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I’ve not been inside The Basement for most of this last month. There have been a number of reasons for this, one of the best is I’ve actually been out on motorcycles. Awkwardly, none of the motorcycles were my own, though I did loan my Triumph to a friend, Michael Ernst, in
Germany when he managed to seize his Hercules during the ISDT centennial rally at Carlisle. Mike was a bit despondent to say the least, while I was running around taking pictures and wondering how I was going to take more pictures elsewhere and do the run too. The solution was simple, Mike rode my Triumph and I nipped away in the van. It was interesting to hear the bike pull away as few of us ever get to experience the sound of our own machines – the exhaust being to the rear of our hearing. Yes, you can argue about any model of a make all sounding the same as each other and I suppose they probably do, or did when they were new but still, hearing your own bike roar off is nice. There is the other thing with loaning a bike for a friend to ride – will it keep going? Will it hold together, what happens if it stops? Luckily, Mike is the owner of a large Matchless trials bike and he competes in German trials so is fairly au fait with Brit bike mechanics. At the lunch stop, as he rumbled in, he was all smiles… Tim