MMC Musings

The Ural – my old bike and sidecar combination – rewarded care. Without it, she’d sulk, get upset, run badly. With it, she was happy and ran with the same unstoppable precision as a vintage caliber 1560. She was most definitely a high-maintenance girl. But she was 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 was slow, needed fear-assistance to make the brakes work, struggled on hills and got out-dragged by pizzaboys on mopeds, but she was a proper motorcycle. A motorcycle with soul. I still miss her.

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 one of my mechanical – proper – watches. They’re all less accurate. All they’ll tell me is the time-ish (although my 1016 Explorer 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 Aerospace simply doesn’t. When the Aerospace 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 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.

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 or 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.

You can see it in the difference between the absolute precision of CNC anglage and the imperfect but wonderful bevelling that’s done by a watchmaker’s hand. It’s easy to spot the difference. One makes you smile – someone has taken care, invested love. The other is just some machining on a bridge. One connects us with the person who made the object. The other does not.

As AI takes over so many tasks, I have a feeling we’ll value this sort of humanity, imperfection and soul more. We don’t want machine-made perfection we want human connection. After all, who loves their laptop?