Alert: Good biker feature in Saturday's Dominion Post

[James Deuce]

Thanks, I'll see what they have to say. No post on advice.

Cheers Shad. If it's reproduced with the permission of the author and he gave it directly to the site that would be OK.

Reproducing it from a Dom-Post source is where the trouble starts.

[Shadows]

Cheers Shad. If it's reproduced with the permission of the author and he gave it directly to the site that would be OK.

Reproducing it from a Dom-Post source is where the trouble starts.

All good, he following article by Stefan Herrick has been reproduced with the kind permission of the Dominion Post.

"After a big day at the office crafting miracles from bits of old wire and a few coins in the time-honoured New Zealand tradition of doing it well and doing it cheap, I throw my briefcase in the back seat of the car and join the queue out on the motorway.

Driving home in my car is a joyless experience. It is a 1993 Toyota Corolla in a shade some wag at Toyota's marketing department decided to call "Bali Seas Blue". It is the most anonymous car in the world.

I have never had a ticket in this car. It is so anonymous that parking wardens don't seem to notice it is there. At drink-drive checkpoints, I am always waved. Even speed cameras fail to go off as I pass, over the limit.

Inside the Corolla, I am encased in an environment that teams of brilliant designers, engineers and psychologists agonised over to ensure it was as inoffensive as possible. From dash to parcel shelf, the interior is a safe shade of Pacific Rim Grey.

Turn the key and the engine makes the same sort of efficient mechanical hum as a refrigerator or food processor.

Depress the accelerator and there is a complete absence of drama, or anything that comes close to tingling the spine - just a slow and sensible accumulation of speed.

On Boulcott St I join the long line of people also encased in their boxes of Pacific Rim Grey. They look the way I feel. We're all under no illusion that we are part of a big machine.

My fellow motorists don't all choose to take to their cars at the same time - it is what the rhythm of business dictates we must do. We emerge from our workstations and are funnelled into vast tarseal races where we trickle along in an orderly queue, unquestioningly obeying the instructions from the central brain. We are theirs until the minute we pull into our driveways.

The Corolla is well-made and reliable car, but it is a cloak of conformity, a bland collection of curves fashioned by 20 million customer experiences, a link in a conveyor belt that carries me to my workstation each day. It is not an instrument of freedom.

That honour goes to the other vehicle in my garage.

I used to snigger at the middle-aged white-collar types out on the highways on their designer motorcycles buffed to a mirror sheen with soft open-weave cloth. To me, it always seemed a bit sad that these freshly soaped pillars of the establishment saw the need to convince people they were bad and dangerous. How bad can you be with a crease in your jeans? Who are they fooling?

Now I'm one of the Middle Management Lost Breed. I was reminded so when I was filling my open road touring motorcycle at a petrol station. A friend bounded up. "You're such a big kid!" he said.

A couple of nights a week, after tea, I'll head out on the bike for an hour. My wife says that when I get home I am a much more agreeable husband.

Sometimes I'll head north along the motorway, turn right at Paremata and head over the hill behind Pauatahanui. Other times, I'll wind my way to the car park at the top of the Rimutakas and sit on the fence for a while.

It's never long before another after dinner bikie shows up. The other day it was a prison officer steeling himself for a night at work. His bosses, he explained, were squeezing more productivity out of him with extra shifts and extra duties. He looked close to breaking point, but a snatched hour with his bike on the road was his lifeline.

Another time, it was a young guy working in foreign exchange. His world was one of 12-hour days, impossible targets and the weighty burden of millions of his clients' dollars. Many of his colleagues drank. He rode.

It amazes me how many of them there are, because Wellington is an insane place to own a bike. Because we're at the end of the island, there is only one direction to go, and that's north, where the choice is between the coastal traffic jam or the Hutt Valley traffic jam.

In town, the roads are narrow, uneven, badly cambered and full of surprises - cars parked on blind corners, buses that overflow into the oncoming lane and slippery manhole covers in the middle of corners.

Then there's the weather. Rare is the day when it's not blowing or raining. Yet, the need to get their fix impels riders to put up with the gusts that could sweep them into the path of the truck in the next lane, frozen jowls or laps full of rainwater.

Unlike the family car, where the passengers are cocooned from the mechanical parts by sheetmetal and layers of sound-absorbing foam, a motorcycle lays its hot, greasy bits sluttily bare. You become intimate with the miracle of locomotion down there between your knees - the tick of the tappets, the whine of the gearbox, the fast, deep breaths of the carburettors, the whir of the alternator and the heat of the cylinder pots. It is as if the machine is alive.

There is nothing like a ride to flush the day from your head. It is as much a form of meditation as yoga, a stroll around Red Rocks or 10 glasses of Bookbinder. The perfect state of mind in which to ride a motorcycle is one of complete alertness and complete relaxation. Often, I'll arrive home unable to recall where I've been.

On a motorcycle, you are only ever one small mistake away from a lifetime of severe physical discomfort, which focuses the mind to an incredible extent. Each minute, you make hundreds of decisions to keep yourself alive as the road races by a few inches beneath your feet like a giant belt sander.

It's not about looking bad or dangerous, or stoking the dying embers of a time when you had hair and a Jethro Tull T-shirt. I understand that now. Out there, it's about escaping the anodyne and artificial corporate world, with its commitment to excellence, delivering value to stakeholders, exceeding the expectations of customers, its grey acrylic carpets, its PowerPoint presentations and its line authority.

Wellington is a high-pressure city, and for many of those up there in the high rises, the machine in their garage is their ticket to a saner place."

[James Deuce]

Brilliant!! Big ups to Shadmeister. This is what we need to do when we reproduce stuff from other publications people.

Make sure you guys give him some green.