Seeing the wood for the trees…

The metaphor of life as a road is everywhere: the long and winding road, the paths we take, choosing the path less trodden, taking a different road, getting off the highway, getting out of the fast lane. The imagery is seductively simple – life is moving forwards down the road and, along the way, we face choices about which direction to take. Radical choices equate to turning on to the back-roads, more conventional ambitions involve speeding down the main drag.

This has been much on my mind this week.

Last Friday I was lucky enough to be invited to a preview night for an event which is quite a big thing in my world – The Bike Shed Motorcycle Club’s annual bash in London; a celebration of custom motorcycles, art, design, photography, tattoos and film. The BSMC is an umbrella for a group of custom bike builders, artists, artisans, writers and so on who share a passion for what they do. It’s fun, and it helps them market their wares too. 

I had one of those good times which is so good you don’t notice you’re having it. Surrounded by machines so brilliant you could get lost in staring at them, supping beer with friends and meeting a host of new people all of whom gave off a vibe which chimed perfectly with my own, listening to tunes, luxuriating in the things I love. I could have stayed there a week.

And I took that warm feeling of contentment in to the weekend, which was a mad series of children’s parties and kids’ football tournaments and wine with friends. Didn’t really have time to think too much about anything, until I found myself jammed in to a crushed train carriage at 7am on Monday morning on the first commute of the week.

And suddenly thinking about that lovely Friday night didn’t make things better, it made things worse. The BSMC event wasn’t a great night out with wonderful people any longer, it was a cruel glimpse of a better world, a peek around the heavy curtain which divides the everyday from the exceptional.

Which was when it occurred to me that much of the joy I’d got from Friday wasn’t just the event and the vibe, it was more subtle than that. I was surrounded by people who’d made The Leap. In each case, these guys had had their version of my moment on the train and decided to do something about it. There must have been tortuous conversations with partners, worries about finances, decisions to place quality of life ahead of income, willingness to be nervous, to take on the risk. Perhaps there had even been difficult truths to face: if you make what you love your business, is there a danger of polluting it?

I came to see, with a smile, that one of the reasons I had enjoyed myself so much on Friday was that I had been surrounded by courage. Not in the sudden and dramatic  sense I used to see in another life years ago in various parts of the world, but a more gentle, consistent courage. These guys had all had the guts to chase their dreams and to aim not for riches and “things” but for happiness. Given the uncertainties of modern life, that’s bravery indeed.

The moments which define us are not occasional, they’re constant. Some people have realised this. They understand that life isn’t just a road with junctions along the way in which only your decisions about whether to turn off or not matter. They’ve decided to enjoy the whole drive.

I’m glad I know them.

NB: These images come from a wonderful gallery on the Elders Helmets Facebook page. They’re nice, and their helmets are great, so don’t steal their stuff (more than I have). The first and last pictures are by the annoyingly talented Andrew Zofka and he owns them. Don’t steal his stuff at all, pictures are his living (and you can see a gallery full of his excellent work on the Bike Shed MC fb page here).

Bigger, Faster, Stronger, Better.

 In a short track called “Little Room” Jack White once described the dangers of things going too well, too soon:

“Well you’re in your little room, and you’re working on something good,

“But if it’s really good, you’re gonna need a bigger room,

“And when you’re in the bigger room you might not know what to do,

“You might need to think about how you got started, sitting in your little room.”

Presumably the ex-White Stripes front-man was thinking about his own meteoric musical rise and the difficulty in staying in touch with the raw genius which got him there, but these days I’d like to play the track to every software designer and marketing manager in the world.

Why? Because no industry on Earth is more guilty of working harder to make things worse in the name of “progress”.

The list is almost endless, but off the top of my head and from personal experience here’s a list of products I use (or used) which were great but are now rubbish thanks to the ceaseless drive to constantly re-launch them as something better:

• Football Manager, the game
• Apple’s iTunes
• The Times newspaper’s iPad app
• Microsoft’s Windows platform
• Apple’s Podcasts app

Each of these led their markets. They were innovative, user-friendly, popular and well-regarded. Now they are often derided, frustrating, over-complex, counter-intuitive and, well, worse. And not worse because they’ve been over-taken by better things; they’re worse because huge amounts of time and money has been spent on making them worse.

Why?

The evils of marketing. Every one of these products is made by a company with a major marketing department. The marketing department didn’t think of the initial idea, nor did it build the initial product. What it did was worry that unless it persuaded those who did that they needed to constantly reinvent their offering, people wouldn’t buy it or use it any more. The reason they worry about this is they know all their competitors have marketing departments too.

This is how marketing departments justify their existence, as far as I can tell.

 So in the case, for example, of The Times, the marketing department is now fighting a desperate rear-guard action to placate thousands of angry users of the new, useless, app, whilst the developers work just as hard to try to make it as good as it used to be when everyone loved it when it was the best newspaper app in the market. Before they “improved” it.

As he did in so many areas of life the late, great Douglas Adams foresaw this trend in his (“increasingly ineptly named five-part trilogy”) The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

The residents of one planet get so sick of all the useless middlemen – marketing execs, management consultants etc – that they stage a fake escape from their “doomed” home planet. It’s a ruse, and only the useless, parasitic third of the population actually leaves on what they mistakenly believe to be “Arc B”, one of three escape ships. Crash-landing on a new planet they begin to build a new civilization. Three years later, when Ford Prefect, the central character, visits them again, they have yet to manage to make either fire or the wheel.

Ford remonstrates with the “Fire Project Development Team Leader” (a girl who was a marketing manager on her home world) that it’s inconceivable that they have failed to construct a wheel or make fire within three years:

“Well, you’re obviously being totally naive of course”, said the girl, “When you’ve been in marketing as long as I have, you’ll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.”

The crowd were tense. They were expecting something wonderful from Ford. “Stick it up your nose,” he said.

“Which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know,” insisted the girl, “Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?”

“And the wheel,” said the Captain, “What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project.”

“Ah,” said the marketing girl, “Well, we’re having a little difficulty there.”

“Difficulty?” exclaimed Ford. “Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It’s the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!”

The marketing girl soured him with a look.

“Alright, Mr. Wiseguy,” she said, “if you’re so clever, you tell us what colour it should be.”

For anyone who’s been around a marketing department or a management consultancy, this is horribly close to the bone.

The relentless desire to improve and progress things has always been one of Humanity’s greatest assets, but where marketing is concerned it’s a “false flag operation”. Marketeers aren’t actually interested in making things better, they really just want to make things appear new again. They believe that with constant renewal they can sell the same thing to customers again and again and again.

The reality is that some things are just very good. If you try to renew them every year all you really do is dilute or subsume what people liked about them in the first place.

Which is why it would be nice, sometimes, if senior figures at these companies had the courage to simply say: “You know what? Let’s leave it alone, people seem to like it as it is.”

The problem is that doesn’t tick many “ deliverables” boxes on an Excel spreadsheet, does it?

Get your Blackberry running, head out on the highway…

“Good morning sir. May I help you?”

“Yes, hello, I’m after a new, edgier lifestyle please. I’d like to look mad, bad and dangerous to know. I’d quite like to alarm the elderly in service station cafes but I’m struggling because I’m an advertising account manager from Basingstoke and I drive a Vauxhall estate. What do you have?”

“You’re in the right place sir. You have various options but I would recommend our ‘Back Road Outlaw’ package with the ‘Utah Fugitive’ extras. An off-the-shelf bike which looks like a hand-built custom, a fake Hell’s Angels outfit (and this month we have a special on helmets with a death’s head painted on them), and two free lessons with a real badass to help you perfect your 1,000 yard stare and general air of quiet menace. £21,876, full finance packages available and we do take Amex.”

Now, I don’t know that this conversation takes place in Harley-Davidson dealerships, but I do know that a version of it does, every day. Here, for example, is Harley’s latest advert:

…or you could take up oil painting, perhaps.

It’s not complicated is it? Are you a normal bloke living a normal lifestyle? Is life boring? Buy one of our bikes and you’ll be transformed into a risk-taking member of the sub-culture who just doesn’t care (thanks to our affordable payment protection insurance package). For God’s sake, the firm’s latest bike is called “The Breakout” (turn your back on the 9 to 5 drudge – from £15,645).

When the big market crash happened in 2008 sales of Harley motorcycles absolutely imploded. They’re very expensive, and they’re all lifestyle choice as opposed to working bikes, so nobody was buying them. How did Harley survive? By selling clobber. Sales of jackets with screaming eagles on, boots with rivets in, t-shirts proclaiming the owner was “Born to die” etc.

In fact the group made more money from selling accessories, extras and clothing in recent years than it did from selling bikes.

And the top of the list of marketing genius (for that is what it is), is the HOG. The Harley Owners’ Group. A “sponsored community marketing club” run by Harley-Davidson itself.

Like “Chapters” of the Hell’s Angels, it is divided into countless local units. HOG Surrey, HOG South Dakota, HOG Iceland. Members wear huge back-patches proclaiming their particular local group on leather jackets, together with various rank and sub-set patches. It is, unashamedly, a take-off of the uniforms of real “back-patch/one-percenter” bike gangs, notably (but far from exclusively) the Angels. It’s little different to those guys who go paint-balling dressed as members of Marine Corps 1st Recon Battalion.

And all harmless enough. These guys are on bikes, to be fair to them, and that can only be a good thing.

Except part of it still annoys me, when I’m not laughing at them. Specifically, the way it’s deemed okay to take someone’s life-style (and membership of the Hell’s Angels, also known as the “Red & White”, is absolutely a lifestyle, involving huge sacrifice in other areas of life) and simply appropriate the trappings of it to flog stuff. None of this is helped by the way many HOG groups behave. Sure, lots are mid-50s accountants who, when they’re not giving it the full Brando, are trying to beat Nigel on that tricky dog-leg par four, but some clearly take it far too seriously.

Mad, bad and probably an Independent Financial Advisor

A few years ago my friend Mark and I helped some great guys from Harley’s European HQ in Oxford to organise a charity ride for the veterans’ charity Help For Heroes. They were great and invited us to the end of ride party at the Harley building, which included bands and food. The pay-off was we provided some security on certain doors. I remember one HOG chapter arriving en masse only to discover that the band they’d come to see, from their patch, had been moved down the bill. They watched their band and then roared off in high dudgeon, refusing to speak to anyone.

The Angels, and other back patch gangs, get a bad press. Some of it is deserved – drugs, weapons, murder, all realities sometimes. In fact the US Department of Justice classifies the Hell’s Angels as an “organised crime syndicate”, rightly or wrongly.

Australian Hell’s Angel. Jacket displays badges of rank, amongst other things.

But the truth is that the vast majority are trying to live a different kind of life to most of us, and if they’re left alone to do it are no threat to anyone. Alright, most should be fairly high up on your list of folk not to pick a fight with, but they’re not in the habit of bringing trouble to those outside their world (unlike, let us admit, tens of thousands of clean-shaven, well-dressed young men in town and city centres across Britain every Friday and Saturday night – if the Hell’s Angels behaved like that the government would call out the army).

And being an Angel is a serious business. It takes years to finally get the right to wear your full patch. Years of hard work, given-up weekends, graft and commitment (and no, that’s not about biting the heads off bats, it’s about getting known by the rest of the Chapter and accepted, about showing you understand what’s required of you, about showing you mean it). There are also the unseen sacrifices. The partner you choose will have to share your passion, or the relationship is doomed; you will need to have a job which gives you your weekends, so there aren’t many senior execs involved.

Not an unusual reception…

It’s a big thing, and all these sacrifices are in the name of belonging, of sharing a passion for a certain lifestyle and for the love of your “brothers”. It’s about putting community before self. Actually the Angels could teach the rest of society a thing or two about cohesion.

What it isn’t is a game of pretend. Quite the opposite. In fact, in the case of some of the “issues” which exist between the Hell’s Angels and the Outlaws MC here in England, it’s often deadly.

The reality is that many of us lead increasingly homogenous lives. We go to the office, looking much the same, tap away at a PC, come home to houses which are much the same and, come the weekend, we all do much the same things. It’s sad but true. That’s why the opportunity to allow people to dip into a sub-culture is marketing gold. You can get outside your humdrum life for a few hours and right in to another one. That’s not a bad thing, it’s probably healthy, but you can do it without aping the real thing, which simply shows how little you really understand it.

Riding bikes is fabulous, and if we bikers are honest it’s also a little of this sub-culture theft I’ve mentioned, whatever you ride. But the HOG guys take it to a point I can’t help finding both disrespectful and, frankly, hilarious. I just kind of wish these folk could enjoy riding their bikes and the company of their mates without needing to get a kick out of worrying pensioners by dressing up as someone else.

In which I write from recent notes…

Morocco.

Africa, although not my bit. Swings wildly between feeling like the continent it’s part of and being a world away in the East. Berbers jokingly say that’s not Eastern, it’s Berber – those Arabs and French were just passing through.

Travelling again though, in dusty places. It’s all good.

And sure enough, early reminders of how much better a world we live in than those who’ve never been out in it would have you believe. I buy cigarettes at a kiosk in a muddy side street of a mountain town. Tourist central it isn’t. School-girls buying fruit giggle at my paleness, jibbering to one another in Berber and a little French. Around the corner for a cafe noir – thickness of custard, of course –  and a glass of water and a smoke. Cigarette kiosk man appears, taps the side of his head and rolls his eyes in the internationally understood gesture for “I’m such an idiot me, I shouldn’t be allowed out”, and hands me some extra change, having got the sums wrong earlier. He’d come looking.

The world is this way. Work has often taken me to witness the worst of it, sometimes unimaginably so, but I know the world is full of kiosk man; smiling, honest, wanting to connect. You won’t ever read about him in The Daily Express, mind.

Travelling again reminds me of this. That’s a good start.

Who else is sat out here having a breakfast coffee? For sure this place is mercifully free of mentions as “an authentic local cafe” in anyone’s Rough Guide. I can tell because it’s not full of disappointed back-packers lamenting the lack of promised authenticity and resenting all their peers, whose very presence denies it to them.

Berber men, young and old, sharing a joke and some news. Older ones in woollen singlets, younger ones in shell suits bearing the legend of Bayern Munich or Manchester City. No women.

Long walk up a mountain, then it’s evening, and the night is filled with the unmistakable sounds of North African dusk – cicadas chirruping, bellowing mules, the early ping of bat sonar, barking dogs and, of course, the baleful howl of a 50cc scooter being thrashed up a mountain-side to within an inch of its life. Probably two-up.

And then it’s prayers. I think I count six different mosques, although with the sounds reverberating off the valley walls it’s hard to be sure. Still one of the most evocative sounds I’ve ever heard, it never fails to move me. And, joyfully, I realise that the Imams are competing, trying to out-do one another because they know the acoustics and the wind, when it’s right, mean everyone can hear all of them. They’ve all got x-factor Simon, no need for you here.

And the next day I’m suddenly back in Iraq, or so it feels. The town could be in Al-Basra somewhere; from the broken, muddy tarmac to the architecture. It’s eerily similar as I walk over rubble-strewn ground between windowless apartment blocks. Except it’s different, because I just walk.

Then high in to the Atlas for trekking under the snow peaks. Guide’s an angel, full of news and gossip and knowledge. Tea with her friends and as the bread comes from the clay oven the green tea emerges too, my secret addiction from travels past. I drink more than is polite but in return they get to laugh at me, so we’re all happy. And Selma, a beautiful baby girl of seven months, who finds my ability to cross my eyes hilarious. I like Selma. Selma will be a heart-breaker one day I expect.

And Berber children so well-mannered and keen and shy and funny and mischievous. Just like English children. My young son, atop a mule in the hot sun with a Berber boy hitching a lift along for the adventure clinging to his waist. My kid offers his water bottle to his fellow rider. The boy’s laugher rings out, even drowning out the noise of the stream we’re climbing up. The joke? The white kid is sharing his water bottle with him – never happened before, apparently. The lad swigs heavily, wipes the neck of the bottle on a dusty sleeve and passes it back with a grin. “Merci,” attempts my lad. “Bonjour!” shouts the Berber kid, trying just as hard. They understand one another in way older kids would struggle with. Adults wouldn’t be in the game at all.

And at dusk, at the top of the climb,  we rejoin the battered Mercedes mini-bus-cum-truck which dropped us at the bottom hours before and head down the mountain, stopping every few hundred meters to pick up anyone walking and drop them wherever they’re going.

Very old woman with younger female companion. It’s a long way up in to the back of the jacked-up truck, so I offer my hand. She hands me her white sack, with a wide grin (I suspect this may be as funny as the water bottle thing for the kids earlier). The grin, though, is as nothing compared to the laughter which follows when I put the bag down only to turn around and discover it’s moved. I pick it up again and it hurls itself sideways, making me exclaim.

Rabbits. The bag’s full of rabbits. A house-warming gift for friends down the valley. Everyone laughs at me, and they don’t even try to pretend otherwise. It’s not malicious though, it’s just genuinely funny. It is too – I look a prat, and I’m laughing.

Just been away a few days so far. Different kind of travelling with the family; no dramas here, no whisky and smokes to get through checkpoints, no “which way will this go?”. But travel nonetheless, and adventure of a sort, filtered through the eyes and ears of a boy of five. Perfect.

I’m reminded that I know this is a wonderful world, something I’d forgotten of late. I hope the little one understands. I need to remember it too, back home.

The Call Of The Mild

That rarest of things, a sunny week in the UK. Alright, as I write it’s pouring with rain, but we had a week which any impartial observer would have struggled not to agree was Spring-like.

Always a joy, but also a reminder that not everything is as it seems.

Walking through London this week I passed small area of grass and trees, perhaps forty meters square or so. It was lunchtime and this little green oasis amid the concrete was so packed with people it reminded me of sea-birds fighting for nesting space on a cliff.

 Office workers and tourists vied for room to stretch their feet out and munch on a £5 sandwich, down a bottle of water and generally feel the soft, cool grass on their backsides and the dapples of sunshine through the branches. And good for them, it made them happy, but it reminded me of something else.

Sometimes on my way home to the country I have to fuel the Land Rover. I stop at a big garage, one of those which doubles as a supermarket and a fast food restaurant. And sometimes I use the lavatory, where the walls are painted floor to ceiling in images of a rolling field full of sunflowers and where they pipe in the sound of birdsong.

As one relieves oneself, one is, I think, meant to feel the welcoming scale of horizons, of blue skies and nature in all its glory.

It makes for a reasonable piss, true enough, but it also leaves me wondering how people have got to the point where three minutes’ exposure to fake birdsong and two-dimensional sunflowers whilst having a dump provides a window to relax in.

The answer, of course, is that for lots of people (and not only those who live in the city) this really is their moment in the great outdoors for the week. Days which run: house, car, train, metro, office, metro, train, car, house leave little room for communing with nature.

Which is a pity, because it’s not good for their health. The reason city folk dash for a three-foot square patch of grass when the sun emerges is that as a species we haven’t yet evolved to live in cities; our development hasn’t caught up with our oh-so-clever way of concentrating ourselves together. 

It’s why we crave room and light, it’s why we get inexplicably and suddenly angry when people infringe what we regard as our personal space, it’s why days under neon lead to headaches and stress, it’s why millions of us have pictures of landscapes or beaches on our computer desktops.

It’s why a London friend I picked up from the station near my house in the sticks recently commented that we had “big skies”. We don’t, I told him, that’s just the sky. The difference is that you can see it here.

That’s where we’re meant to be, psychologically and physiologically. That is the habitat animals like us are designed to live in.

 A cleverer person than me might be able to tell you when that will change, how many thousands or tens of thousands of years we’ll have to live literally on top of one another and in places where we can’t see the horizon before we adapt to it.

But in the meantime we’re busy regarding our cities as the pinnacle of our achievements as a species, one of the grand examples of what separates us from the other animals.

I can’t help thinking of that lavatory and wondering whether the squirrels are laughing at us.

It’s A Kind Of Magic

Yesterday evening as the sun began to sink, bathing everything in a honey glow, I found myself standing in an echoing space holding a long brush and a bag of wood shavings and pondering the nature of spirituality.

No, not an art installation in Shoreditch, but the garage beside my house. It’s where the Land Rover usually lives. I swept it out, removing eons-worth of mud and dust and leaves, then I covered the Landy-generated oil spill with the wood shavings, stamped it down and locked up again. The Landy was around the corner, under a car port in the yard. Tonight I’ll deal with the wood shavings.

I need the space, you see, for my motorcycle, which arrives in a few days.

I’ve been without a bike for a little over a year. Sure I’m looking forward to riding it but actually, as I stood there in the middle of this now empty space, there was something more. I’m going to enjoy it being there, existing there. I’m going to look forward to talking to it, to looking after it, to having a partnership with it, as one does with bikes.

The thing about a car is that however impressive it is, when all’s said and done you operate it. Wheels are turned, gear-sticks shifted, switches pressed and when these things are done mechanics, hydraulics and electronics “happen” and your input is translated in to action from the car. From a Pagani Zonda to an Austin Allegro this is true.

Bikes are different because your body, your physical self, plays an integral part in the process. You share the responsibility for making progress with the machine. Where you put your weight, how much you trust it and thus how far you are prepared to lean and climb about on it dictate how it corners, handles and performs. Sometimes it saves you from yourself, sometimes you boss it. It’s a two way thing in a way that driving a car never can be, however it throws you about.

Left to its own devices a bike, unlike a car, will simply fall over: a metaphor for your relationship with it. 

And the consequence of all this is bikers begin to think of their rides as more than a machine. Deep down we know it’s just metal and aluminium and plastic; of course it is. But we also begin to think it has a soul, a spirit. We do things together with it, we look after each other. We’re a team.

I sold my last bike because I was full of guilt about taking the risks – and they are real – now that I’m a parent. The reality, though, is it is a huge part of me and below being a dad and a husband I think riding defines me more than anything else; more than my job, or my income, my class or my politics. Without it there’s a background hum of sadness about me, a gentle reverberation of glumness. I’m not quite complete.

I’ve tried to mitigate it by buying a bike which won’t cope with commutes to London or winter riding (both of which I’ve done for years), and I’m going to further mitigate it by removing certain other risks from my life – smoking, too much booze, not enough exercise and so on (all of which are more dangerous to me than the bike, I suspect).

So as I stood in the empty garage I found myself thinking about where my tool boxes can go, and where I could get a chair, and wondering whether the wifi and the radio will work. The space came alive before my eyes to become a warm, happy place full of promise and excitement, contentment and labour, a place to escape to and feel comfortable. It buzzed a little, despite the bare, whitewashed walls and empty floor.

Bikes can do that, you see, because they’re just a little bit magical.

What Do You Think You Look Like?

 With exception of some people’s particular sexual peccadilloes, most of us stop “dressing up” at about the age of eight. Before that it’s deemed perfectly socially acceptable to invite your friends around and spend an afternoon delving into an old wicker hamper packed with the clothing ingredients to transform yourself in to a pirate, a soldier, a fairy princess or a spaceman.

And then of course we grow up. It’s not that these fantasies completely abate, but we live them out more subtly; behind the wheel of a car, perhaps, or on the five-a-side football field. The big difference is that these adult fantasies don’t involve dressing up to look like something we’re not.

Except it seems that now they do.

Near where I used to live in south London there’s an old, weather-worn shop of little note from the outside. Inside, though, it has been, for two decades, a haven for motorcyclists. Ancient leathers and wax jackets from Lewis and Belstaff and other great names of the past, Bell open-face helmets, old doe-skin gloves. None of it cutting edge in terms of warmth or protection but all possessed of a certain style which, if you rode certain kinds of bikes, fitted nicely. On a good day you could part with £70 and be in the pub on the corner by lunchtime in possession of a lovely 80s Barbour bike jacket which, with some TLC, would be great for your summer commute on the machine you ran.

The shop’s still there, but I don’t go in any more. I can’t afford to. Now there’s an organic coffee bar in the back, complete with old motorcycle race posters and kit for the customers to lounge around amidst, looking hip, and that bargain Belstaff jacket full of holes these days will be £400.

Why? Because the shop doesn’t really sell to bikers any more. It sells to people who share one thing in common – they don’t ride bikes.

The “biker-look” is in vogue like never before. And it’s not just any biker look, it appears. It’s retro-biker. Here’s the beautiful Kate Moss wearing a jacket from that very shop for a Vogue photo-shoot. 

I know it’s fashion, and I know how daft that is – a marketing triumph like no other in human history that encourages people to throw away good, expensive clothes because they’re no longer fashionable and buy more, good, expensive clothes because they are. You have to admire the evil genius of it.

Now I hang around with a lot of retro-bikers. They’re not retro because they hark back to a different stylistic age, they’re retro because they never left it. They’ve been skint pretty much forever, so they don’t wear an £800 Rukka jacket which is hyper-protective and will keep out the worst weather imaginable; no, they wear a slightly naff leather jacket they bought off a mate who bought it off a mate who swapped it for half a pound of Dutch rolling tobacco in 2001.

They wear battered “piss-pot” helmets not because Steve McQueen did, but because many of them they have long shaggy beards which won’t fit in a full-face and because most of them chain smoke, including when riding.

Real bikers nipping to the Spar for 20 Richmond and a Ginsters

But walk through London now and you see legions of young men who have payed hundreds and hundreds of pounds to look like my mate Frog. Perhaps without the pipe and the beer belly, I’ll grant you, but otherwise these chiseled young hipsters are dressing like a 55-year-old retired welder from Hull.

Equally I know guys who ride retro bikes and wear older kit because it “fits”. In the same way you wouldn’t wear an Alpinestars one-piece race suit on a BSA, you don’t wear a Barbour Trialmaster on a GSXR (although I’ve seen it done).

Recently the Financial Times newspaper’s weekly magazine, the numblingly-crassly named “How To Spend It”, ran a feature on where to get that “authentic” biker look. Not just a biker look, mark you, but an “authentic” biker look. It seems you can be an “authentic” biker without a bike, but you need the kit to be worn in already, otherwise you won’t look biker-like enough. Which translates as “If it’s not worn-in you won’t look like you ride a bike, although you don’t, obviously, because you have a Porsche.”

Mr McQueen. The real thing.

Incredibly this gets worse. Steve McQueen was a very cool guy. He was handsome, manly, famous and a true biker (and, indeed, driver), competing in numerous race events. He wore both Barbour and Belstaff kit in many of them. Why? Because in the 60s it was good kit. Now Barbour will sell you a Steve McQueen replica jacket with fake mud splatters on to match the ones in the photo of Steve wearing it.

Barbour McQueen “Tribute Jacket” with fake mud. Not the real thing.

That’s fake mud splatters folks. FAKE. MUD. SPLATTERS.

For only £500 you can buy a bike jacket which looks like you’ve just hopped off your bike after a trials event, without the inconvenience of having to do something so awful as actually ride a bike or be forced to interact with all those horrible, (genuinely) muddy bikers who are so awful they wear exactly what you wear, but don’t know they’re fashionable. Can you imagine not knowing whether your outfit is “in”? Shocking; those actual bikers are so fake.

Belstaff make great bike jackets, but they’re bulky and full of armour and not really ideal for lounging in pubs in. Not to worry though because they now also make replica versions without the armour, the clever materials, the waterproofing, the triple-stitching or anything. The replicas, from their boutique on London’s fashionable King’s Road, cost more than the bike jackets. There really are people out there who are that stupid. Loads of them, it seems.

What puzzles me is that I genuinely can’t work out what these people think they look like. I really can’t.

Do some of them smear a little oil on their hands before going to the pub, or carry fake keys with a Triumph key-fob? Perhaps they do, but they are undoubtedly dressing up just as much, and in exactly the same way, as my five year old does when he puts a plastic plant pot on his head, grabs a stick and sets off to slay a “dragon”.

It’s kind of like Frog turning up to our local bike cafe in a suit from Daks of Jermyn Street with a copy of the FT tucked under his arm. He doesn’t go about dressing up as an office worker, why do they feel the need to dress as him?

I don’t know the answer, but I do know that the main issue for me is that the longer these buffoons push the prices of great old bike kit up, the fewer actual bikers will be able to afford to wear it because all the genuine stuff gets sold to idiots on eBay now, rather than sold between riders. Which leads inexorably to the delicious irony that within a few years anyone you see dressed like a biker probably isn’t.

So here’s a plea. If you’re the kind of slack-jawed idiot who’s thinking about splurging £600 on a Belstaff jacket, please don’t. Spend it on tickets to see Michael Macintyre at the O2, or on a stag night in Dublin, or whatever it is you people do; better still, spend it on a bike and enjoy your life without fretting about whether you’re wearing what the fashion editors have told you to wear this season.

But for fuck’s sake leave our lifestyle alone. Take us out of your dressing-up box.

It’s too late to buy them flowers, David.

Earlier this week the charity Relate produced a report which showed husbands usually fail to spot the danger signs that their marriage is broken and failing, sometimes for years.

David Cameron, it’s safe to say, hasn’t read it. Not that I’m suggesting that he and the lovely Sam are in difficulties, you understand. No, Cameron’s problem is that his other spouse, Tory voters, have been unhappy for a long time.

Like many wives, they tried to talk to him about it. The passion is gone, they said. You just don’t love us anymore. You’re always making eyes at those pretty, younger Labour voters.

He didn’t listen, and so it was no surprise that he came home from work last night to discover them in bed with Nigel Farage. No surprise to all of us, that is. Poor David is probably very upset.

I think he began to realise a little while ago something was wrong. He started to make an effort. But it’s too little too late, really; the Findus lasagne has bolted.

The real tragedy, of course, is how easily this affair could have been avoided, from the early warning signs of the disastrous 2010 election through the last two and a half years.

Like Tony Blair but in reverse, Cameron has tried to build a new consensus around his politics. A “big tent”.

The thing is, to do this you need to make sure everyone who was in the tent in the first place stays there whilst you bring in the new recruits. It would be silly, for example, to ignore them entirely when other people with tents are wooing them. It would be worse than silly to set about doing everything you could to annoy, disappoint and infuriate them. It would be cataclysmically stupid.

So it has gone though. Tax rises, planning laws, gay marriage, foreign aid, fuel prices, hunting, defence cuts, battering the motorist, train fares, small business lending – on and on and on. Whatever one’s view of the rights and wrongs of individual policies, even within factions of the Tory vote, the cumulative message to that vote appears to be “Sod you!”.

And let us recall that this began with that shockingly poorly judged 2010 election when David Cameron could have won a majority, despite the pre-election balance of the House, by saying: “I am not Gordon Brown; I shall now be making no further comment until polling day.” Instead, in a misguided attempt to “detoxify the Tory brand”, he oversaw a campaign which left millions of Tory voters unsure who he was or what he stood for.

That left him hobbled by coalition, and needing to sign up to things he knew would be deeply unpopular with his base. Surely, then, any strategist would have advised him to recognise that and do all he could to solidify it, and then expand it? But no. Many pre-election promises fell, and many were nothing to do with the Coalition Agreement.

Now even socially liberal, progressive Tories are deserting in droves. They may applaud the position on gay marriage but it doesn’t make up, to them, for being taxed in to next week. And where are the new recruits? Not many Labour or Lib-Dem voters beating the door down, are there?

The thing which many in the Tory Party have been trying to tell Cameron (not one of life’s listeners) for three years is not that his approach is making Tory voters dislike him, it’s that his approach makes Tory voters think he dislikes them. That’s vastly harder to come back from.

In which I fail to mind my own business.

Neil is keen to know what Dave’s view was.

It emerges that Dave’s view was, in the main, positive, in so far as I can tell. Neil suggests that this all needs further discussion. We should, Neil makes clear, “have a call on this when I’m off the train.”

Then Neil hangs up the phone. The conversation is ended. Neil, somebody else and, presumably, Dave, are all paid to tell one another what their view is. Of something.

Middle men, I think, as I try to concentrate anew on my book now that the man called Neil has gone quiet.

I’m on a hurtling metal tube, gouging a tear through the countryside,  packed with middle men. Middle men phoning, and typing, and emailing, and texting. With great self-importance. Presumably their views.

The world is the same, to look at, at the end of their day as it was at the beginning. Nothing new exists. Nothing real.

How many of us are aboard? 800? 800 middle men, middling, moving information and numbers and views about as we rumble towards London at 70 mph. It’s important we get there. These views won’t express themselves.

Presumably, down the line (metaphorical, not literal) all these views and numbers and words are about something real. Something mined, perhaps, or designed, or built. Presumably there has to be a tangible thing at the end, or beginning, of all this. Otherwise what is it?

What if we crashed? I can’t help asking myself this. I close the book, again. What if we crashed and were all killed. Aside from our weeping families, what would change in the world? How would society be any worse off, really?

It’s an unpleasant thought. I open the book again.

Then I remember that last weekend I made a bracket. I made it from metal, in the workshop. It’s not a great bracket, if I’m honest, but it’s now there, inside the engine bay of a Land Rover. It wasn’t there before, now it is, and I made it.

A thing I have brought in to this world, which has changed just a little as a result.

“That is well put”, says one character in my book to another, “but we must cultivate our garden.”

Horse meat – the hardest thing to digest is that it’s your fault.

No doubt you are outraged about the horse meat scandal. You have every right to be – criminality, profiteering, potential fraud, all have led to many people eating an animal they would probably prefer to see in the 3.20 at Kempton and possibly also ingesting dangerous veterinary drugs. 

However, I’m going to come at this from another angle and it’s this: it’s your own bloody fault. There you go.

I know, I know; you’re not happy. It’s not your fault is it? It’s the government, the supermarkets, criminals and Goodness knows who else.

But it’s not just them, you see. It’s you.

After a week of this story my patience has finally snapped, and it’s time someone told you a few home truths.

Many of us have been banging on for years about this stuff, trying to make you care about the need for better food labeling, about fairness for farmers, about the need to support local farms to avoid all our food coming from giant, uncaring corporate agri-businesses which churn out cheap product to feed the insatiable appetite of supermarket price-cutting.

We’ve been highlighting the unfairness of UK farmers being forced to meet 73 different regulations to sell to supermarkets which don’t apply to foreign suppliers, and talking about our children growing up with no understanding of food production and, more than all of this, about the way supermarkets have driven down and down and down the cost of meat to the point where people think it’s normal to buy 3lbs of beef (in burgers) for 90p.

And you wouldn’t listen. It was like shouting into a gale.

Through the years of New Labour, when farming and the countryside were demonised, you wouldn’t listen. You cheerfully chose to believe that all farmers were Rolls Royce driving aristocrats, as painted by John Prescott. You had no sympathy. You wanted a chicken for £2 and your Sunday roast for a fiver. Well, you got them didn’t you? And hundreds of farmers went to the wall. And you still didn’t care because Turkey slices were ten for 60p.

And now you’re furious, because it turns out that when you pay peanuts for something it’s actually not very good. Who knew eh?

And before you start, don’t even think about the “it’s all right for the rich who can go to local butcher’s shops but what about the poor?” line. The number of people who can’t afford adequate amounts of food is tiny – tragic and wrong, yes, but tiny. Supermarkets don’t make their billions from them hunting in the “reduced” basket, they make their money from millions of everyday folk filling a weekly trolley. You, in other words.

Until the mid 1990s, Britain was also full of good local abattoirs. They were run by people who knew the local farmers who used them, and the local butchers which sold the meat. They were closed in their hundreds by new health and safety regulations which made it impossible for small abattoirs to compete with giant companies doing the job more cheaply.

We tried to tell you, you didn’t care.

And of course, unlike the previous generation you were “too busy” to actually cook. You were so busy that the idea of making a meal, then making two more out of the left-overs, was like something from Cider With Rosie to you. You bought a meal every night. And so it had to be cheap.

We tried to tell you. You just pointed out that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall went to Eton and sneered at us.

Cheap rearing abroad. You didn’t care. Cheap slaughtering by machine. You didn’t care. Cheap meat full of crap and off-cuts. You didn’t care. Frozen blocks of meat off-cuts from the abattoir floor being trucked in from Poland to ensure your pack of mince was cheap enough. You didn’t care. In fact you didn’t know, but that’s because you didn’t care.

But we cared. We kept trying to tell you. We launched campaigns, we wrote letters, we raised funds for adverts. Nobody knows what they’re eating anymore, we said. Nobody recognises how hard it is for farmers here to produce quality meat at a price they can sell because of the supermarkets.

And you didn’t care.

Well, now you know you’ve been munching on Dobbin and his various nasty drugs, possibly for years. And now you care.

And yes, you’ve been misled, cheated, lied to. But you must also take some of the responsibility. You didn’t tell supermarkets you wanted quality, you just watched the ads which said “175 products cheaper at Asda this week than Tesco” and went to Asda. You made the market they sold in to, you set their priorities. They gave you what you wanted.

So what will you do now? Now that you care.

How about this…

Rather than just moaning at MPs why not actually think about what you eat, what you buy, where it comes from? Why not visit a farm on an open day? Take the kids, show them where their food comes from. If it’s a good farm, why not try to use your consumer power accordingly to make more farms that way? To make them viable. Why not have a think about how you could make meat go further without spending more, through cooking, and thus be able to buy good, British, assured quality meat? 

If you do that, I’ll stop blaming you, and some good may come of all of this.

The culprits responsible for all this will be found, and no doubt tried and hopefully convicted. With luck new rules will be introduced to make a repeat harder. But the market will find a way – it always does. So long as there is a demand for vast quantities of ultra-cheap meat, people will find a way to supply it. So long as people remain uninterested in where their food comes from and how it’s made, someone will cut corners.

It’s a ravenous beast, the market. Like its customers, as it turns out.

So now that you care I’ll tell you that we’ve been highlighting the plight of dairy farmers this year; explaining how supermarkets are paying such a pittance that they can’t stay in business and milk is increasingly coming in from abroad, where standards are lower. Pleasingly people noticed. Some people. If you weren’t one, perhaps, given events, you might like to now?

And when you’ve done that, take a look at the video in the link below, which details the Countryside Alliance’s hard-fought campaign on country-of-origin food labeling.  Whilst you were suggesting the CA was only interested in fox hunting, it was doing this, for you, and now you know why.

SOS Dairy: http://www.fwi.co.uk/articles/29/12/2012/136833/sos-dairy-farmers-end-2012-with-heads-held-high.htm

Food labelling: http://www.countryside-alliance.org/ca/campaigns-food-farming/our-step-towards-victory-on-meat-labelling