GRIZZLING

WELL, BLESS ME!

Do you have a space in your calendar in early October? I do, believe it or not, and I’m going to fi ll it by making my way down to Mirboo North in Victoria’s Gippsland for the 10th of the month.

The occasion is the second Blessing of the Bikes at the Inline 4 Café, and it seems as though it’s going to be a terrific way to spend a day.

We’re going to have a bit of a stand, so come and see us to say hello and anything else you might want to tell us… we look forward to seeing you there.

The fact that the riding is absolutely spectacular around the Strzeleckis is a bonus!

Moto Marck did not bother with sidestands. Instead you got a bloke who walked alongside as you rode, and whose shoulder you could lean on when you stopped.

DID I EVER…

Tell you about the time I was riding a mate’s two-stroke down Glebe Point Road in Sydney? The lights at Bridge Road were red, so I stopped and promptly stalled the bike. No problem; it was a smallish bike (a 175… Maico? I think, maybe) and kick starting it was easy. It backfired, caught and ran smoothly.

I didn’t know what that backfire meant, at the time. The lights were just about to change and I tried to get a jump on the rest of the traffic. I slipped the bike into gear, let out the clutch and accelerated, and ran straight into the truck behind me. Going backwards. Naturally I fell over. I lay on the ground, totally disoriented, with the bike still running faithfully in reverse.

The truck driver climbed down from his cab and apologised effusively. He thought he’d run into me. After making sure that I was all right, he helped me upright, gave me a carton of cigarettes – quite unprompted, I presume he was delivering cigarettes – and drove off really carefully.

I rode off as well, after turning the bike off and restarting it, being careful about the direction in which it was running.

Despite the almost paranoid concern I’ve had about this since, I’ve still managed to do it again (with my Cezeta scooter) – but I’ve never even got another pack of cigarettes for my trouble. Probably a good thing, really…

DOG DAY

Bloke comes home on his bike, parks it in the garage and goes into the house.

His wife asks, “Are you okay? It’s raining cats and dogs out there!” “I know,” he says. “I nearly hit a poodle.”

That came third the other day in a bad joke competition at the pub. Couldn’t even win that…

TOP GEAR TERROR

On the other hand, it’s been very funny watching the kerfuffle about Jeremy Clarkson. The simple fact is that it’s more fun watching “rude” than “nice” on TV. But you must have genuine rudeness, or the effect is just not there.

Genuine rudeness, however, doesn’t switch off when the camera’s light goes out. So of course the BBC has been treading a fine line for years, with Clarkson given more and more leeway until he finally blew it.

And now they’re discovering that true rudeness doesn’t even stop when you fire the perpetrator; you then get death threats from his fans…

CONGRATULATIONS, TAC An Australian TV ‘Road Safety’ ad made it into the American media with the following comments: “A public education video campaign that the TAC (Transport Accident Commission) in running in Australia has provoked negative reactions from a lot of motorcyclists. If it’s true that a rider can, in some circumstances, avoid a collision thanks to low speed, it remains that in this video, many noticed that the car driver didn’t stop at the intersection, didn’t try to avoid the collision with the motorcyclist. And he is never blamed for it…”

And there we are. They can pick the holes in the TAC’s publicly-funded nonsense all the way across the Pacific. Congratulations on the creative use of our tax money, TAC.

Peter ‘The Bear’ Thoeming

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