Transports of joy. Saying goodbye to two wheels

You can listen to the whole of what follows by clicking on the audio file above.

I think I was only allowed to have that Vespa 150 GL at the age of 15 because it didn’t run. It had no logbook, no MOT, a rusty frame, and a broken throttle cable. Since my pal Dougie Walker had graduated to a roadworthy BSA Bantam 175 when he turned 16, his after-school attempts to use the Vespa as a scrambler in the woods behind his house had ceased. I think I paid him £5 of hard-saved Christmas money for it. The year was 1970.

Motorbikes. Scooters. Anything on two wheels with an engine. The cool seniors at school arrived on Honda 90s, Lambrettas, and—in one case—a BSA 250. We clustered around the parked machines in jealousy and awe. On Templehill in Troon, Cooper Brothers was our petroleum church. It was a place where Les Cooper, an ex-TT racer, would regale us (if he was in a good mood) with the story of how he lost a leg in a high-speed crash on the Mountain Circuit. “I looked up at a tree, and there it was. My leg…”

We would gaze at the glistening, oil-dripping Triumph Trident that sat for months unsold in the showroom. Sam Cooper, the sales chief, let us stroke it, but nothing more. We’d pester the mechanics in the workshop for advice or for any dodgy bits and pieces they were surreptitiously selling without their bosses’ knowledge.

At Coopers, I bought a new throttle cable for the Vespa and spent what seemed like weeks working out how to fit it. Starting from scratch and without a manual, I dismantled the primitive carburetor and wound the cable around the grooved needle. I mixed two-stroke oil with petrol from my dad’s lawnmower and, day after day, would come home from school to attempt to kickstart the old Tuscan lump, with its odd wee engine mounted to one side of the rear wheel.

Then, one day, it burst into life. Tweak the choke lever on the frame below the seat, wind the throttle open, and kick. Clouds of blue smoke; that dry, ringing rattle. Shock and joy. It stalled immediately, but it started again and kept running. Without a second thought, I hopped on board, put it into first gear with a flick of the wrist, and rode out of the garage. We had a sizeable garden, and I rode round and round it perhaps a dozen times.

The joyous sensation of freedom—the absence of pedalling and the release from physical effort into movement across the earth (or past the laburnum trees, at least)—was overwhelming. It’s something every motorcyclist feels: an absence of distraction or thought as your body and mind coalesce, becoming one with the machine—in balance and moving, speed controlled by your right hand.

In the years to come, there would be dozens of motorcycles. And here I am, aged 70, with the last of them—a little Royal Enfield (the modern variety, made in India)—having been ridden away yesterday by a man named Scott. “Sure you’re not having any regrets?” he asked just before he put on his helmet, the chug of the single-cylinder engine steady and solid.

“No,” I replied. “I’m done with bikes.”

Now it’s all memory: the big journeys —some laughably small in retrospect, others insanely ambitious. I remember riding a Honda C50 from Ayr to Kirkcudbright and back in one night (on a single tank of petrol) to see my first girlfriend. All we did was hold hands. I covered the entirety of Scotland on an East German MZ 250 and sidecar, a trip later reprised on TV. That was Spirit of Adventure—the book, the radio series, the television series, the DVD… the start of all kinds of broadcasting adventures.

I tackled golf courses great and small on a Kawasaki Z650 with a set of clubs strapped to the back for Hell’s Golfer. There was the Harley-Davidson Centenary rally in Perth aboard a gigantic and treacherous HD Road King, and a madly dangerous jaunt from one end of South Africa to the other—just after Mandela came to power—on an uninsured BMW R1150GS.

TV again, and road tests for STV of everything from a Ducati 996 to a daft, three-wheeled BMW C1. Then there was the Journey’s Blend book-and-whisky trip aboard what was probably my favourite bike: a sublimely well-balanced, smooth, and very quick Triumph Trophy 1200 ‘Cat-Eye’. Conversely, there was the disaster in the car park of the Bushmills Distillery when a borrowed Triumph Street Triple toppled onto an extremely hungover me.

So many others: the classic Yamaha RD400 two-stroke that seized outside Inverness; riding two-up on a tiny BMW R65LS to the much-lamented Aultnamain Inn; sliding a Harley Sportster on a cattle grid outside Tomintoul. The last time I rode at over 100mph was during a long trip from Norfolk to Beauly; I noticed how, as the Highlands cooled, you could smell each piece of the journey—drying washing, pine forests, cooking curry, burning wood.

I’ve tried to stop. Two heart attacks and four cardiac stents a decade ago should really have brought the adventure to an end. But no—the wee, slow Enfield and a mad attempt to relive my youth on a sports Ducati 750 were the final flings. It all finally had to end after I fell over a fence last November and broke my ankle, damaging both knees in the process. Healing is still underway, and the occasional lack of joint solidity means keeping a bike upright at slow speeds is by no means guaranteed.

But before the Enfield was sent on its way yesterday, I took it out of the shed and gave it a last polish with WD40. Suddenly, I was back in Ottoline Drive, Troon, in 1970—tweaking the choke and carburetor of that old Vespa, inhaling the fumes, and feeling the utter delight when it sparked to life. I flicked the electric start on the Enfield and trusted my damaged limbs for one last circuit of the garden. Round and round, maybe a dozen times. Lost in the past, oblivious to everything save balance and movement. Transports of joy.