Motorcycle Sport & Leisure Magazine December 2018 Back Issue

I wish it had been the tractor that I missed, but no – I went straight into the side of it. So instead I missed the best biking summer in living memory. Oh well, I guess it could have been a lot worse.

I will go into more detail about the crash in a later issue, but in a nutshell it was a rather big bang with a tractor on an old airfield, followed by a helicopter ride to the hospital, a good while on hospital food, then a load of daytime TV and hobbling around my house on crutches. Not the summer I had planned.

As I write this it has been seven months since the crash, and it looks like I’ve pretty much regained my pre-prang level of fitness (which isn’t that hard if you’re not very fit in the first place).Things are looking good. If I were a bike I would have been classed as a category S write off (structurally damaged but repairable) right after the crash, then lovingly rebuilt by the NHS mechanics, and now in full working order with some minor cosmetic blemishes. The curious thing about having some time away from work is that you start missing it much sooner than you realise. To try and claw my way back to normality and feel like I was working again I started to keep an eye on what was going on with the mag as soon as the NHS morphine wore off. One of the things that I particularly enjoyed was reading the correspondence.Thanks to everyone who has sent emails and letters with good wishes for a speedy recovery – they have been much appreciated.

And apologies if I haven’t replied to you all, there was a lot of mail to catch up with. Luckily, while I have been licking my wounds and slowly getting back into work again Tony has kept MSL going from month to month. He’s done a sterling job, but unfortunately his knees are playing up, so we’re both off bikes for the time being. It’s like two diabetics running a sweet shop – you can look but you can’t touch.