Despatches: Crashing and Despatching - Learning the Hard Way!

The radio was on the blink yet again. The vile CX650 gave out an excess of vibes and the rock solid suspension did nothing to moderate the ruined road surfaces. Each night I rode home bruised and bloodied from the day's adventures. Each morning I woke up worn out but ever hopeful. What kept me going was an agreeably growing bank account and the fact that after ten years of trying to settle into a proper job I'd at last found some work that didn't bore me rigid.

Part of that was because for a lot of the time pure fear was coursing through my veins. The CX might have many virtues as a long distance tourer but in town it was so slow moving and so heavy going that I had often seemed to have more chance of winning the lottery than missing the cages. It was really weird, then, that the first time I came off was down to another bike crashing into me. I was just edging into a gap between car and pavement when there was a blast on a horn like a volcano rumbling. Before I'd had time to react some hard faced DR had edged his DR650's front wheel in front of mine, tried to use the momentum of his bike to knock me off.

Two motorcycles into a bicycle-sized hole certainly wouldn't go. The CX surged forward, knocking the DR sideways into the back of the auto. As metal crunched into metal I was finally thrown into the gutter, toppling over on to a bunch of glue-sniffing retro-punks. It was hard to tell who was the most enraged, with the resulting screaming, brandishing of tyre irons, knives and knuckle-dusters.

The DR viciously whacked me on my helmet with a tyre iron only to find his knee-cap broken from a kick by the burly cager who was frothing at the mouth. The punks ran off with some of the parcels that had fallen out of my panniers, whilst still starry-eyed from the bashing, I cursed under my breath. The police turned up next, far from amused at the mess and the violence. It took them a while to work out that I was an entirely innocent victim rather than the prime cause of all the carnage. The DR was carted away in an ambulance, between howls threatening to tear us limb from limb, the car driver cuffed and myself taken down to the cop shop for the obligatory statement.

Coming back to the bike some four fraught hours later I was relieved to see that it was still in one piece, hadn't been torn asunder by any of the louts who hung out in town. The controller was almost understanding when I turned up with my tale of woe, insisting that we had some medicinal brandy until both of us could barely walk. I ended up sleeping in the office overnight as I was bound to crash the CX in my far gone state.

That happened two days later when a diesel slick had left a huge area of a junction as slippery as an ice-rink. The slide was almost graceful for the first few yards, with the crash-bars scraping over the tarmac, until we hit a cyclist. We had momentum and speed on our side, but the collision caused the Honda to flip right over and send me catapulting through the air. I was lucky no-one ran me down, though it wasn't a view shared my either the cyclist or two car drivers who'd had their cages battered by the out of control Honda.

I told them we were all lucky to be alive, which went down well! The same set of cops turned up again who were not amused at my antics. They viewed my claims about the road surface with suspicion until one of their number slipped, landed on his back and started groaning in agony. He needed an ambulance and one of the other cops waved everyone away with contempt. He was becoming so aggressive that it was lucky he didn't have the time to do us all.

The Honda had bent bars and pegs which explains how I fell off a mile up the road. There's an art to rolling with the fall which I totally failed to implement that time. That was because I landed on my head and wrenched my neck. The CX didn't look like it was any more damaged than before, the cause of the low speed accident its top-heaviness when I banked over into a bend. The thing just flopped over in an instant.

CX650's are easy to repair, just kick or bend everything straight. I rode majestically through various external traumas for the next eight weeks before another accident occurred. I thought I'd mastered the sixth sense necessary for survival in the intense, heaving traffic but you can't account for completely mad drivers, can you?

This one was piloting an ancient van that creaked along low on its springs, its age made up for by some dirge out of a 100 decibel stereo system. This battered remnant of a fairer society slid through the traffic oblivious to the carnage it was causing, the driver's foot stuck on the throttle. I'd heard it coming, glanced sideways to see it rearing across a junction, ignoring the redness of the traffic light. I had but moments to react, decided to accelerate across its front. He missed me but the desperate use of the throttle had caused me to back-end the car in front, whose driver had decided to go into total panic mode by hitting all the brakes.

By the time I'd picked myself up off the floor, the van had done a disappearing act and there was no-one left to corroborate my obviously weak story. Apart from having the stuffing knocked out of me I was okay, so we agreed to swap names, addresses and insurance details, although god knows I was probably going to end up black-listed! The CX had a bent front wheel but it still rotated, allowing me to complete the day's work at the price of wasted arm muscles from fighting the continuous wobble - I was thankful I didn't fall off again.

It was at about this time, just after fitting a used front wheel, that I decided it was time to fit a huge Rickman fairing to see off the worst of the winter weather. The truck-like handling became much heavier and unable to see the front wheel, the whole bike developed a vague, querulous nature that didn't look likely to aid my future survival. On the other hand, having functioning hands and feet in the cold weather would leave me much more in control of the beast.

The weight over the front wheel allowed the front tyre to slide away in bends with frightening ease. In the first week of wet weather I came off about ten times, doing the same knee in twice and actually breaking the crash-bars in two! The tyre was a bit rotted, to be sure, but it'd previously gone into controlled slides rather than turn rancorous and retributive. A nearly new Metzeler transformed the front end but the vagueness was still there.

The hectic pressure of despatching in the capital meant that I had to force the Honda through narrow gaps despite the excessive width of the fairing. This led to many a merry moment when desperation failed to overcome physical reality. When I began to realize that the edges of the fairing were both sharp and strong, I just surged through the gap, battering away at the cages until they nervously jerked out of the way.

On one occasion, in a rare psychic moment of communion, two car drivers both veered inwards, trapping me between them. The fairing shuddered then cracked asunder with an almighty bang, bits of GRP flying off. The cagers blew their horns in celebration and sped off down the road, leaving me stranded with bits of fairing meshed in the front end. The only good thing was that winter was coming to an end by then and I was quite relieved to dump the pile of GRP by the roadside.

Of course, the next week we had record rainstorms that left the city in a foot of water, the roads really greasy and myself soaked through. You could see the cagers congratulating themselves on their good fortune... until I slid off a couple of times and ruined their day. I defy anyone to stay aboard two wheels in that kind of maelstrom. I escaped serious injury except for a twisted angle when I fell all wrong but I bound it up and carried on heroically.

This might all seem a bit excessive but it was part of a DR's life, especially one who was new to the trade and wasn't riding an ideal machine. These days I lurch around the city on a much modified MZ 500, a rather more reasonable set of wheels and have escaped serious injury for the past seven months. A miracle? Probably, but I put it down to the highly developed survival instincts of a coward.

T.L.