A little
night music
Guido ponders misdeeds in darkness…
“A thoroughbred
Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put
himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius
turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.” (Hunter S Thompson, Song
of the Sausage Creature)
Well, I guess that cancels most of us out as a thoroughbred café racer,
though I can see where Hunter S (RIP) was coming from.
There is something weird and entrancingly vicious about a fast night ride that
really has to be experienced to be believed. My favourite was racing Chris Beattie
across some god-forsaken mountain road about 20 years ago on the way to a bike
journo convention.
If memory serves right, that trip had a fair bit of potential to turn into our
last as we tipped into half-blind corners, guessing the exit lines, and heard
the occasional mad crackling as gravel bounced off the header pipes.
It was also the year that Beattie almost succeeded in turning a GSX-R into a
jet-ski without resorting to the use of a hull – but let’s leave that
to some other time.
What prompted these thoughts was a recent experience with Ms A, an occasional
inmate of Stalag Cessna, who has recently begun her riding career.
I had to pick her up from work, as she wasn’t up for battling Friday evening
traffic with the little TS185, and the mighty Kingswood was in for a heart transplant.
So she was on pillion duty.
As it luck would have it, it was a brilliant evening. One of those classic warm
late summer nights, where temp is in the low 20s, there’s a little humidity
and it just feels good to be alive.
“Let’s take the long way home,” I suggested, and there was no
objection. It was just a gentle cruise through some of the local café
strips, and out across one of the skyline roads. Nothing sensational and taken
at an easy pace so we could all relax and enjoy the tunes you play with engine
and gearbox as you flow through the curves.
As luck would have it, it was enough to re-energise Ms A about riding. She was
finding getting on the road much tougher than expected, and that little experience
reminded her that there are some very special rewards.
Of course the return doesn’t have to be that great. An ice-cream will do.
Two summers ago we got hit by an extraordinary heat wave, with temps over 40
for several days and the evenings struggling to drop as low as 30.
Very late, on by far the worst night, daughter Ms M discovered me rattling around
the house and suggested we go somewhere. Anywhere. Why not? Sleep was clearly
out of the question.
We grabbed, of all things, the Enfield Bullet test bike that had pole position
in the shed, mounted up and headed into St Kilda in the hope of finding somewhere
that might, despite the hour, be open and able to sell an ice-cream.
It was two in the morning by that stage, and the place was packed. All the ice-cream
shops were open and doing a roaring trade, while the beach was close to being
standing room only as people did whatever they could to try and cool down –
a surreal sight.
Now manhandling an Enfield, two-up, at two in the morning might not spring to
mind as being the start to motorcycling bliss, but it was in its own peculiar
way. Bumbling along to the machine’s lumbering beat, enjoying the closest
thing you could get to a breeze, and feeling the sights and sounds of a half-awake
city made life good again.
I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that night riding is somehow special
and has a musical quality all its own…
Guy "Guido" Allen
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