OH GAWD, it's started. Even if I couldn't walk outside and get a whiff of the daffodils and the muckspreader as it trundles down my lane, I'd know it was spring from the headline in my local paper: "Police to Clamp Down on Bikers". Much the same can be read every year, and it always makes for a few juicy column inches when the local rozzers announce that they're going after the "hooligan element" who terrorise the local residents along a couple of scantily used A-road that wind through the glorious mid-Wales hills and valleys. Of course such is the wildness of the landscape that there aren't really any local residents, apart from the odd suicidal badger and a few errant rabbits. And any damage done to our furry friends is inevitably the consequence of an Escort -full of farm boys careening back from the pub late at night, when of course no sensible biker would stray outdoors in his Kushitanis.

But ignoring that little discrepancy, the cops will instead play the speeding ticket card, and they'll be out there with their radar guns, hell-bent on piling up points on our licences. Which is a crying shame.

But it's also why more and more of us are buying into the dratted Track Day scam (see my last Inside Leg) and, I gather, the slightly more benign, if bizarre, "organised biking encounter."

This, in case you're pinching yourself, is part of a growing commercial trend whereby we -well not perhaps you and I because we're rough, tough bikers -pay good money to have someone else organise a day or three's motorcycling activity for us out of harm's way. The (almost) inevitable idiot bastard offspring of the hideous corporate hospitality trade, it means turning up at some fairly remote rendezvous in your Mondeo or your Vectra and getting kitted out with fancy riding clobber and something to wear it on.

Of course for decades now anyone who fancies familiarising themselves with the various A & E wards of our magnificent NHS has been able to study the serious business of roadracing at one of a number of circuit-based schools, but what we're dealing with here is an entirely new, primarily recreational phenomenon. Most commonly, this will involve a quadbike, a trailbike or, for the somewhat more seriously fearless, a moto-crosser on which you'll navigate a set course, or some well-worn bridleways, after a little appropriate instruction from an expert. However, I've recently noticed some hybrids lurking in the small ads of the biking press, namely the classic bike encounter and the touring experience.

Heaven forbid that we should actually buy our own rattlyold Brit bike and toddle off when the mood takes us, or even join a club and do so amongst like minded chums. And of course we are far too timid to load up the panniers on our Gold Wing and bugger off up to the Highlands, or mix with those dreadful foreigners across the channel without someone riding shotgun, at least metaphorically. No, we want to be led gently along the highways and byeways by Someone Who Knows What They're Doing and, perhaps more to the point if it's on some 40+ year-old Triumph or Norton, followed at a discreet distance by a mechanic with van and a plank.

Of course both these activities require their punters to actually own a motorbicycle licence, but I can only conclude that they've been acquired in recent years when mandatory training meant riding along in a kind of motorised school crocodile behind an instructor. And either the habit has stuck or the participants are simply too frit to venture out on two wheels on their own.

Taken to its more extreme conclusions, can we now expect a day's accompanied puncture repairing outside the Basingstoke Little Chef, or perhaps an afternoon's gentle bump-starting "classic British 2-strokes" on the hard-shoulder of the A1(M)? Then who would not want to spend a couple of hundred quid learning to navigate the brolly dollies on a Honda Monkeybike at a WSB meeting?

Or how about the Despatch Rider Experience: spend an invigorating day dodging death from the relative safety of a Ural sidecar outfit as you follow Darren and Wayne on their CX500 and GT550 ratbikes through the rain-sodden mean streets of London's glittering West End. (Including numerous breaks for soggy roll-ups, weak coffee in polystyrene cups and tall talk about 100mph cop car chases down Regent Street).

As I see it however, this sort of organised motorcycling is just another sorry example of how our game is becoming homogenised and sanitized (I'm starting to sound like a milkman).

Okay, if I want to visit some far flung shore, like New Zeeland, Canada or the Himalayas, there's quite a lot to be said for pre-booking a machine from a dealer who'll supply maps, route advice and breakdown support. That said, a couple of friends of mine just returned from a month in India, much of it aboard an Enfield 350 ("with the largest panniers in the world") which they hired on the spot, followed their noses and had no trouble with.

But do we want to be molly-coddled and shepherded along pre-determined routes at the pace of the slowest riders in these exotic locales, let alone Ireland or Yorkshire? And what precisely is the advantage of doing it on some dreadful old stump-puller that can only wheeze along at 50mph without losing its reverse-threaded valve release countersunk grommets, never mind your fillings?

A moderately competitive foray on a rented trailie masquerading as foreign holiday, such as last year's Rally of Discovery in Crete is another matter however, and that I could certainly go for... if I was a little fitter, of course. But otherwise I think I'll stick to doing things my way, on my own and on a machine just slow enough to disappoint the boys in blue lurking behind the bushes on the A44 of a weekend.





Taken from Inside Line Magazine.

http://www.inside-line.co.uk

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