Random Musings
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School results day has become one of those annual media rituals that now arrives with all the subtlety of a royal wedding. Television crews descend on schools. Reporters wait outside the gates. Teenagers are encouraged to wave bits of paper in the air while photographers search for the perfect shot. And I find myself wondering when this became normal. When I sat my exams, you didn't even go to…
I noticed a tin of baked beans in the cupboard while reaching for a coffee pod - yes, I know, not exactly eco-friendly - and found myself looking at the words Baked Beans. Baked beans. They are not baked, are they? I had never really thought about this before, which is odd because I have been eating them for most of my life. You open the tin, tip them into a saucepan, heat them up and eat them. Or…
Hay is convinced Amazon is listening to her. She looks briefly at something online, or mentions it at home, and within hours she is being followed around the internet by adverts for it. Shoes, furniture, kitchen equipment, whatever it happens to be. Amazon has apparently stationed a small commercial intelligence unit in the sitting room. I don't get that. I can spend days looking at motorcycles,…
One day into the restoration, the £250 Watsonian already started explaining itself. The image below, I should explain, is not the finished article, but the template. The trouble with bringing home an old sidecar is that it does not remain merely an old sidecar for long. Yesterday it was a faded black Watsonian Monza which Hay thought looked like the first car from a Big Dipper I was planning to…
Buying an old sidecar, I have discovered, does not really involve choosing a sidecar. It involves staring at photographs of damp gardens, workshop floors and unidentified ironmongery, trying to decide whether the wheel belongs to the thing being sold or merely happened to be passing through when the photograph was taken. The original idea was simple enough. Buy an old sidecar for a few hundred…
Lying in bed one night, I woke up thinking about the portable air conditioner. This is the sort of thing that apparently occupies my mind in the small hours. One inlet and 2 outlets. At least, that was how it appeared. Cold air came back into the room through one outlet. Hot air went outside through the other. "Hang on. If air was being pumped out of the room, where was its replacement coming…
People say buy cheap, buy twice. Not always. Sometimes you buy cheap once, discover you've bought rubbish, then keep it for years because throwing it away feels like admitting it has beaten you. My latest example is a Terratek rotary tool. I thought it would be useful for the GT6, the bike and all those little jobs where an angle grinder would be considered excessive. It boasts 234 accessories.…
Watsonian has been building sidecars since 1912, which places it among that select group of British manufacturers whose products have survived wars, recessions, changing fashions and the repeated efforts of the British motorcycle industry to abolish itself. Its sidecars belong to an age when a motorcycle combination was not merely an eccentric weekend toy. It was family transport, commercial…
There is a small absurdity in buying second-hand motorcycle clothing on Facebook Marketplace. Motorcycling is supposedly a pastime built around speed, machinery and a faint disregard for convention. Yet the used clothing market appears to have been designed almost entirely for fat bikers with 40-inch wastes. Waist, obviously, but given the amount of surplus material involved, the misspelling seems…
I drive for a living. I have now covered thousands of miles without an accident. There are 2 tempting conclusions. There are 2 tempting conclusions. The first is that I must be an exceptionally good driver. The second is that the law of averages is waiting behind a hedge with a clipboard. Neither is quite right. Experience matters. The more miles I drive, the better I become at spotting the little…
