Staff Blog: Natural order restored

I thought I was done for winter. After a couple of weeks on holiday I’d not got back into the habit of riding to work every day, thanks to my insistence that I would only ride when I wanted to, not because I felt I needed to. There’s also my reluctance to get the Triumph coated in winter cack as one 20-minute wet commute can create two hours of cleaning the Street Triple, which is a mucky little devil that happily messes itself.

But the feeling of defeat on the A1 each morning has grown stronger with every utterly avoidable traffic queue. As bikes slip by, usually ridden by an MCN colleague or someone from the monthly magazines that are also made in our building, it galvanises the feeling that I should be on two wheels.

A broken car forced the issue this morning and I refitted a freshly charged  battery to the Street Triple R, pumped up the Pirelli Angel GT tyres and rode it for the first time in a month. It all felt so natural, as if I’d never been away and should never have been away. It was my turn to be the one slipping past colleagues trapped in the warm with the radio soothing their queue stress.

This is how it should be, and this is how it’s going to be. I reckon I’ve got a month left before the Street Triple R has to go back to Triumph. But I’ve got my old Yamaha Diversion 600 sat in the back of my garage waiting to perform her intended duty… get me to work when the back roads lose their grip and allure. And I’ve got one month to get her ready for action.

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