Lord of the Flywheels

From Cyril's memoirs dated 22 January 2007

What first set me off on this passion for motorcycles? I can still remember the day that started a lifetime's obsession.

It was summer 1945 and my brother and I were at Uncle Gilbert’s place near Uttoxeter. I was ten years old and distinctly recall emerging from the improvised swimming pool my uncle had made using hay bales and a tarpaulin. He was on the gravel path on a large motorcycle, watching us intently with a far away look in his eyes. I ran over and he picked me up in his strong arms and lowered me gently onto his big thumper. It was such a rich sensory experience, the smell of warm lubricant, the feel of ribbed rubber in my hand as I reached out and gripped tightly, and when he loomed up behind me and thrust hard with an animal-like grunt, the thing came to life between my legs with a pulsing throb and I was left breathless by the whole amazing experience. At that point something happened deep inside me. Yes, Uncle Gilbert had planted a seed. Five years later I was a messenger boy at Ariel and the rest, as they say, is sub judice.

Many years later still, in 1976, I was UK Sales Manager for Honda. It was my first time working for the Japanese after years with the British industry, and I was keen to make an impression. It was that memorably scorching summer and in those pre-Playstation days the streets and parks were filled with youngsters. One day, I stopped at the edge of a park in Chiswick to double check something on a new Gold Wing I’d taken for a spin from the Power Road HQ. Within seconds the bike was surrounded by chattering, goggle-eyed kids keen to know everything about it. That got me thinking; why not set up a special day for youngsters to introduce them to the wonders of motorcycles? Some might immediately take up off-road sports, others might start saving for their first road bike. It couldn’t fail. Or so I thought. I’d decided to keep a diary of events that day, to enable me to pinpoint the most successful areas for replication nationwide. What follows are extracts from that notebook.

09:30 Saturday 21 August, St John’s Park, Chiswick
Hot and sunny. Bikes all here and on display, including CB125S, CB750F1, CJ360T (though God knows why), CB400 Four, XL250 and GL1000 Gold Wing. People beginning to drift in. No sign of Bill Curtis [my Dealer Liaison Manager]. All bikes to remain strictly stationary with engines off!

10:40 Place filling up nicely and the kids love the XL and the Gold Wing in particular. Some rather fetching young mums around, too! Apparently Bill is organising a refreshments truck and will be along shortly. Small fat boy has just fallen off the stationary CJ360 and torn his shorts. Will have to placate irate father.

10:55 I take two aspirins for the pain in my cheek and although I cannot currently see out of my left eye I’m assured that the swelling should quickly subside. He really was rather angry. Bill Curtis has arrived, ushering in a large snacks wagon that appears to sell alcohol. Maybe not the best thing at this event, but still, I might have a quick snifter to help with the pain.

12:15 Marion is absolutely stunning, although her 15-year-old son, Wayne, is a little shit. Pain is easing nicely thanks to Mr J Walker. After much badgering, decide that starting the engines is fine. But definitely NO riding!

14:40 Luckily, it was the XL that was ridden into the ornamental fish pond and it showed its off-road ability to the full. Unfortunately, Wayne, flapping from the bars like a rag doll, found it all rather a shock. Perhaps I shouldn't have leaped from the pillion, but it seemed a hopeless and extremely dangerous situation. Bugger that!

16:20 Bill has totalled the Wing. I don’t know how it happened. Susan (or Sally?) and I were ensconced in the herbaceous border discussing the effect of crankshaft off-set on piston skirt friction levels. I emerged to see the bike on fire in the middle of the bandstand. The CB125 and XL250 are now wailing skeletons ridden by youths stripped to the waist, their bodies painted with ash from various fires. I appear to have created Lord of the Flies on wheels. What fun. Another drink, I feel.

23.15 Released on bail pending appearance at Acton magistrates court. I seem to have lost my trousers. Not the best of days. Whole thing needs a bit of a rethink.

The TriBSA bonk plot

From Cyril's memoirs dated 14 December 2006

‘Get me Ago’s sperm!’ And with that shout from the boardroom so began one of the strangest and most regrettable chapters in the history of the British motorcycle industry.

This year I’ve spent many a happy hour glued to the screen watching lithe youngsters perform while a foaming stubby sits snugly in my hand. MotoGP has been thrilling, but how much more thrilling it would be for us Brits if we had a bunch of riders out there capable of getting on the podium. No disrespect to James Elison, [now James Toseland – Ed] who at least gives us a presence.

In the late Sixties we Brits were beginning to struggle both on the track and in the showrooms. When Mike Hailwood retired at the end of the 1967 season, it left only Phil Read with a real chance of winning a prestige title (which he did admirably, with a 125, two 250 and two 500 crowns between 1968-’74). But it was clear to all that the glory days were coming to an end and something had to be done. There was much talk of racing academies and the like, but nothing has even been divulged of the plot to systematically breed fresh racing stock. It was a dark period in Britain’s proud motorcycling history.

By 1968 the boardroom at BSA-Triumph was being infiltrated by accountants and marketing men with little background in motorcycling. The future looked grim for this once immensely successful industry and they were desperate for a solution. In November of that year, three directors – Tom Wildman, Terry Sheldon and William Atkins – gathered for an informal meeting at the Talbot Inn, Leamington Spa. The discussion that took place over pies and pints today beggars belief. It was agreed that what dealers needed was not only a high-tech product to combat the increasingly popular and sophisticated Japanese motorcycles, but also a highly-talented British racer to put the firm’s name on the podium (imagine how Ducati feel right now, with Capirossi [now Casey Stoner – Ed] doing the business for them). However, BSA-Triumph's methods were questionable to say the least.

It’s said that Atkins first proposed obtaining Phil Read’s sperm with a view to creating a test tube racer, as it were, even offering up his own wife, Glynis, as the carrier. However, although in vitro fertilization was in development, the first success wouldn’t come for another ten years and it was decided that given Triumph’s inability to get a reliable oil feed to rocker spindles, the chances of manipulating Read’s lively semen into the right nook or cranny were minimal.

It was then Sheldon who suggested that surely the thing to do would be to select a young, healthy woman, fully paid for the task, to seduce a racer and fall pregnant, the progeny to then be raised in an environment that would nurture his inbred racing talent. And why not, he suggested, aim for the top? Giacomo Agostini had already won four world titles and showed no signs of slowing.

So, the buxom daughter of a former British racer of some repute (doubling their chances of producing a racer-baby, so they argued) was enrolled for the job and packed off to Italy with the aim of draining Ago dry. The firm lost contact with her after two weeks and after a couple of months had given up hope of ever seeing her again, assuming she’d simply done a runner with the down payment of 400 guineas. But five months later she returned, clearly pregnant. Champagne corks popped in the boardroom.

However, doubt was soon cast over the child’s parentage. Rumour had it that the midwife sprang back in shock when the glistening infant slipped out and emitted an unearthly, guttural howl. He had more of a pelt than skin and by the age of five his Cro-Magnon features and inability to master simple words were giving serious cause for concern. Unfortunately, he was never able to cope with riding even a tricycle, a nasty tumble mercifully knocking out one of the buck teeth from his hideously overcrowded gums and leaving his ginger mop with a slight bald patch. A child of Ago's? Never. He was, however, extremely dexterous and when presented, aged 7, with an 80cc Italjet scrambler he rapidly converted it into a rudimentary two-speed ploughing device.

Aged 11 he escaped into the wild and, now in his thirties, is believed to be living a feral existence in the dense forests of Cannock Chase in Staffordshire. Rumours that he’s being stalked by Foggy Petronas trappers, keen to offer him a development engineer position, are completely unsubstantiated.

Testing times

From Cyril's memoires dated 7 November 2006

The Kawasaki ZZR1400, Suzuki Hayabusa, even the ageing and relatively sane Honda Blackbird, we’d all have given a testicle to medical science to have just one day on any one of those bikes back in the spring of 1960. Why? The first stage of the M1 motorway had been opened in December 1959, a 50-odd mile stretch from Watford, Hertfordshire to Crick in Northamptonshire (now junctions five to 18). Mostly three lanes, almost empty of traffic and absolutely no speed limit whatsoever (they didn’t spoil the fun until 1965).

At that time I was Overseas Sales Manager at BSA and for a short while, with the new M1 just a 30-mile hack away from the HQ in Brum, unofficial high-speed testing was frequent and exhaustive. It might have heralded a golden era of test riding at Small Heath, but I’m afraid the whole subject of testing on the M1 came to be seen as something of a curse.

Test riding bikes on the M1 was officially frowned upon by BSA, but despite this, testers would often hammer up and down at full tilt enjoying the relative space and the chance to hold the bike on the stop for sustained periods. Sometimes they’d be spotted by management lackeys and reported, other times news of an unfortunate incident would unavoidably reach HQ. There was the time that Harry Charlton rammed an old Golden Flash test mule beneath a lorry carrying effluent to a sewage works, rupturing the tanker and causing a lethally slippery and nauseatingly pungent slick to spread across the whole carriageway. From then on the bike was known as the Golden Flush and Harry as The Crapped Crusader.

Another incident involved veteran test rider Sid Turnbull, who’d stopped by at a friend’s abattoir near St Albans to collect five gallons of pigs’ offal to feed to his five Red Setters. The offal, in a thick, flexible, black rubber tub, was precariously strapped to the back of an A7 Shooting Star. Just outside Potters Crouch, with about 80mph on the vibrating clock, the bag slipped round, jammed the back wheel solid and the bike went down. Sid ended up in a field, where he lay unconscious for about 20 minutes, meanwhile, the Potters Crouch police, unused as they were to dealing with high-speed traffic accidents, decided that the splat of bloody guts they found on their arrival was the inevitable result of having a speed limit-free motorway. This, they muttered among themselves, was the carnage of which they had warned.

So management got tough and when the next rider was caught on the M1, a youngster by the name of Johnny ‘Fireball’ Jameson (that’s another story), he was summoned by none other than the Chief Executive, the eccentric genius Edward Turner.

Turner was a daunting man. Though nearing retirement he still cut a powerful figure but had always been known for a certain maverick approach. It was around this time that he was putting a lot of effort into designing a scooter to rival the successful Italian models and I suspect the pressure was leading to increasingly erratic behaviour. (Incidentally, left alone in his office one morning, I couldn’t help noticing some scribblings on his desk jotter, possible names for the new scooter. Marilyn, Lana, Betty. No, no. Edna, Ethel. THINK MAN!! Maud, Mary. BOLLOCKS! BOLLOCKS! BOLLOCKS! They eventually settled on ‘Tina’, so to speak.)

Well, young Johnny went into the great man’s office and the door was closed. We’ll never know exactly how the conversation went, but the next thing anyone knew, Johnny emerged with Turner on his back, riding him piggy-back. Johnny was straining to maintain balance and momentum as Turner, a portly man stripped to his vest and pants and sweating profusely, whipped his mount with a clutch cable, shouting, ‘This is how to bloody test ride, you sodding young upstart! I’ll ride you to hell and back, you jive monkey!’

When Johnny finally collapsed just outside the toolmakers’ workshop after an agonising ten-minute gallop, Turner simply strolled back to his office as if nothing had happened and the incident was never spoken of within earshot of management. From that day BSA testers were very cautious about using the M1 for work, lest they too should be subjected to what became known as ‘the Teddy-back ride’.

Heat

From Cyril's memoires dated 2 October 2006

Heat. Without it our bikes would go nowhere, but dealing with it can be a problem. My lovely young wife Francesca reminded me of this on a recent trip to the south of Italy on my Ducati Multistrada. Underseat exhausts are a tidy design, but, she explained, squatting over a hot pipe for a few hours can lead to a certain amount of discomfort, especially in an Italian summer. By the time we reached our hotel, Francesca was desperate to jump in the shower and douse the bush fire, as it were. Being a gentleman, I insisted on applying a slathering of cold-cream. It was the very least I could do.

The temperature in a combustion chamber can reach more than 1000 deg C, so there's a hell of a lot of heat to get rid of. Liquid cooling helps, but I recall a trip to South Africa in 1982 when we were involved in pre-launch tests of the superb, air-cooled Suzuki GS1100GK. The simple aim was to put in plenty of miles on three bikes in high temperatures and our small team comprised myself, chief engineer Colin Craywell and one of his young protégés, Ashley Gardener. Much could have been learned from that trip, if only things had gone according to plan.

Ashley Gardener was a tall, skinny, wax-white youth in the Peter Crouch mould, very uncomfortable in the hot South African summer and if something wasn't chaffing then something else had broken out in a rash or had swollen painfully. We were all in the hotel swimming pool one evening and I'd never seen so many mosquito bites on a man. He assured us they were 'all over' and had to be dissuaded from proving the point in a sheltered area behind the chlorination out-house.

Day five's itinerary demanded that we take a long and extremely exposed route from Britstown to Moffie. The bikes were checked the night before and we set off well loaded with water and food. The morning went very well and Colin and I were loving the ride, dicing with one another, or just sitting back and enjoying that silky motor and the stunning scenery. Ashley loitered at the back like a sullen teenager and at each stop reeled off a list of blisters, sores and throbs.

The road deteriorated badly and we were reduced to 20mph for more that 30 miles. Well, you can imagine that on a fully-faired air-cooled bike in 40 deg C, the heat rising up from the engine was enough to boil an egg. My eggs were certainly boiled. After a while we realised that Ashley was no longer with us. Colin offered to go back to see what had happened, while I stayed beneath a shady poes tree.

After half an hour I started to get worried. After an hour I jumped on the GS and retraced our tracks. A mile back, I found both Ashley and Colin and the vision I was presented with in that sun-scorched landscape is one I've never shaken from my mind. Colin's bike was on its centre-stand and the throttle was pinned open, the rear wheel spinning furiously. He was lashed to the bike on his back with his head on the clocks and his legs splayed over the panniers. He was absolutely naked and gagged with what I assumed to be his own underpants. I could see no sign of Ashley.

Then, from behind me came a blood-curdling scream and I turned in time to see a spark plug spanner fly past my left ear. Ashley was naked, too, except for a bandanna fashioned from an inner tube. His scrawny, almost hairless body was smeared with engine oil, presumably taken from his own machine, which now lay on its side in the poephol bushes. He squawked like a bird and with uncanny agility scaled a nearby tree, from where he proceeded to put on a lewd display of genital gymnastics while grunting, babbling and drooling. It was hard to tell whether he was in a state of arousal or if his distended manhood was the result of yet another nasty bite, but distended it was. Meanwhile, the bike was still revving painfully in the background and Colin began to yelp in pain as Ashley pelted his rotund, naked form with spiky fruit from the tree. It was a scene straight from hell.

Back in Britain, the doctors blamed heat stroke for Ashley's bizarre interlude and a week later he returned to work. However, Colin Craywell never recovered fully from the trauma and he spent the rest of his working life in a Jawa-CZ dealership just outside Chorlton-cum-Hardy. It seems that for Colin the nightmare was never-ending.

Auto erotica

From Cyril's memoires dated 22 September 2006

Twist 'n' go motorcycles, highlighted recently by Honda’s DN-01 and Yamaha’s FJR1300AS, prompt much debate. Emasculated beasts for those who don't have the skill to swap ratios? Or a natural development letting the rider concentrate on other aspects of machine control? My own opinion is darkened by a rather unpleasant experience.

Few will remember HappyTime, a Dutch set-up moderately successful with 50cc scooters in the late Eighties. But in 1981 their ambitions had been higher. At the time I was European sales manager for Suzuki but a friend of mine told me that HappyTime, who were as yet unknown to me, could offer lucrative freelance work. Truth be told, I needed the extra cash due to my then wife Anoushka’s heavy addiction to vodka, horse meat, gambling and shopping, usually in that disastrous order, so I agreed to get involved. If only I’d known.

I met Arty Boerelul, HappyTime's owner, at the firm's base on an industrial estate to the south of Amsterdam in the spring of 1981. Something about him immediately put me on my guard. The lace-up leather trousers, zapata moustache and bubble perm were fine. No, it was a fevered look in the eyes that made me uneasy.

'For shure, Shyril, I'm not bringing you here to be shafting you, you know? I’m wanting everything to be shtraight up!' I'm sure he didn't intend the double entendres.

'I'm having a great thing to be showing you - a monster that will shurely impresh! I'm hoping you'll be taking it in your hands!'

This, Arty explained, was the future. A motorcycle with automatic gearbox but also, unlike Moto Guzzi's Convert and Honda's CB750A (recent experiments back then), he told me it had plenty of power as at its heart was a turbo-charged Kawasaki Z1-R engine. But it was also a hideous carbuncle, a massive torque converter contributing to its pot-belly girth.

'I'm calling it the Freefist Slippy,' said Arty proudly. Given that I was employed in a marketing capacity, I convinced him to think again.

I managed to avoid riding the contraption for quite a while, until one fateful day when Arty said, ‘Shyril, we've been working for sheveral months and you've not yet ridden the beasht. For shure, you're needing thish for the true knowledge.'

For shure, I hadn't been looking forward to this moment. The only time I'd seen the machine in action had been in the hands of Arty, who would manfully wrestle it out of the carpark, vicious power surges and coarse and thudding ratio shifts causing his bubble-permed head to rock violently back and forth like a hairy bladder on a stick. However, the money was good and if I wanted to keep the work I needed to show willing.

The first 100 yards were fine. Yes, the change into second severely cricked my neck (I heard a definite twang) and when I throttled off slightly the instant lurch threw the borrowed and ill-fitting open-face helmet over my eyes. At this point I'd still not collided with anything, so it was going relatively well. But as I pushed the helmet off my eyes I thudded into a pothole, the jolt causing me to open the throttle no more than half an inch, but the result was disastrous.

With a sickening lurch the turbo kicked in, whipping my head back on my cricked neck, which locked solid with a blinding white flash of pain. I let go of the machine (by now, incidentally, called the Freebase Wristy) and tumbled off, bouncing into the road. I lay there helpless and watched its progress.

The chances of the riderless bike ploughing into a delegation from the Lesbian Society of Rotterdam, down to assess production of a new range of strap-on 'accessories', must have been a million to one. Luckily, there were no serious injuries, but quite a few nasty gashes.

Arty Boerelul and I parted company at that point and I never again heard of him or his Freebase Wristy. And I have to say that since that day I've had an aversion to anything that's automatic, straps on or is a diabolic combination of the two.

Absolute rotters

From Cyril's memoires dated 20 August 2006

When the MotoGP circus cavorted into Britain recently, it made me think not so much of the great victories, the thrilling skills, the memorable races, but rather of the downright skulduggery that has gone on down the years. Some rivalries reached such a pitch as to drive even level-headed riders to acts of near lunacy.

The spats between Phil Read and Bill Ivy in the Sixties were legendary and while Read’s manoeuvres on Ivy have been well documented, he’s been a tower of discretion in not revealing some of the provocation coming from ‘Little Bill’.

During the 1968 season the Yamaha team mates both had a chance of winning the 250 world championship. Things had been especially fraught during practice for the Dutch TT at Assen. The evening before the race, while Read was back at the hotel completing his life-size bust of Queen Elizabeth II made out of plum stones glued together with Bostik (a grotesque thing that he shows to visitors to this day) Bill nipped into town on a borrowed bicycle and returned with a packet of itching powder, which he emptied into his team-mate’s leathers hanging in the pit garage.

Race day came and although Read was leading comfortably he was clearly in some distress and began to lose ground. On lap 12 he pulled over and threw off his leathers and rode the rest of the race pretty much naked. He made up many places but narrowly lost to Ivy by a tenth of a second. With the Summer of Love fresh in the memory no one batted an eyelid at the time, in fact much of the Dutch crowd had consumed copious amounts of LSD, with many copulating openly in the grandstand. However, footage of the race was subsequently doctored using the latest Hollywood techniques to make Read appear fully clothed throughout.

Barry Sheene was always one for the ladies and it was with this in mind that his old rival Johnny Cecotto decided to attempt to put Sheene out of the 1977 Finnish Grand Prix. Cecotto aimed to ensure that Sheene was simply too tired to race to his full potential and through a series of messages sent via mechanics and local gofers arranged for a beautiful and indefatigable prostitute to be sent to Sheene’s room the night before the race.

However, there was a dreadful muddle and instead of a high-performance tart, Sheene took delivery of a nanny goat. Never one to be overawed and a keen practical joker himself, he set about milking the goat and by morning had produced several small cheeses and bowl of yoghurt, which he presented to a crestfallen Cecotto at breakfast. But Cecotto had the last laugh as Sheene, ever the perfectionist, had laboured feverishly on the dairy products throughout the night, at one point sending out for a second goat as the first batch of cheeses were not up to scratch but the original nanny had been squeezed dry. Our Bazza was too exhausted to put in his best performance on the track, finishing an uncharacteristic sixth while Cecotto took the win.

One of the great rivalries of recent times has been between Valentino Rossi and Max Biaggi. The most memorable manifestation of this was the infamous ‘fight’ between the two after the 2001 Catalunya Grand Prix. Much was made of it at the time but few real facts emerged. However, living in Italy I’ve made a few contacts in the racing fraternity and it appears the truth was stranger than any imagined scenario.

Italy is a country engulfed by superstitions dating back hundreds of years and that still hold sway, especially in rural parts of the peninsula. It seems Rossi and Biaggi had been involved in Il Passaggio della Cacca (The Passing of the Turd), a complex and ancient form of hexing with, to the outsider, an impenetrable set of rules. Basically, the hexer must touch the victim with a bony part of the body to pass on ‘the turd’, but the subsequent re-passing must be done with a body part appropriate to the strict rules of conduct. It seems that in the days prior to the race Biaggi had ‘toed’ Rossi and Rossi had ‘kneed’ Biaggi some time later. This went on even during the race where if one watches closely there’s a clear clash of elbows on lap seven, a complex manoeuvre that left Rossi with ‘the turd’. However, Rossi’s decisive use of the knuckles immediately after the race turded Biaggi once and for all, a crucial moment that even today seems to be dogging the Roman’s MotoGP career.

Kwaka-Gamma-Cow-Pow

From Cyril's memoirs dated 8 July 2006

Smiffy is a character from my past with whom I’ve had many adventures, several of which I’ve tried hard to forget, though they return in fevered dreams. I shall now tell you of one I’ve kept to myself for many years.

Carl Smith is one of the finest motorcycle mechanics I’ve ever met. Known to his mates as Smiffy or Smudger, we’ve been firm friends since school. He was a bull of a youngster, a superb lose-head prop and bore huge forearms which easily powered him to the position of school’s top arm-wrestler. And even at that relatively young age he already packed a fearsomely destructive punch.

In 1985 we both celebrated our 50^th birthdays and decided to mark the occasion with a motorcycle tour of Britain. I was working for Suzuki and got my hands on the then new RG500 Gamma – not ideal for touring, but hilarious two-stroke madness. Smiffy had his Kawasaki Z1000-engined Harris Magnum, a beast he’d spend years tuning to match his rather volatile but ever entertaining personality.

On a bright summer’s morning we headed for Dorset, for no other reason than as kids we’d had a great holiday together in Weymouth. Early on there were tedious dual carriageways to clear and what better way to clear them than quickly? It was still early morning and the long stretches of open tarmac were too much to resist so Smiffy and I lined our bikes up side by side and wound up the throttle.

I was caught napping with the Suzuki out of its power band and the Magnum pulled away in top gear on torque. Down a gear and the Gamma’s revs pushed to the magical 9000, the exhaust note crisped and Smiffy was reeled in. As I crouched behind the fairing I turned to see him braced hard against the wind blast. I flashed a victorious grin and screamed off with 148 on the clock. I didn’t know it then, but I’d sown the seeds of disaster. Smiffy has never taken defeat well. (As kids, we once battled to capture the most disgusting fart in a jam jar. After several attempts my gaseous resources were exhausted but I’d produced the most nasally damaging parp. Smiffy, straining desperately to produce one final example, went a little too far with dire consequences.) Laying the Magnum to waste had lit Smiffy’s fuse and he would have revenge.

We left the dual carriageway for a twisting B-road and the Magnum filled my mirrors. We came to a short straight which, at most, was good for 100mph before a sharp bend. Half way along the Magnum came by doing about 130. By the time I was braking hard Smiffy was bursting through a flimsy gate into a field, feet down and elbows raised like a motocrosser.

Somehow, he stayed upright. I found him sitting on the edge of a trough lighting a cigarette. The Magnum was his pride and joy and the thought of it being totalled in a crash had shaken him up. I approached with caution as at times of high excitement (and damaged pride) Smiffy could be unpredictable, but he smiled ruefully and we laughed about it.

As we chatted, a fat Friesian cow wandered over to drink from the trough. When it had finished, it lifted its tail and a steaming gush of piddle cascaded over the Magnum. Horrified, Smiffy leaped up and tried pushing the cow aside, but the pee kept coming and the cow wouldn’t shift. Incensed, Smiffy took a step back, threw off his jacket and let go with one of his trademark right hooks. Well, I’ve seen him lay out a few blokes in my time, but a cow? The creature’s back legs buckled, it lurched backwards, knocked the Magnum onto its side then squatted with its full weight on the bike. But the searingly hot engine against the cow’s backside caused it to jerk back up, wide-eyed and mooing, inadvertently head-butting Smiffy full in the face.

I’m afraid that was the end of our celebratory jaunt. As I said, Smiffy never could take defeat, and being knocked cold by a dairy cow was a personal disaster. To this day his explanation for the clearly broken nose involves a yarn about a gang of skinheads. And I, naturally, have never contested that in public. Until now.