The Volvo crashed to a halt at the junction with a mini roundabout. I had already looked ahead and seen a perfectly clear road, I was so surprised by the sudden cessation of motion of the car that I but barely avoided putting the front wheel of the GS400 into its back. Bloody typical, thought I. I had the choice of pulling over, thus allowing it to get far away out of danger, or swinging the bike around it and screaming off up the road - the only way to deal with these kind of car drivers is to get away from them as fast as possible!
Indicator on, quick glance in the mirror, I began to swing out behind the Volvo. The bastard violently swerved into the middle of the road. I managed to ram on the brakes, avoid falling off when the bike wobbled wildly and then gave him a blast of the horn. The arrogant git gave me the finger. Right, bloody war then. I hurled the bike alongside, thumped his roof a few times (which did more damage to my hand than his metalwork. I’m sorry to say) and screamed off into the distance. I only wish I had access to Happy Henry's huge chrome plated tyre iron - they should be standard issue to all London DRs.
I know it's not just DRs who are having a hard time. My mates in engineering are even worse off, one of them so desperate he’s thinking of becoming a social worker on the premise that the country is falling apart so rapidly that it's the only growth industry left. Another mate in the car game is desperate to sell a car, any car at almost any price, just to pay off his mortgage. I seem to spend more time sitting around reading bike mags or swapping improbable tales with other DRs than actually getting out on the street. The only good thing about the last winter was that the newish GT750 did so few miles that it was immaculate enough to fetch £2250 when I sold it a few weeks ago; I had to do something for my cash flow as I had the tax collector threatening abuse.
The GS400 was my reserve machine for when the GT was being serviced or out of commission for some reason. The GS had clocked up 135870 miles at the time it was plunged into full time abuse; most of its components had been replaced at least once, many two or three times, but what was bunged together worked in a reasonably satisfactory manner. You had to remember which gears didn't work any more, forget any notions of doing wheelies (the clutch would break) and generally treat it with a bit respect.
It was more or less legal, even offering some advantages over the GT, down to its light weight and general agility through the clogged up inner London streets. As long as it was kept in sprockets and chains, and had the oil changed every 600 miles, it was remarkably reliable, the electrics having long since been sorted by replacement of all the original Suzuki equipment with non standard stuff of a higher specification.
The low running costs helped compensate for the fact that my wages were down from a high of £550 to around £175, although some weeks I didn't even get past the ton. Sob! I had changed DR firms every month in the search for better wages but ended up back at the original firm as I kept finding myself worse off with each change. Even the winter wasn't much help as everyone seemed so desperate to keep up with their bank loans or mortgage payments that they kept going through the worst of the weather.
Every car driver in London appears to have descended into a violent psychopathic mood. They were obviously having their own financial problems and bottled everything up until they got behind the wheel of their expensively purchased cars then all hell broke loose. They just didn't want to give way to motorcyclists. They seemed to go out of their way to close gaps on you or swing violently into your path whenever given the mildest opportunity. Never mind that a motorcycle forced to sit in a traffic jam rather than filter through it prolongs the chaos, they all seemed to have become petty minded and vindictive. The same could be said for the DR bosses. With so little work they could pick and choose the best riders, demand cuts in rates and delay paying out the money for as long as they could get away with it. In one outfit I temporarily worked for the boss had a fatal heart attack and his wife took over. She made Mrs Thatcher look like a real pussy cat. Her first act was to give us all a lecture on our terrible appearance along the lines that if any of us turned up at her residence her first act would be to set the dogs loose and the second to summon the police... she anannounced that she was ordering some bright, colourful clothing for us which we had better wear or else.
As it was the depths of winter we didn’t take much notice, there was no way we were going to be prised out of our several layers of clothing to flop around in some fluorescent rubbish. DRs mostly wear black because the grime and dirt resultant from riding around the great city does little damage to the appearance of these outfits. When the great day came, she unfolded this lycra stuff in deep purple and vivid green. It almost made me throw up at the sight of it. One of our number was persuaded to don a suit, under the threat of the dole if he refused.
We were all in hysterics for days afterwards, the stuff was skin tight and stretched to follow the contours of his body. The poor chap’s beer belly made him look eight months pregnant. She expected us to ride around in this dreadful stuff in the middle of winter, freezing our balls off and being the laughing stock of the whole city. Fat chance. Threatened with a mass walkout she relented, but murmured that come the summer months we would be expected to do our duty. I moved on to a new company very quickly after that experience.
Even old DR hands were having problems making ends meet. They were already down to some pretty minimal machinery as a matter of course, so couldn't really take my temporary escape route of selling a decent machine. Just about everyone was caught out by the tax system whereby the self employed pay tax on the previous year's basis... this is fine as long as you keep earning more money every year but when income takes a dive for a year, the whole year’s money ends up going to the bloody tax man in back tax! There were some pretty long faces around.
Even hardened DRs were so pissed off that they were getting into some pretty dangerous and wild antics... one old codger who had been in the game since the war, if his tales were to be believed, could be seen screaming through the traffic like a juvenile delinquent until his luck ran out... a taxi driver cut him up, sending the bike spinning off in front of a double decker and the rider under the front wheel of car. The bike was a complete write off and the rider only just avoided having his leg amputated, by all accounts. That was the end of his career as a DR.
Other DRs, unhindered by house ownership, have just taken what money they have out of the bank, sold their bikes for what they can get, bought the cheapest plane ticket they can find and headed for new shores. Australia is a particularly popular destination, although those with a bit more money have headed for the Spanish beaches to cheaply lounge around in the sun until things pick up again in a couple of years time But most people have family, mortgages or even a love of good old England, so like myself they have to stick out the tough times and hope things will get better.
It's all pretty dire at the moment, the only good thing is that my mileage has gone down so much that I now have the chance to enjoy motorcycling for its own sake again; two years back the DR game was so frantic that there was no way I wanted to sit on a bike for pleasure once I got home. Things can only get better... I think!
Pete Berisford