The last thing I wanted was to put a leg down and have it collapse under me and I'd been ignoring the knee joint problems for quite a while. Besides money was really tight, we relied on the Food Banks for having enough to eat and as I had nowhere I needed to ride to anyway my last exit was a 50cc scooter until they changed the rules about conditions of ownership to add insurance and registration because so many were buying them to avoid all the hassles and the state was getting antsy about their loss of income.
You think I wanted to go out like that?
However I've led a fortunate life of bike ownership and can still dine out on my memories and at least I didnt kill or invalid myself over 60 years of riding though I've had some amazing escapes.
Funny thing about crashing is that you learn from it so that when an accident rears its ugly head your body does all the right things automatically, you actually get better at baling out and avoiding a fatal impact. Or maybe its just luck but I would never say that in case it lifted that form of intervention!
I've had all sorts of bikes to ride, not all of them mine but I was lucky with borrowing bikes to try out and finding old heaps for a song that just needed fixing.
My mate Phil I mentioned? His dad would do anything to keep him out of trouble and for a year or two he wanted to race so his dad got him a Manx Norton and the original Ducati 750SS but Phil couldn't wield a spanner to save his life so the two of us worked together in a sort of ad hoc bike repair business because so many local lads were like Phil and brought their mounts to me to put right.
Trouble was that Phils big weakness was falling for schemes to make a fast buck and sometimes he skated too close to the edge and had to disappear until the heat died down. So we ended up parting ways because I refused to be associated with him and his get rich quick schemes.
He ended up being murdered in Amsterdam having tried to rip off the wrong person, a girl called Astrid who also vanished when Phils parents asked InterPol to find out what had happened to him. None of us, his mates, had a clue as to what he'd been up to but we could hazard a pretty good guess as he just would not leave the drugs out of it. At the time there had been a ring operating out of Falmouth sailing yachts abroad to import pot and that would have probably not been too heavy but once you start importing the hard stuff you aint playing no more and those people dont mess about.
Nevertheless Phil had been a good solid mate to me and if I'd been around then I might have managed to call him off from his last bright idea, God knows I extricated him from a few close calls. The two of us were inseperable riding buddies but the minute I turned my back it seemed like he'd find yet another get rich quick idea.
So whilst I was in America for the first time I got a phone call from his mum asking me if I knew where he was because his father had died and left him the business which was being run by his partner who understood that Phil was to inherit his fathers position. It would never have worked out, he'd have run it into the ground.
So you might ask why on earth I would have stayed loyal to such a bloke? Well he saved my life once and possibly more than once, even when I went away he always welcomed me back, lent me his cottage and car when I came down to Cornwall to see how things were.
Another mate Frank who died recently was part of the gang, we all shared jobs and accomodation and had some great adentures until we went our separate ways. Frank stayed in touch even came here to see me and I went to see him in Germany which was when I found out about the Astrid story which Frank had done his best to learn about but t no avail.
Oh I forgot to mention the motorbikes. Oh well.
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