The Crisis Licence

I press the button on the remote and the garage door jerks into life. A few autumn leaves cling to its lower edge as it rolls up, before they lose their crispy grip and flutter down to the concrete. My bike waits in the oily shadows.

Like most children I had progressed from push along trikes to stabilised bikes to two-wheel proficiency. Whole days of the late eighties and very early nineties were spent riding around the streets in a state of BMX abandon, sometimes happily alone, sometimes as part of a peloton of weaving bandits. But that was the end of my two wheeled life, except for a few later short-lived adult forays, when a bike became a piece of sprocketed exercise gear, instead of something to have fun on. A reluctant driver who delayed the acquisition of a car licence until the point of necessity, the very idea of me riding a motorcycle would have been enough to make my twenty-something-year-old self break out into a flushed sweat.   

I attribute my conversion to a day spent learning to eat fire. For my girlfriend’s birthday we spent a day under the tuition of a sunken-eyed exhibitionist who came to us direct by overnight van drive from a Budapest circus, learning to put burning torches in our mouths. Doing such a counter-intuitive thing, overcoming the evolution-forged instinct to keep a sensible distance between face and flame, without feeling anything other than satisfaction and exhilaration, without losing an eyebrow, cauterising a nostril or soldering my mouth shut was the beginning of a slow-burn epiphany. Seeing flame hover in a quivering trail of vapour on your forearm, blowing orange plumes of fire into the crepuscular light of a deserted nightclub, will give you a sense of the things that are waiting for you, things that only remain undone because of an indefensible indifference to the pleasure of novelty.

As her next birthday approached escalation became inevitable. This year she would realise her adolescent dream of learning to ride a motorcycle and I, newly intrepid consumer of the least face friendly element, would join her.

So at the age of 43 I found myself wobbling around a yard in the spring sunshine on a Suzuki GSX 125 with enough confidence to be let loose later the same day on the public roads, under the close supervision of an eccentric instructor who looked like he may have shared our fire eating tutor’s Budapest van ride a year earlier, and not bothered to sleep since. I was sufficiently proficient to be given a certificate to say that I could ride an L-plated 125cc bike on the roads. I was off. It was on.

It is now November 15^th 2024. Yesterday I passed my Mod2 bike test, the final part of the process necessary to get a full UK motorcycle licence. I’ve learned something new. I have an ability I didn’t have before. I am just a little bit more than I was, in a slightly expanded world. I can ride any bike I like on the public roads. You’ve seen those massive SOA Harleys? Their chrome organs splitting sunbeams as the front wheel splits the air and a V twin with more power than your car thrums past you with a single, leathered easy rider on the back? I could do that. You’ve seen those Italian bullets howl past you on the motorway like your 60mph car was parked? Armour suited riders curled and tucked into the fairings like HR Giger got a primary palette and a sponsorship deal? I could do that. You’ve seen a Japanese streetfighter moaning through a city night, neon captured in polished paint? I could do that. But for now, I’ll stick to my 125, savouring the feeling of motion, held on my seat by a confident mix of gravity and newly acquired skills, loving the centrifugal bliss of a corner swept, or the exhilaration of acceleration, a feedback so direct that no great speed or abandonment of responsibility is necessary.

I was not Born to be Wild and/or Run, and yet apparently now it’s on a steel horse that I ride. Although the trusty 125 may be more of a Bad Motorscooter, it’s enough to act as a bridge to the poetic world of a Vincent Black Lightening 1952, or even the sideways thrill of a Silver Machine. I’ve yet to hit the highway like a battering ram, on a silver-black Phantom bike, but the songs inevitably roll around inside the helmet of any honest rider. Just as when you’re in love everyone on the radio is singing about you, when you’re rolling down the road with the wind on your body and the thrill of movement rushing in your veins, all of those rock stars know your name.      

The purchase of a big bike is coming, but it’s coming slowly and beautifully like a closely watched sunrise. Like the sagacious Pooh knew, the moment before you eat the honey is better than the moment when you do. I will scroll the websites and haunt the showrooms, considering the options like a hungry diner with a Michelin menu.

Isn’t it a horrific cliché? To think that the ability to ride a bike, to care about such a hackneyed expression of antiquated cool, could matter to anyone but the desperately unfulfilled? Aren’t I embarrassed to be seriously contemplating leather trousers? No, it’s just fun. And if it does link my existence by even the finest, most stretched and nebulous thread to a sepia-tinted memory of Steve McQueen, or Indiana Jones in a joust with a nazi or a thousand other James Dean dreams, then that’s ok with me, and needn’t really trouble you. Unless you’re jealous.  

This may well be a midlife crisis, although the expression seems to require a crass devaluation of the word, a slap in the face to anyone experiencing something that has earned the right to be labelled a crisis in its true sense. Maybe it is a midlife crisis. If it is then it’s a fantastically fun, life affirming, world-opening crisis full of joy and excitement. It’s definitely one of the most pleasurable crises I’ve ever had. Get yourself a bike, ride out of your comfort zone and into the future, and enjoy a crisis of your own.

The garage is open, my bike is ready. My family barely believe it, my younger self would be paralysed by anxiety at the thought of it, but I’m armoured and ready. I’m a fighter pilot, a needed hero. I am going to ride to the shops.