Yamaha 125 twin

The Yamaha 125 twin two-stroke was a dog. It barked. I bought it because my West Australian driving license was valid in the UK for one year, and at the end of that time I was forced to take the UK driving test or never ride again. The ignominy of wearing L plates and riding a dog of a 125 was unbearable. I had already had a bike license for five years.

Failing the test the first time was even worse. I think this was the occasion when I was so relieved at completing the test I pulled into the test centre through the exit marked "No Entry". The examiner may have appreciated the irony, but did not let on. Perhaps he laughed himself silly after I'd gone to get drunk. That evening I lectured the cat on the dangers of going in the wrong opening.

The Yamaha had been painted with Dulux gloss powder blue. One of the cylinder head studs had been Araldited in place, and when I took the head off to replace the rings, I found out why Yamaha prefer metric threads to glue. This bodge explained the tendency to lose compression and stop running from time to time. Like when it was warm. Or hot. Or half-warm. Or half-hot. I had many opportunities to view the Cambridge countryside while it cooled down. The other quibble was its constant habit of blowing fuses. I fixed this by using a carefully contoured piece of aluminium foil. I never tested the theory that the foil would melt before the bike did.

The picture at the bottom left shows me running into a mechanical excavator. The Cambridge firm of W.E. Pearce provided advanced cycle tuition. Part of this consisted of colliding with a large selection of vehicles, on the Monty Python principle that one never knows when one might have to disarm a man with a loaded banana. In this particular picture I am demonstrating the correct emergency dismount procedure in a collision with an excavator. The more common high-speed forward roll would have been inappropriate because the model of excavator in the picture uses a high strength alloy steel in the shovel arm that has been found in tests to mark the gloss finish of a polycarbonate or fibreglass helmet. I apologise for the level of technical detail, but these are things that an advanced motorcyclist needs to know before riding at high speed around a building site.

The picture on the right shows a close up. You can see that I have carried out a successful emergency dismount without breaking the plover's egg in my right hand. Unfortunately I was not so lucky with the blown-glass ship-in-a-bottle model in my left hand, which thereafter lead to a critical lack of confidence and destroyed my ambition to be an emergency motorcycle fancy-goods courier. C'est la vie.

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