperial toolkit wouldn’t be much use, but that wasn’t a problem. Delaheye always carried a full set of metrics. That 1am whisky in the Mess was suddenly looking a whole lot likelier.

He was wrong. It was a Norton. Probably an old wartime WD16H (“WD” for War Department and H for “home” as opposed to C for “colonial”) despatcher’s bike. The bike stopped and the rider climbed off with a wave.

“Evening, Sir. Everything alright? Saw you stop. Not the night for it.”

“Good to see another idiot out on a proper bike at this time of night! Glad you stopped – think there’s a duff wire and I can’t see a damn thing, my torch battery’s buggered. Haven’t got one have you?”

Delaheye took in his rescuer’s bike and kit. Flat matt green paintwork, serial number and a division crest on the tank. Single seat and canvas panniers. A beautiful restoration, he could see that even in the gloom through the rain.

“Always liked those old 16s, quite fancy one myself. Better than this thing.” He commented, kicking the BMW again.

“Standard issue, Sir. Good bikes, front brake’s a bit vague if you know what I mean, but they go well.” he added with a grin.

“That a Douglas, Sir? Flat twin, yeah? It’s gorgeous – not seen one like it.”

Delaheye’s rescuer didn’t wait for the answer, but pulled his machine onto the stand and started hunting for his torch. He found it in a remote corner of one of the panniers and handed it across the bike with a grin.

Delaheye took it. Cold, wet, metal, with heavy tube body, a belt clip and the head at a right-angle. He suddenly realised. Re-enactment. No summer weekend was complete without some battle being re-enacted on a field somewhere. The guys always had the right kit – he’d been amazed at how accurate the old RAF uniforms and equipment were. And the Luftwaffe ones too, he thought, with a wry smile.

The re-enacters often had mid-week pub meetings. His rescuer must be on the way back from one locally and have got caught in the storm too. He was clearly into his hobby – the “Sir” comments, the uniform, the immaculate bike. It all fitted.

“I’d check the magneto if I were you – loose wire I’d guess.”

Delaheye slid the switch and pointed the light under the tank. There it was! Why hadn’t he spotted that before – magneto wire loose and almost off the post. He reached back and pulled a 12mm spanner from the roll and nipped the nut up as the Norton rider looked on.

“Sorry,” Delaheye said, making conversation, “I didn’t get your name. Mine’s Delaheye – Martin Delaheye. Trying to get to bloody Brize before the mess shuts!”

“Guessed you were RAF with a flash new bike like that. “ The other rider grinned again.

“Tarrant – Harry Tarrant. My lot are all camped over there. Nearly time for the off though.”

He nodded a direction and Delaheye could just see a row of army-issue style tents stretching back from the road. A few figures moved and glowing cigarette ends blinked on and off as they cupped the smoke.

He gestured at the three stripes on his arm,

“Mind you, it’s Sergeant Tarrant nowadays. But a rider’s a rider, if you know what I mean – doesn’t matter who it is, you always stop. ‘Specially on a night like tonight. G’luck, Sir – she should start now.”

Delaheye grinned in return, handed the torch back and straddled the BMW. Pulling out the kickstart, he weighted it carefully, found compression and kicked. The engine fired. He waved his thanks to Tarrant as he let out the clutch, mentally planning to look up his re-enactment club on the web – should be easy enough – and thank him by e-mail. Maybe even get him in for a mess night as a thank you.

As he looked back in his mirrors, Tarrant had already disappeared in the darkness behind a curtain of grey rain. And, half a mile later, as the familar landmark of the derelict RAF Broadwell control tower loomed up from the left, he realised he’d be at the mess bar with that whisky in about fifteen minutes. He opened the throttle a little wider and smiled happily in anticipation.

————————————-

December 11 2010

As the heavy door shut behind him, Delaheye wondered why he’d passed the Plough so often yet not come in before. Handing over his coins, he drew off the top of his pint and was soon happily reading the old cuttings on the walls. As the nearest civilised pub to Brize, there were plenty of them. Stories about long-scrapped Vulcans, Lancasters, Spits, even a few about the D-Day Douglas Dakota glider tugs from Broadwell.

He usually drank in the Clanfield Tavern. He had only dropped into the Plough because he was out for a ride before the light went, just to clear the cobwebs after a day of clearing admin from one tray to another. He didn’t fancy bumping into his colleagues and having to stop to chat. The R50 was going a storm. New bearings after that summer’s engine rebuild and no trace of magneto problems.

A framed cutting a little higher than the others caught his eye. A bike and rider. The paper yellowed and the mount speckled with pub nicotine and age. It was just too high to read, so he reached up and took it down.

A Norton 16H and – yes, it was unmistakable – Harry Tarrant. Delaheye would recognise that grin – and that bike – anywhere. He felt a pang of guilt. He’d still not got around to sending that e-mail. He patted his pocket, reassured that his iPhone was still there. He’d sit and read the article and send Harry his belated thanks as he drank his 6X.

Then, he spotted the date at the top left of the framed article. August 3 1944. Not quite registering, he sat down and started scanning the text under the picture of a smiling Harry and bike:

“Local Hero – Despatch Rider Decorated. Sergeant Harry Tarrant, son of Peter and Mary Tarrant of Alvescot, was, last Thursday, awarded the Military Medal for his gallantry in the recent Normandy Landings. After flying from RAF Broadwell on D-Day, Tarrant, a despatch rider in the Royal Corps of Signals, not only rode into hostile machine gun fire to ensure vital signals were delivered to forward HQ positions, but continued to do so in order to rescue two fallen comrades whose lives were in mortal danger. He later died of the injuries he received.

His award of the Military Medal is posthumous.”

“A rider’s a rider, if you know what I mean – doesn’t matter who it is, you always stop.”

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee O Lord;

and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night;

for the love of thy only Son our Saviour Jesus Christ.

As I’m sat, as ever, at the kitchen table (with a bottle of whisky this evening) I can remember so many evensongs.  Quiet, reflective services.  The procession in silence through the dark-cornered church.  Fine music.  The silver threads in the air spun by canticles and responses by Stanford, Gibbons, Walton, Vaughan Williams.  And, at the end of the service, wheeling my bike (pedal in those days) out of the vestry and riding home.

In my memory, evensongs are always autumnal.  That’s daft – there were just as many spring, summer, winter services but somehow evensong suits autumn.  Reflection.  Quiet.  The close of the day.  Ellerton’s words:

The sun that bids us rest is waking

Our brethren ‘neath the western sky…”

I was reminded of those days as I rode this evening.  No pedals now, just a throttle.  And no evensong anymore – not now the Church of England has left its liturgy to the dead-handed, censorious people who write tax forms.

I love riding in the dark and tonight was the first time for a few weeks. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy it.

There’s a night-defined cocoon in which one rides. Instrument lights. Headlights. The edge of the road.  The syncopated flash of indicators.  The pooled limit of the lights ahead.  There’s a reassuring solitude.  And you see so much more, but only in glimpsed vignettes.

Through Wootton, a man, on his own, washing up in yellow gloves at the kitchen sink, picked out in the light from a solitary fluorescent tube.

Outside Sunningdale, A girl, early twenties, rubbing sight through the greasy, wet misting of bus windows.

Huddled against the rain in a bus shelter, a lad, no more than sixteen, his face lit by the glow from his mobile phone.

And on to the artificial dawn of Brize Norton’s lights as it welcomes home, perhaps safe and sound, another plane of soldiers.

And, throttling back as I ride into Bampton, a stooped, elderly man pushing his bin carefully to its place for collection tomorrow – two lads running in unison back from football practice, in perfect step as their trainers splash in the same spouting puddles – the beer and laughter-infused lights of the Morris Clown’s windows and the faint whiff of cigarette smoke from a single pavement-banished smoker and, finally, the lights of home.  Pip, her back to the window, and just catching the noise of my engine, turning and smiling.

I feel like I’ve been riding a long, long time.  But I’m all the happier for it.

As I usually do on a trip like this, riding done, I unrolled the Ural’s toolkit on the ground beside the bike, opened a beer and started checking the machine over, part by part. This is therapy and my favourite part of the day. Miles covered, supper and another beer earned and in view and a chance to tinker with the bike as the sun goes down over the sea.

The Ural – my bike and sidecar combination – rewards care. Without it, she’ll sulk, get upset, run badly. With it, she’s happy and runs with the same unstoppable precision as a vintage caliber 1560. She’s a high-maintenance girl. But she’s far from sophisticated. An antique horizontally-opposed 650 pushrod twin, barely making 40 horsepower. Carbs, not injectors. Cable brakes, no hydraulics. Plenty of milled steel and no plastic at all. She’s slow, needs fear-assistance to make the brakes work, struggles on hills and gets out-dragged by pizzaboys on mopeds, but she’s a proper motorcycle. A motorcycle with soul.

What on earth does that mean? What’s ‘soul’? How can an inanimate machine have ‘soul’? Plenty of people talk about it – in Watchland as well as Bikeland. A 1964 1016 Explorer has soul. A G-Shock doesn’t. A classic Laverda Jota has it, a new GSXR600 doesn’t. But perhaps soul is more about time and our relationship with something than the thing itself.

For a start, we make the inanimate animate; petrol and a kickstart for a bike, our own movement for a mechanical watch. A watch that only ever needs a battery every five years doesn’t allow that interaction. A hyper-efficient Japanese superbike that is only ever serviced by a computer-wielding white coat is far more competent than its rider, but that very competence keeps him at a distance.

My most competent watch is easily my Breitling Aerospace. It’s gained just three seconds in six months, so it never needs setting unless I’m feeling more OCD than usual. It can wake me up, precisely measure my morning run (and subsequently accurately time my breakfast eggs), tell me the exact time in Tokyo and its titanium case keeps it waterproof to deeper depths than I’ll ever plumb. I hardly ever wear it.

Instead, I’ll pick up my old Explorer I, a Timefactors PRS3 or my favourite – my IWC Mk XII. They’re all less accurate. All they’ll tell me is the time-ish (although the Rolex is frighteningly accurate for a 40-year old watch) and that’s it. They’re heavier, clunkier, less accurate and much simpler. But they allow me a level of interaction that the Aero simply doesn’t. When the Aero dies, I have to buy a battery. When my mechanical watches stop, they need movement – mine – to make them live again. I need to interact with them to re-set them once the energy of the mainspring has lapsed. And I like that, because that interaction gives me a sense of relationship that the Brietling and its quartz cousins just doesn’t.

And maybe the very lack of precision and presence of faults is part of this relationship, this attribution of soul. We’re not precise animals. We don’t always do the same things in the same ways, react consistently and we change our minds. Something more organic, more flexible just fits us better than something with the hard edges of absolute accuracy. It’s why a Cotswold village’s higgledy architecture and meandering lanes is more comfortable than the ruler-edges of the town planner’s gleaming flats and open boulevards.

For me, there’s a lesson – albeit a slightly whimsical one – here. And that’s that human beings are best when they’re allowed and left to be human. Because we’re designed to harness our imprecise, organic, chaotic humanity and turn it into creativity. And the more precise, hard-edged and controlled we’re made to be, the worse we run. So I’m finishing this here so I can bugger off and do something irrationally human, like go and check the valve clearances on the Ural. After all, I haven’t done ‘em for at least a week.

If you have any charitable soul, you’ll drop a few quid into one of the collecting buckets too.  That’s because Cassington’s primary school and a few local charities always organise a serious BBQ, a couple of bike parks and somewhere to dump your helmet and leathers as you stroll around.

This year’s event was even sweeter than usual.  It wasn’t the sun, or the old friends, or the remarkable machines that rolled in from across the country.  It was the sheer damn triumph (see – a pun) of common sense and community.

You see, the local Council wanted to smother the event with pages of dull grey forms, regulations, guidelines and ‘what if?’  An example of the sort of thing:

“…responsibilities included a provision of the risk assessment, proof of relevant insurance cover, proposed traffic management for the event and payment for the costs associated with all safety aspects of the event.”

Apparently the Council had looked at some photos of last year’s event, reasonably anticipated a few thousand bikes and decided, rather like milk monitors, that “something must be done”.

Sadly, rather than letting the event go on unhindered as it has for years without problems, it meant trying to strangle the whole thing with the sticky, tangly red-tape of the bureaucrat.  This tape is insidious stuff.  It clings and wraps and multiplies and chokes and the only things that hold it (temporarily) at bay are hard Council-Approved facts of the Right Sort.  ”It’s always been OK in the past.”  That’s no good.  ”Common sense.”  Not a chance.  ”We’re not children, you know!”  Nope.  Where’s your Risk Assessment form?

Rather than recognising an event like Cassington as a benign opportunity for people to get together, raise money for charity and enjoy themselves, it’s treated with grim-eyed seriousness.  ”Ah, but of course,” the bureaucrat will cry, “WHAT IF?!?!”  And with those two words, he binds up and denies the rest of us the pleasures we’ve enjoyed – without incident – for years.

And ‘What If?” is a powerful thing. There is always the potential for a small child to put a hand on a hot exhaust or for someone to step in front of a bike.  Shit happens, chaps.  But your regulations, rules and restricting our experience of life doesn’t stop it.  Despite your best efforts, shit still happens and always will.  But part of life is simply accepting that any experience worth the candle (fire hazard) carries risk.  Dealing with it is part of having a life worth living and not an infantilised, ersatz existence starved of pleasure, learning or enjoyment.

As one of the marshalls said to me, “Council said ‘no’.  Community said ‘yes’.”  I think this both explains and illustrates something important.  Councils, by extending their remits way beyond what is reasonable, needed or justifiable, are now at odds with the communities they serve – but in reality, rule.

It’s not because they’re stupid, nasty or horrible.  Most of the council officials I’ve met are decent people who give a damn, care about what they do and want to do a fine job.  It’s simply because we’ve decided, as a society, that we’re too scared of “What If?” to face up to it, give it the bird and just get on with living.

So I’m delighted to say that shit didn’t happen last night and that “What If?” got the bird.  Instead, good people enjoyed bikes, drank beer and ate fatty food on Cassington green and, most importantly of all, raised their faces to the sunshine of friends, shared experience and life.