Fill Part -1 CBT Attempt 1

This is where I’d love to be able to inform my readers that I ran-away and just got a motorcycle licence and rode away in to the sun-set, with the occasional vague and warming recollection of learning to ride a motorcycle,

That wasn’t the case at all though,  and in the tradition of the now ‘wanked flat’ US comedy ‘How I Met Your Mother’ I’ll tell you it ended in me having a monumentally pathetic, but painful crash.

 February 2012 was bloody cold, supremely, unforgivingly bloody icy and snowy, doubly so when I was driving over to Peterborough on the morning of my CBT in my battered old Peugeot. I should add at this point that at the time I was studying for degree in something at Nottingham University but the plan was to drive home to Suffolk through Peterborough and pick up my CBT on the way (such a trifling matter I considered it) then quick blast down the A1 to tell my friends and family of my great feat of daring and gall farting about Peterborough scared fucking rigid of the beast of a Suzuki 125EN between my legs in the freezing cold.

I turned up at the CBT place, and sat in my car watching two blokes who clearly didn’t want to be there using shovels to break up the ice in the car-park and shovel it to a pile in one corner- this didn’t bode well.

The first bloke,  I’ll call him ‘Dick’ (because it IS funny)  waved me over

“Morning mate, I’m here for a CB…”
“Get in there and get kitted up, lot to cover today, you ridden before?”
“Erm…. I’ve had a go on a mates bike in a car park when I was 15”
“Great,  I’ll go and get you a bike out whilst you get kitted up.”

Ladies and gentlemen,  I won’t ‘call out’ this establishment, but Dick hadn’t filled me with the warmth and light I was expecting. I guess naïvely as my first attempt it’d be like being stuck in the ‘Home and Away’ theme song,  all warmth and loveliness with the sort of people who’d go to the ends of the world to make sure I left a reasonably competent motorcyclist ready to deal with all the demands of riding a motorcycle.

“Hold me in your arms and don’t let me go…”

(Or, the version I sing to my wife’s great alarm whilst she’s watching the aforementioned dose of antipodean escapism…. “I’ll do you up the bum and make you squeak…” it does fit rather nicely in the melody,  try it.)

The day only got worse really,  I’ll just use phrases to describe the rest of the day in the interests of brevity – The Greatest Hits of Dick if you will;

“Pretend that this mark on the ground is a junction, and that that line of ice represents the lane down the centre of the road….”

“If you can’t get figure-of-eights,  you probably shouldn’t be riding a bike”
 

Most worryingly in the back of my mind were;

“That bike does that sometimes,  if it does it on the road-ride just roll of the throttle, pull the clutch in then let it out again and it’ll usually restart”

“That neutral light is a bit funny, just ignore it”

There was also a bonus track, a rather heavy 12” Extended Remix of “Why everybody should vote UKIP” which was given to me as a radio test before venturing out on the road.

Needless to say, I went home £100 down after the road-ride was abandoned halfway through due to snow, and told to come back another day….

…Which I’ll tell you about next time.