The Daily Novel

In the dream I had bought a much older and lighter Yamaha motor cycle to replace my trusty but heavy Yamaha Majesty 250 cc scooter. I had made the purchase quickly and when I got it home I found that it’s performance was inadequate. I made some enquiries and discovered that it was indeed a brilliant bike, much loved by a devoted band of enthusiasts. But the company’s product. To work well this Yamaha required a modification which involved fitting an extra six exhaust pipes. Making this a motor bike looking like no other on the roads. Many people found that the seven ribbed fan on the side of the bike was ugly. But to the enthusiasts, who included one of my colleagues in City University’s music department, it was not only beautiful but an example of engineering excellence. The company did not make this modication. You had to buy the kit from the band of enthusiasts for 935 pounds.

I don’t think it is likely that Yamaha, or any other company, ever made such a bike, so instead of checking it out on the web, I thought a bit about how my sleeping mind had come to write this nonsense drama.

At yesterday’s meeting I had to meet a fresh face from union headquarters, and in the social chit chat before we got down to business I told him that it had taken me 48 minutes to reach City University by public transport, whereas it would have taken me 13 minutes on my scooter, which is now garaged in Dorset. He told me that he had walked from HQ in twenty minutes, but that he too preferred the speed and convenience of two-wheeled transport. He had a 900 cc Yamaha, which he did not use yesterday, because he has recently moved to deepest Surrey and comes up to London on the train.

I told him that my first bike was a 125 cc BSA Bantam, which had by far the biggest sale of in Britain in the 1950s, before the Japanese arrived, spearheaded by Honda, and drove BSA of the face of the earth. We might have gone on to discuss whether British manufacturing declined because of conservative and slothful managers or because of bully boy and conservative trade unionists. But instead we got down to business, which involved trying to protect our members from the effects of the new fashionable managerialism which is sweeping the British university sector.

Back to the dream. Now it serves as a reminder that I too suffer from the dread disease of conformity. My first bike was in fact a 1928 Raleigh 250 cc which I bought for 15 pounds from my saved up pocket money. It was a huge weight to push when the engine gave up, which it did occasionally. So I sold it for 20 pounds and bought, for 25 pounds,a 125 cc James, a lively and smashing bike. It had a modified exhaust  which stuck out at an odd angle and made rather a lot of noise, which alarmed my family. So I did the ’sensible’ thing; traded it in and bought for seventy pounds on hire purchase a BSA Bantam.

In truth, I never liked it that much. It made heavy weather of the hills, and girl on the back was liable to jump off and run up the hill, it was so excrutiatingly slow. And it stopped frequently. I became something of an expert at tickling the carburettor to get it going again. But that is no fun on a rainy night on the Birmingham New Road.

Why on earth did I not have the courage of my convictions and keep the James? And why am I presently a slave to Microsoft, even though its huge programs slow my computer down to a snail’s pace?

And why do I continue to use my mobile phone to communicate with BT and npower when they make no effort at all to sort out their mistakes and apologise for them?