Loose Lines: Helmetless [May/June 1998]

I am of an age that can work out which year the helmet law was introduced with some simple arithmetic - the year I was born plus sixteen, as it hit me halfway through my ownership of a moped. If we want to get really historical, that was also a year when mopeds weren't restricted to silly power and speed limits and it was quite feasible to find a 50cc set of wheels that could top 45mph via a vertiginous drop and howling gale to the rear, albeit one with a set of pedals whirring around frantically. A year later, FS1E's and SS50's took things a little further along the way to youthful self-destruction, though by then I was old enough to own a proper motorcycle (anything up to 250cc, no power restrictions but 30hp the most the technology of the day was up to).

The bureaucrats convinced that the combination of forcing youths to wear silly looking crash helmets on 30mph mopeds would soon wean them off such indulgences. To an extent it worked pretty damn well. Recently, in the corridors of powers, mutterings abound that mature riders will actually be allowed to ride bikes without crash helmets - it may have already happened for all I know. I'm so out of it that I haven't seen a newspaper, heard a radio or watched any TV (in a language I can comprehend) for the past few weeks. The corollary to that removal from reality, that I've been bopping around on a motorcycle without wearing a lid. And jolly good fun it is, too!

Could it be that forcing everyone to wear a lid has backfired. That along with head protection, the leather and knee-slider junkies have made it trendy to get all dressed up (to my eyes looking pretty absurd, but then what do I know?) and armed with the latest 180mph hyperbike, go and have some fun on the open highway. Hear those bureaucrats and safety fascists grinding their teeth? Luckily, banning outrageously fast bikes would inevitably lead to a similar ban on powerful cars, which the governmental junkies, and others, with more power in their fingers than lead between their legs, wouldn't like at all; a fast set of (four) wheels needed to impress gullible babes.

Actually, those with both a full set of mental facilities and back issues of the UMG might like to look up a past column (if they have nothing better to do) in which I suggested this very thing many years ago - let mature riders, those over 25 or who had done a certain number of years on bikes, ride without helmets if they want to. Don't believe it? Well it's there in print somewhere, though I have neither the eighty-odd copies of the UMG to hand, nor the time to sift through them. Sorry!

The result of that idea, a barrage of letters from riders offended by the notion that they would be shown up as cowards by not having the courage to ride without a helmet - it wasn't the way they put it, but the tone of moral outrage and anger made it all pretty plain to me. It was, in my moped days, much more fun to hurtle along bare-headed at 45mph than with a lid on and I couldn't understand why anyone should object to me taking the risks at higher speeds when I later made it on to serious wheels - I wasn't going to do any harm to anyone else if I topped myself.

Apart from the rare early morning indulgence which involved getting up at an unlikely hour and heading for deserted back roads, the vast majority of my UK riding has been with a helmet on. In the winter or rain I wouldn't complain but when the sun's shining and the weather's warm, who the fuck wants to ride around with a coloured potty perched on their head? Not this kid, for one, not even after passing 41 pleasant summers on this planet (go on, work out which year the helmet law was introduced, get the old brain working. No?).

One thing's for sure, the removal from reality that comes from wearing a full-face lid helps safety not one jot. Speed's much less intense, aural awareness of the proximity of other vehicles almost non-existent and the consequences of falling off much muted under the illusion of cranial protection. Theories abound about the effect of the lower half of a full-face lid snapping back suddenly under impact with the ground, breaking the wearer's neck. And judging by the high level of baldness amongst the motorcycle fraternity, wearing a helmet aids premature hair loss.

Obviously, grinding down the road helmetless is likely to result in brain meeting air or a whole face being torn off; but then crossing the road with a moment's inattention is equally likely to cancels one's existence! Motorcycling has always been mixed up with living one's life to the full, taking chances and going to the edge at times; riding without a helmet just one more aspect of the great dance with death. If you're gonna go, you're gonna go, etc.

Being out in the country (and out of the country as well, if you see what I mean) you can take things even further. As well as not having to wear a crash helmet, the speed limits in practice non-existent and whatever traffic rules the bureaucrats thought up haven't quite made it into the brains of the populace. Having to avoid the antics of drunken, if not drugged, lunatics in forty degrees of heat might appear to make helmets, if not full leathers and body armour or even a machine-gun, mandatory but it's all so fluid, in a mad kind of way, that it seems dead easy to dance through the traffic at dangerous speed whilst screaming obscure insults in English that no-one has any chance of understanding. Just smile whilst it's going down.

See, the thing about all this craziness is that it only needs a minimally modern motorcycle to join in - say 35 horses of Japanese inspired two-stroke wizardry in a chassis that weighs little more than 200lbs. Less than a thousand notes brand spanking new. Enough to make you cry, ain't it? Combine that go, which includes hot acceleration to about 75mph and an ultimate top speed of around 110mph, with riding sans lid, to find a whole new world of motorcycling that harks back to the sixties in the UK, when men were men and bikes were raw and mean if wholly lacking the sophisticated reliability of modern strokers (engines good for 25000 miles plus).

When riding lidless, 50mph feels like 90mph, 100mph like 150mph and doing 110mph likely to snap sunglasses in half, the only reasonable means of ocular protection when you have to ride fast and look cool. Senses are alive, even overloaded, with stimuli and it's an incredible buzz just to be alive and out on a bike in the sunshine with a babe clinging on desperately out back, nothing more than a couple of tee-shirts muting the body heat. And the heat of some frail who's spent her youth cutting rice or sugar cane in suicidal temperatures is something else - once experienced never forgotten, anything less no use whatsoever (a diet of rice and beer doing wonders for one's potency, by the way).

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that riding helmetless makes the whole plethora of superbikes totally redundant, pointless, their excessive speed and power wholly unnecessary in this context. In the rain and cold, when it's sensible if not essential to wear a lid, the big bikes have too much power to use properly, the small stuff killing them dead in most circumstances.

Throw in the appalling economy, massive expense and silly complexity of the superbikes, to figure that the past two and a half decades have just been one huge con - could the Japs have been foresighted enough to bribe the bureaucrats to introduce the helmet law so that they could off-load increasingly powerful, and therefore necessarily expensive, motorcycles. Nah! No-one's that clever, are they?

Bill Fowler