The 100,000 mile Fireblade

This has absolutely nothing to do with this blog other than the fact that I go everywhere pretty much on my Honda Fireblade.

Last week was simply an historic moment as the numbers 999999 clicked over on my Fireblade as I was zooming up to London. I have ridden in all and every type of weather imaginable and MCN (Motorcycle News) did a little story on me earlier in the year. The reporter who interviewed me said that he had never heard of so many miles done on a sports bike. And here is the little beauty.

In fact, I took this picture because although legally parked in a motorcycle bay, a traffic warden thought that I might have been impeding a footpath, so I got a ticket. Go figure.

Anyway to the glory of all things two wheels with big engines here is an excerpt from a poem that I read as a teenager by the poet Thom Gunn called

On The Move ‘Man, You Gotta Go.’

On motorcycles, up the road, they come:
Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boy,
Until the distance throws them forth, their hum
Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.
In goggles, donned impersonality,
In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,
They strap in doubt–by hiding it, robust–
And almost hear a meaning in their noise

It is part solution, after all.
One is not necessarily discord
On Earth; or damned because, half animal,
One lacks direct instinct, because one wakes
Afloat on movement that divides and breaks.
One joins the movement in a valueless world,
Crossing it, till, both hurler and the hurled,
One moves as well, always toward, toward.

A minute holds them, who have come to go:
The self-denied, astride the created will.
They burst away; the towns they travel through
Are home for neither birds nor holiness,
For birds and saints complete their purposes.
At worse, one is in motion; and at best,
Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,
One is always nearer by not keeping still.