Miscellaneous

I am not referring to the aptly-named Honda Miscellany (a parts-bin special), or that polypartizoid motorcycle more commonly called a "Bitza" (i.e. bits-a-this-and-a-bits-a-that). I am talking about the motorcycles one rents while on holiday "for a laugh". It is the laugh other people have when they see you sitting on the beach with a vivid Mercurochrome tan and gravel rash from your sandalled feet to the (abraded) end of your nose.

Riding a Yamaha 100 c.c. two-stroke up 4-in-1 switchbacks on Corfu with Jan on the back reminded me of things I had forgotten. Willingly. Deliberately. The sort of things I drank to forget. It was like being back on my CD90. The bike was so small it felt like the runabout the Seven Dwarves bought after chasing the Wicked Queen half way across the Black Forest - riding deer bareback is all very well, but let's face it, it was a panic response to a difficult situation. The bike I rented had been discarded by Grumpy and thrashed by his clinically depressed brother, Perpetually-Pissed-Off.

After riding around most of Corfu, much of the way on dirt road, the bike stopped at the top of an extremely steep switchback out of Paleokastritsa. Jan and I spent the next hour rolling the bike down the switchback and pushing it back up in the attempt to make it go. There was a taverna at the top of the switchback and we went in to rehydrate and summon help. The owner demonstrated that Greek hospitality to guests is virtually unlimited by grabbing a carving knife. He then tried remove the spark plug with it. After a moment there was a sound like a demented bumble-bee as the end of the blade snapped off and shot into the scrub, decapitating cicadas by the dozen.

We were spared further experiments with bottle-openers, forks, meat cleavers, ashtrays and doner-kebab grills when a van belonging to a bike-rental firm pulled up. The driver pulled out the exhaust baffle with a triumphant and baffle-weary flourish and left us to drive back to Barbati.

On another holiday in Corfu we rented a fat-tyred bike thing (a Honda?) and rode it up dirt tracks to the summit of Pantokrater in the centre of the island. A frustrating thing about riding in Greece is that just as you are struggling up some rutted and boulder-strewn stream-bed masquerading as a road, the local orthodox priest goes flying past, black robes and beard flapping, on an oil-soaked two-stroke that makes an MZ seem like a GP racer, and leaves you for dead. As spiritual gifts go, this isn't comparable with levitation or halos or raising the dead, but it is still an impressive sight.

The final approach to Pantokrater. This must have been taken on our first visit to Corfu c. 1981 - Jan has her hair long (see below for a view of Jan on our second visit a couple of years later).

Jan's fluid and influential interpretation of Grecian dance.

Jan on the fat-tyred bike thang c. 1984. This one didn't break down. Neither did the Suzuki 250 c.c. trail bike I rode around Crete in 1988.

Corfu c.1981. This is the horrible Yamaha 100 c.c.

I think I might have been going through a New Romantic phase. Either that, or I was auditioning for a role in Roman Polanski's Pirates.