Speed. O jest unseen

By manufacturers' agreement, production motorbikes are limited to 300 kpm (186 mph). My licence allows me to ride one.

I last rode a bike in 1974. A Velocette similar to that shown though dirtier, the surface was a tarmac footpath less than 1 m wide and it had just rained.

At 20 mph I arrived at a gentle curve, knew I wouldn't make it, trundled on to the adjacent grass, re-assumed the path and rode on.

I didn't know then this would be my last ride; now I do. It's pathetic but I'd like one more go. On a winding Hereford road then a motorway, latterly 80 - 90 mph. Silly old fool, you say.

Motorbikes are unique. You've more power than you need, you're among the elements, you change gear in milliseconds, you incline yourself and the bike to get round corners. It feels safer than it looks. It's noisy and anti-social and it helps explain why some people behave noisily and anti-socially.

I wrote a sonnet. Rubbish except, possibly, for the last line:

Seeing the corner’s coming trajectory.

JOE'S NUDGE
I saw the sunlit vale, and the pastoral fairy-tale;
The sweet and bitter scent of the may drifted by;
And never have I seen such a bright bewildering green,
But it looked like a lie,
Like a kindly meant lie.

Reasons why: Not much verbal beauty here. Both “sunlit” and “vale” tend to exist mainly in verses. Can you see a fairy-tale? The contradiction of “sweet and bitter” is an improvement and I like “bewildering”. But poems needn’t be beautiful if they grab you. And I for one need a resolution for those last two lines.
NOTE: Last line had typo: "line" instead of "lie". Now corrected.

Edmund Blunden (b. 1896)

Got it? Flaunt it!

Luxury is several things:

● Ease/comfort based on habitual or liberal use of expensive items without regard to cost.

●  Something desirable but costly or difficult to obtain.

●  Something relatively expensive adding to pleasure or comfort but not indispensable.

Do I do luxury? Ignoring wine as too complex, the answer must be no. I once bought a Savile Row suit but only to dazzle potential US employers at job interviews. Several shirts were excessive but were needed for special events - notably weddings.

My Longines wristwatch cost lots but was a gift. Dictionaries? - they're big but I flatter myself I need big. Dover sole costs much more then cod but it's better; in any case it's a rarish treat.

Only my shaving bowl refills are luxurious. A tenner, they cost three times more than the competition and come from Geo F. Trumper in swanky Curzon Street, London, who once cut James Bond's hair. When they lasted a year they were almost a bargain. Now only six months.

Trumper is "for the discerning" and issues instructions: "Only shave after a bath or shower; prepare the skin with Trumper’s skin food.”

Why Trumper? To keep tabs on the enemy.

PROUSTIAN TITBIT
I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of logs which would break out again in flame in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across  them to strike freshly upon my face…

The pain of acknowledgement

World War One still chokes me. As I get older, the sensation intensifies. All those deaths - accepted and borne for so long.

Television, the home of shallow reaction, last night faced an un-televisable event - a national enactment of Lord Grey's comment at the beginning of the war: lamps going out all over Europe. Television depends on light and needed to communicate its own brief extinction. How do you depict the dark?

I recalled a Guardian reporter who had sat in a café in Mons in Belgium, watching the world go by, chatting to customers. For decades Belgium has been the butt of jokes about the country's presumed unimportance. Yet Belgians, some of them great grandchildren to the WW1 generation, said the same thing: they would never forget the sacrifices made by British troops (later other nationalities) in coming to Belgium's help a hundred years ago.

One café customer was Belgium's prime minister. On his own, chatting, reflecting.

I am no monarchist yet two smallish details stand out. The Queen took no part in the Westminster Abbey event, preferring to meditate in (I think) a small Scottish church. A rare occasion when non-participation proved to be the greater tribute

Prince Harry read out a letter from Pte Michael Lennon sent to his brother Frank in 1915. Harsh bare words about the likelihood of death; gruffly pushing this idea to one side. Inevitably Michael Lennon died two days later at Gallipoli.

As I said, the sensation is one of being choked. As if old events were reaching out, determined I should share some of the pain. And so I should.

Touché? I prefer flabby

The Royal Air Force, with which I (unwillingly) served for 62,899,200 seconds, didn't care what I did with my mind, didn't acknowledge I had one. But it did encourage me to consider my body. To buff my biceps.

You can see why. Seeking the bubble reputation, even in the canon's mouth (quote), it’s better to be fit than flabby. To ensure a battlefield strewn with comely corpses the RAF provided "facilities".

Most lacked attraction. Weights? Pure drudgery. Medicine balls? Badly named. Pommel horses? I suspect quadrupeds.

Fencing foils were different. In an armed service aiming to kill from above, a sword seemed ironic. Only a dagger brought you closer to your victim. I recalled Gene Kelly slashing his way through The Three Musketeers.

Within ten minutes I'd lost all interest. The initial steps in fencing are wearisome. Form your feet into a T then shuffle forwards. Then shuffle back. Do this for some time. And again. Was there more? I'll never know. Parenthetically, parallel bars proved no better.

Gene Kelly shuffling! Nah. I don't favour bombs but in my opinion swords will never make a warfaring comeback.

JOE’S NUDGE
I like good poems. Those that teeter amuse me too:

From the Gallows Hill to the Tineton Copse
There were ten ploughed fields, like ten full-stops,
All wet red clay, where a horse’s foot
Would be swathed, feet thick, like an ash-tree root

Reasons why. But does it teeter? You’d pay good money for “ten full-stops”. And the hammered-home reality of lines three and four satisfies because it’s sustained. Could you beat “swathed”? Or the foot/feet conceit? Or the vigorously worked rhyming?  OK, so you don’t like fox-hunting.

John Masefield

Innocent and woundable

Sometimes - let's say, very rarely - I admire my younger self. Here I am with my bike, aged 16. I'm accompanied by a pal and I've stopped briefly in the middle of England. I'm en route from Bradford to London a distance of 200 miles and I will arrive on the morning of the third day. I will be staying in a squalid hostel in  Hoxton, sleeping in a dormitory and cooking my own evening meal.

Call that a holiday? These days I'd prefer to open my veins. But that's comparing then with now. The road in the background is the A1, then the main arterial from London to "The North". Note the grass verges; much safer for bikers. These days I'd be squeezed against a kerb before I reached Wakefield.

I didn't cycle for fun, only to get there, to wander round London streets spending nothing. After two nights in Hoxton I'd leave for the Isle of Wight, taking the ferry from Southampton. I can remember absolutely nothing about the IoW.

In retrospect it seems mildly adventurous but not then. In 1952 it seemed logical and - above all - cheap. I'm astonished by my teenage fitness; there were days when I covered 80 miles. The high spot occurred at a railway station near where this photo was taken. I was leaning on a gate watching school-kids - in blazers - getting on to a train. Especially one girl, perhaps a year younger than me, inspecting me through a lowered carriage window, finally smiling. Then the smile seemed conspiratorial; now I suspect she thought my beret was stupid. How wounded I'd have been had I known.

Only 300 days (approx.) to go

E-MAIL NOSTALGIA
CAST (in order of appearance)
Daniel (Ysabelle's partner)
Occasional Speeder (RR's younger daughter)
Ysabelle/Bella (RR's granddaughter)

--------

Daniel (Famed for fearing "different" food): Remember when I had mussels? Good times.

Occasional Speeder: Yeah – I remember – the “Allo Allo” thing came on – and Bella was like that Peter Kay sketch about the wedding disco DJ: “What’s he saying – eh? Oh he said “mussels” I heard that.”

So off we went to the centre with BG (Big Grandad - ie, RR) and got mussels off a man with no teeth. Then LG (Little Grannie - ie, VR) got involved cleaning them– then I did the stuffing and Bella and LG were sorting stuff – then LG  cooked them but best of all – you tried them. And you ate quite a few. But I think you knocked wine on mine – but it was ok because there were many.

L’Equipe lay on the table, a lilo bobbed on the pool, and wine and cider were distributed. It was warm and lovely and we never wanted to come home.

Don’t miss it at all…

Daniel: Haha, I miss it. lots.

Ysabelle: Me too.

Occasional Speeder (in e-mail to RR): Today we are sad.

PROUST PICKINGS
Another short extract from Swann’s Way:

The hour when an invalid who has been obliged to start on a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel, awakens in a moment of illness and sees with glad relief a streak of daylight shewing under the bedroom door. Oh joy of joys! It is morning…. (But) the ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight, someone has turned out the gas, the last servant has gone to bed…

Who and where I am

Much as I'd like to be gritty working-class, given to brawling in pubs, I know I’m middle-class, defined by what I do and what I avoid doing.

I avoid package holidays, Bargain Booze shops, displays of sentimentality, pizza, Sloanes, the whole of the Iberian peninsula bar Portugal, playing competitive games, seaside resorts, small cars, steak dinners, many forms of youth, front lawns, ash-trays and Huw Edwards.

I bang the drum for Lyse Doucet (BBC’s Canadian correspondent in Gaza), John Lodwick novels, non-patronising explanations of quantum theory, the sign Dégustation gratuite, Richard Strauss orchestral songs, Helmut Schmidt, blanquette de veau, Alastair Sim, BBC4, the role of the short-stop, the Diafani - Vananda - Diafani swim, zinfandel and the Marais area in Paris.

Very occasionally these boundaries are crossed. In the UK fish-and-chips is, or should be, classless yet VR and I knew we weren’t getting the best out of this delicious meal. VR tracked down the reason. We were using namby-pamby, utterly middle-class white wine vinegar on the chips instead of robust, even vulgar malt vinegar, Hence the Sarson’s, our gesture towards a fairer society. In a plastic bottle, naturally.

JOE’S NUDGE
First verse of two:

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears;
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

Reasons why. Are we able to judge this (as poetry) without the second  - obviously resolving – verse? Rhythm impeccable, the imaginative use of “seal”, the enticing emergence of “she”, and of course the conciseness of “earthly years”. I say a resounding yes but I’m merely your mediator.

Wordsworth