I have suddenly been plunged into a lifestyle so curious and disruptive that it’s a major miracle that each issue of the UMG actually hits the shelves more or less on schedule, and that I manage to both own and ride motorcycles in several different countries when in reality I should be chained and shackled to this computer terminal if not wholly embroiled in the slightly schizoid world of C90 ownership. None of my current spate of machines can boast more than 500 cubic centimetres nor command much dosh in the secondhand market, although they are generally reliable and trouble free, which is just as well as I have taken the art of total neglect to new and previously uncharted heights - it makes blitzing along at ton plus speeds all the more interesting and takes me back to my XS650 days when I was trying to get into the motorcycle accessory business via a lock-up in suburbia. What the owner of the attached house and his neighbours thought of having the area under a pall of GRP fumes at all hours of the day, or of barely silenced and generally rotted motorcycles turning up at 3am, I never did find out, suddenly seeing sense and doing a disappearing act after about a week of choking on fumes and producing moulds that would have had trouble passing muster in front of a blind, Iimbless, mindless chimp.
Nevertheless, whenever I have a spare moment and am sufficiently sober to hold a pencil in my hand, I plot and scheme various project bikes that are in reality only likely to be turned into harsh metal if one or more of my adversaries manage to catch up with me and tender me immobile for a long period of time by breaking my legs, although I must warn anyone attempting such an act that ever since I can remember I have been trying to perfect the perfect kneecapping kick. Such violent thoughts are, of course, purely defensive in nature, I have not yet become so mentally vacant as to spend all my waking hours working out so as to gain sufficient bulk to join the lager louts.
Judging by the antics of various despatch riders in Shit City the last time I was there, you don't need to be drunk to be abusive, it seemed to come naturally to some riders who were screaming (and I mean screaming) abuse at car drivers and peds who momentarily impeded their progress. The sun was even shining, so god only knows how these knights of the road and wild warriors react in the rain and the cold. I must admit, though, that even in the relatively sane city of Cardiff I scream an internal stream of abuse whenever I come to a junction only to find car after car after car making it impossible to join the traffic flow unless you pile on the revs, abuse the clutch and get up to 30-40mph in an instant after throwing the bike in front of one car and then careering down the centre of the road as if it belongs to you. I could take such antics when I was 16, 17 with a degree of impunity, but these days the repeated dice with death bean to lose its attraction, especially when a majority of car drivers deliberately throw their vehicle into the ever so narrow gap I need to survive... visions of loss of leg or complete disintegration of mind and body are with me once again (which funnlly enough takes me back to my XS650 days...).
Everywhere I go, and I don't just mean within the confines of this great Isle, there seems to be more and more cars. Traffic becomes ever slower and even fewer new motorcycles are sold every year. Absolutely crazy. Perhaps the availability of electric bikes will help ease the congestion, although as the things are only rumoured to hit 15mph maximum they may mess things up even more - it's bad enough swerving around very arrogant bicyclists and stopping myself falling off in hysterical laughter at the sight of these fellow citizens sweating under their vividly coloured crash hats that look like a pudding basin would after an artic's rolled over it. I mean, some of these people are actually over the age of consent and ought to have enough self respect to enjoy the feeling of wind in their hair.
You might convince me in a moment of weakness that the occasional motorcyclist would have avoided death by wearing a crash helmet but I have never come across anyone in the last 35 years who has hurt his head falling off a bicycle. I can understand paranoia but these people must be so out of it, so warped, so completely removed from real life that they make my own machinations material for model citizenship. These days my only means of communication with the outside world is through various fax machines which are changed with the confusing rapidity that only the true paranoid can manage. Only when confined to a wheelchair or hospital bed would I be forced to stay in one place long enough to get things together sufficiently to even get close to the coherence necessary to pull together all the elements to produce a project bike or even, goddamnit, a whole new motorcycle, and even then my own limitations in producing the damn thing are so vast that it would cost me more dosh that I'd need to lounge around in Bangkok for the next decade, or even the rest of my life. But such is the weirdness of modern life that I can actually envisage, in my moments of more succinct clarity, a scenario wherein it was possible that the Fowler Motorcycle Company became more that just a figment of my ever more disjointed imagination - shit, Horatio, if a bunch of ex property developers can get in on the act just think what a real, live ex-engineer could do!
Naturally, it would have to be built somewhere interesting (either Merthyr or Bangkok) and contain the elements that this column has in the past gone on about at great and tedious length (I'll just have to read some back issues to recall what they were) but the longest l have managed to stay in one location in recent memory is three months - even the delights of a certain GPz failed to entertain me to a degree that stopped total mental apathy. I was even reduced to digging up the front garden, such was my state of mental frailty, having managed to ignore the jungle like proportions that various weeds had attained for two years; the next door neighbour would've been friendlier if I'd just been let out of a mental home after gunning down a whole village or declared the rear garden as a rally site for the Great Unwashed.
The neighbour who is still speaking to me tells me that my motorcycle is very quiet; I haven't the faintest idea if he's being sarcastic or not. No sooner had I started to contemplate a gentle exile in Merthyr Tydfil with nothing more taxing than producing an issue of the UMG every three months, and watching the young ladies of the town stroll past the tranquil grounds of a suitable sanatorium, than various communications from the outside world indicated I had foolishly agreed to knock out more issues of the UMG this year, as well as committing myself to starting another publication on another, gulp, continent.
l was so out of it by then that I was not really surprised during the next rational moment to find myself in a flat in Bangkok with a view over the notorious Klong Toey slums that managed a mention in the UK press a while back,when stored, noxious chemicals exploded in sufficient quantity to burn half the area to the ground and put the local abortion clinic out of business (unborn children being killed in the womb by the fumes). It's the kind of place where if you venture out late at night and take a five minute walk in the wrong direction you are as likely to get mugged and robbed by the locally dispossessed as be turned over by the cops. At least the sudden, violent change of scenery shocked the mind into believing it was still able to function; sitting here on my balcony I have a perfect view of life as low it can get, which, I suppose. gives me enough reason to keep going.
Bill Fowler
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