KIWI RIDER 05 2020 VOL2 | Page 93

quarantine after posting up pictures of a trip they did... a year ago. The times they are a-crazy, huh? You only have to look at the on-line caperings of Editor Ben here. Bastard’s been filming himself doing push-ups every day. I keep telling him he should be doing them in the nude or wearing a nice bonnet if people are to seriously believe he’s fighting the Plague Boredom on Social Media. He keeps deleting my comments. My friends are also locked-down to various degrees. Of course, the more they drink the less locked-down they feel, or the more paranoid they become about getting the Plague. It’s a rich conflict. The really pissed ones are sharpening shovels and axes and forming legions to march on China to exact revenge for the eating of Plague-bats, or something. But in the main, they are bored. And this boredom is tinged by concern. Not fear, of course. Just mild concern. They are motorcyclists, after all. They feed on fear and are therefore used to it. Panic-braking into a decreasing radius hairpin at 170km/h is where true fear lives – not sitting in a house in your underpants, illuminated by Netflix and nourished by lager, wondering if the neighbours will dob you in for wheelieing your bike up the street in your girlfriend’s underpants. That’s just boredom. And bored hands are the devil’s tools. So it’s fair to say most of us will be hardcore Satan-worshippers before this is over. All the motorcycles we own are now cleaner than they were since they were bought new. Every nut has been kissed by a spanner. Every hole in the discs has been swabbed with a cotton ball (it’s not like the missus has been using them to put on make-up lately, is it?), and every skerrick of filth has been expunged from the deepest engine crevice. Chains have been cleaned and lubed and adjusted, then re-adjusted. The bike itself has been moved several times, with each new position in the garage offering a new viewing angle for when you drink beer and stare at it with fond memories of when you used to ride. If your bikes were bought second-hand, then they are now worth more than they were when they were purchased. New tyres, new air in those tyres, 4367 coats of bees-wax polish, and cables so lubed and greasy they leave drip marks under the bike. Your hands are nothing but grimy cramped claws, and you have so much Autosol under your fingernails, each time you eat, your food tastes like alloy-cleaning chemicals. You find yourself scouring the Bikes For Sale pictures on the Internet. Before the Plague, you were not in the market for a new bike. But now that your days may well be measured in days, is it such a bad idea? How good would it be to own a Brough Superior, huh? You’ve always wanted one, right? KIWI RIDER 93