Having narrowly dodged a bullet, well OK, a raid by the filth, on my recent soujourn to the Scottish Highlands, I found myself on a train headed south with no clear idea of what to do next. I'd had nothing to do with the alleged illegality, of course, but I very much doubted that McPlod would have believed that version of events. After some thought I elected to continue to London, as I hated the place with a passion and no-one in their right mind would have thought to look for me there. Most importantly I had a couple of friends I could call on, and I hoped against hope that neither of them had moved in the past year or so!
I successfully hid in the bog until the conductor had passed by, and pretended to be asleep for the remainder of the journey. This old favourite had served me well on the odd occasion that I'd been forced to travel by train, but nowadays there is the problem of the closed station to deal with. On my arrival at Kings Cross I simply bought a ticket to there from the nearest unmanned station and passed through the barrier unmolested, the entire journey completed for just a couple of quid. At one time I would have simply vaulted the barrier, but these days the Met have been known to shoot people dead for less.
So now what? I used some of the little credit left on my phone to ring the first of my mates. Disconnected... shit! I rang the second and, mercifully, Baz answered! That was the good news, the bad bit came in the form of his living arrangements. He now had a wife and kid in tow, and was still living in the same poky bedsit as he had been when I'd last seen him. So, no room for me then, but he suggested I could crash at his lock-up, and he would fix me up with some despatching work with his employers. This was the closest thing I'd heard to a plan since I'd landed in the wilds of Scotland just over six months ago!
I headed off to a nearby army surplus to load up on camping gear, and then there was just the problem of a bike. Mine were in storage, a good couple of hundred miles away, and I was going to need something PDQ if I was to take up the work Baz's firm had just offered me. Baz drove me round to the lock-up, gave me the spare key and, grinning from ear to ear, ushered me to a corner. There, under a dust sheet, stood a mystery bike. Grabbing a corner of the sheet, Baz whipped it away in one swift movement of the wrist revealing... a Honda 70.
Not wanting to appear ungrateful, I tried to see the positive aspects of this machine. Its engine had been replaced with a 90cc one from a later bike, which came with the added bonus of 12V electrics. These bikes, while slow, are extremely agile in traffic and will tolerate ridiculous levels of overloading. As I was to be working largely in the city these qualities would prove most suitable for its purpose.
My first day at work was not a total success; it rapidly became obvious that the Honda's engine had almost no compression and was absolutely knackered. Once warm, it was nigh on impossible to restart it. I put up with this for a week, after which I decided enough was enough and, now flush with a week's wages (and no outgoings!), I purchased a Chinese 110cc engine. This took all of an hour to install, there are just two mounting bolts, and six wiring connectors. The engine cost just £150 brand new and was a massive improvement - the bike would now, even with the original carb, pull 50mph on the flat - fully laden! Better yet, it had four gears as opposed to the original's three, making progress up hills much easier.
A couple of weeks later I bought a carb from a Honda ATC110 trike (£20 from a breakers), figuring this to be a better match to the engine. For once, I was right - the bike pulled more strongly throughout the rev range and now boasted a top speed of 55mph! Thrashing the arse off the bike everywhere was taking it's toll on the oil, however, and after 500 miles Asda's finest was well cooked. A £35 oil cooler from eBay improved matters greatly, and on the basis of this I upped the oil change interval to 1000 miles - partly because the stuff still in good nick after 500 miles, and partly because I'm lazy (and tight).
After about 5000 miles of unremitting abuse I made the mistake of believing the little Honda to be indestructible. A combination of shit rusty old forks and bumping up one too many kerbs had ended in disaster. The shocks had simply gone through the 'metal' and reduced the suspension travel to zero. By now I knew several of Baz's colleagues, and many of them had run similar step-thrus in the past, and had parts lying around that they were often only too glad to get rid of. When one chap offered me a set of forks FOC, I went round to his house to be offered a selection of parts including part-worn tyres and rusty exhausts. I gratefully accepted this and other offers, and in this way I spent almost nothing on the upkeep of the bike.
By the time I'd reached 7500 miles the chain fell off. I suppose adjusting it might have alerted me to its condition, in truth I hadn't even noticed the racket it made scraping along the bottom of the chainguard until I fitted a better, used one from the heap of parts. Around the same time the exhaust snapped off at the flange, which I'm guessing is a common problem as this was the third one I broke. Again, a rusty used one was thrown on in its place. I guess it's possible that the increased vibration from the Chinese motor caused these failures; the vibes certainly caused plenty of other stuff to fall off - horn, indicators, lower chainguard etc.
Baz was mostly doing out of town runs at this time, so I would hang out at the pub with the other despatchers. I did try not to go on the piss too often, but instead to use the pub as an alternative to spending evenings at the lock-up. While my accommodation was cheap, it did little for morale. I had done my best to make life there more bearable; as well as my army camp bed, stove and chemical toilet, there was now a mini-fridge that I'd pulled from a skip and I'd also amassed a sound system and satellite TV setup by similar means! Notwithstanding, it was still a shit-hole and I still hated London, so I knew that I would have be on my way sooner rather than later.
The one saving grace in all this was the work: despatching in London on the Honda was actually not too bad. I wasn't doing huge distances or great speeds and that suited me. The bike cost next to nothing to run, and I wasn't too worried about the odd knock or scratch it might pick up during the day's business. I was also earning pretty good money and, thanks to my unusual digs, spending very little of it indeed.
Consequently, after a year I decided to head back up North. Baz was amazed that the Honda had survived 12 months and 15000 miles at my hand, as was I, and he promptly sold it to me for £100. Man hugs were exchanged, I extended an invitation to him and his family to visit me in the frozen North and got on my way. The Honda had a week's MOT left, two bald tyres and serious wear in the front suspension bushes but, on the upside, all it had to do now was get me the 200-or-so miles to my home. No bother!
M Zapata
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