Due to an innate sense of shame, I haven't bleated about it much recently, but I still own a shabby, not-so-old Suzuki scooter and I still ride it. In fact just recently I've been riding it a lot. Since I moved down to God's Own Country late last year, I left the Suzy in London to gather grime and pigeon-crap outside my girlfriend's flat so that on the increasingly rare occasions I visited the glittering metropolis I could avoid the over-priced, third world horrors of London's public transport system. But when the MoT ran out I decided to bring it down here, give it a service, get a ticket and sell it, reasoning that since it was essentially surplus to requirements I might as well trouser the proceeds and put them towards buying a Real Motorcycle. That was the theory, anyway. Getting it down here was a major undertaking because (a) scooters aren't built for long distance travel, and (b) they aren't built for the carriage of bulk. So anyone cruising down the A40 in mid-June might've been irritated to find themselves behind an AN125 groaning along at 50mph under the weight of a large suitcase, briefcase and a hunched-up six-footer grimly ignoring the frustrated parps of Eddie Stobart's army. And you could almost hear the sniggering behind the full-face helmets of the few 'Blade-runners and Bandits that whizzed past me at twice the velocity.
Having had a brief flirtation with Mod-dom and a succession of similar capacity Lambrettas in the early '60s (which were of course over-burdened with 30 extraneous spotlamps and mirrors), 50mph doesn't seem very fast for a 125 these technically advanced days. But the automatic gearing clearly murders a pony or two, even if the little 4-stroke engine seems torquey enough to support a higher upper ratio, which would make cruising a little less frantic... and faster.
So a 160-mile journey which routinely takes 3-1/2 hours in a car took over five on the Suzy and left me feeling utterly shagged out, and not a little humiliated, but which galvanised my resolve to fix, flog and then replace the thing with a motorbicycle.
Fat chance, of course. First off, in order to make the scooter presentable to potential punters a new front fairing panel had to be substituted for one broken asunder by ne'er-do-wells in a botched hot-wiring exercise in a London parking bay. Purveyors of motorcycling plastic won't be surprised to learn that this simple v-shaped panel cost over sixty quid, and the tiny stick-on Suzuki logo a further seven, but I gritted my teeth and told myself that without them the machine would be worth a lot less. The oil filter was, however, about the same price as the one for my car, albeit a fifth of the size, so I spent a happy afternoon changing the plastic, the oil, the filter and spark-plug and preparing it for the MoT in anticipation of some smiling fool riding off into the Mid-Wales sunshine (sic) after having deposited seven hundred smackeroons in my bin. But after putting an ad. in the local weeklies, it became horribly clear that a low-mileage, two owner 1996 Suzuki AN125 at that sort of money isn't going to get a path beaten to my door.
Not one bloody phone call was the upshot, and I'm buggered if I'm going to traipse back up to London on the thing just so's I can advertise it in Loot - which is about the only reliable way of outing a low-ticket scooter short of attending an autojumble. My nearest but hardly local dealer offered me £450-600 part-exchange depending on what glittering bauble I could afford to pay the balance on, but since this basically boiled down to a 1991 grey import GS400-F or a three million year-old GPz305, I backed away feeling bitter and disenchanted. I fleetingly harboured dark wishes that the villains who'd tried to steal the thing had made a better job of it so's I could at least have won back its insured value (£800, since you ask), but rather than witter on again about the shocking state of used bike prices and their deterrent effect on would-be motorbikers, delayed writing this column for a day or two and went and got slaughtered in the pub instead.
But to my amazement, the reality is something else. Okay, it's been necessary to tog up in acres of ancient Rukka-wear, but the (newly repaired !) fairing is surprisingly effective in protecting my trainers from the downpours, the evenings remain light 'til 10.30 and best of all, there is the speed. Or rather lack of it.
Now we're all keenly aware that piloting a fast motorcycle through the great outdoors is an exhilarating way to go, but one is usually too busy avoiding somnambulant grans in Micras to take in the scenery. But when your top whack is 50mph, and considerably less on the omnipresent upward gradients hereabouts, you can really enjoy the view, and indeed the fauna and flora of our barely trafficked country lanes. Why, Mr Rabbit winks at you chummily as you pobble along, chaffinches alight on your shoulder and whistle a happy tune for a mile or two, and on rainy nights frogs have plenty of time to hop out of you way and avoid suicide.
So hello trees, hello sky, hello men in white coats, all of a sudden I'm a bumpkin scooterist, and going slow ain't that bad.