My journey to a BMW K1200RS. Part Six.

A ZZR1100 came along after the VFR. The ZZR was a beast. It had been lovingly attended by its previous owners but was way too fast for its own good. It was a smooth, powerful brute of a machine. It was comfortable and very economical for its size, but it was just not me. I should have listened to the omens when I picked the bike up. I saw this one advertised in Derby. I borrowed my neighbours’ trailer, for the first time. It had a short loading ramp and the low belly fairing on the ZZR smashed into it as it was loaded onto the trailer. A costly repair was required before I even rode it.

But when I did, I quickly tired of leaning over the tank and forever checking the speedo. 100mph just came and went so quickly that it was no pleasure in going for a normal, enjoyable, sensible ride out. I didn’t want a bike that no matter how gently you used the throttle launched you towards a lost licence at every opportunity. So this too went into the list of have hads.

Next followed a series of BMW’s.

I saw an advert in a classified ad on the computer. Someone was selling a 21,000 mile BMW R1100RT  in Kent, for a song. The bike had been used as a ‘blood service’ back-up bike so was white in colour, but had full BMW service history and was in civilian specification. No emergency lights and no nasty holes in fairings, just some reflective decals. It was about £1500 under priced so I phoned, haggled some more and immediately borrowed the trailer and went and got it!

I cleaned it up, removed the stickers and sold it on again.

My journey to a BMW K1200RS. Part Five.

I had moved around a fair bit but was now re-located in the ‘west country’. One day whilst shopping in Exeter with the wife, I talked her into looking round a now no- longer-there motorcycle showroom and saw a very nice imported Kawasaki Z750LTD. It had been a bike that I had admired as a teenager. I should have left the memory alone. I bought the bike and rode it home the following week. It was unwieldy, slow and uncomfortable, so it had to go!

Next on the list was another BMW. This time a very nice, pearl white K100RS ABS. It had one previous owner and came with a low-ish mileage, all the luggage and at a reasonable price.

The K100RS was a lovely bike. The handlebars were a little too narrow for my liking, making the steering heavy, but it was smooth, quiet and deceptively fast. I should have held onto this one for longer, but I get restless and need to change my bikes around for the ‘buzz’ of riding something different.

A Honda VFR750 in lovely blackberry colour followed the K100RS. This was another great bike that well deserved its reputation, but I found it a little too small for me, physically. Over the years the pounds had crept up and the VFR was just a little too cramped.

My journey to a BMW K1200RS. Part Four.

After a long recovery and all sorts of problems with insurance and compensation, I had gone back to driving cars again for a while. It was a few years before I went back to two wheels. Marriage and children became the focus. But the yearning was still there.

I picked up an old XS250, and then managed to get hold of a really cheap Honda CG125, which was in amazing condition and really low mileage. So I chopped that in for a Honda 250N Superdream. A friend at work had a BMW R80. He was an old geezer and the bike suited him. I thought an R80 would suit me too, but these bikes were just too ancient and I wasn’t ready for retirement at that time. I bought an ex-police R80RT, in white and still with police single seat and panniers. I bought that one somewhere in Essex. I rode it home to Bexhill-on-Sea, where we lived at that time and immediately started to strip it down. The engine and mechanicals were in excellent order, but it was cosmetically challenged and white! A couple of months later it was civilian spec’ and dark metallic green. It looked fabulous, but was still an old R80RT. Some people love ‘em. I’m not one of them!

At that time my son was about two and a half years old. He was already following in my footsteps and loved cars and motorbikes. I had spent a couple of months in my garage, stripping, cleaning and re-spraying the RT. It was all back together and waiting for its unofficial revealing ceremony. It looked like a new bike. The paint job, for an amateur, was bloody near professional and the bike looked like new even if I do say so myself! I was stood in my back garden talking to the neighbour over the fence when I heard a tapping noise. I listened, trying to decipher the noise. It was a metallic, banging sort of sound. It sounded like metal on metal. Hollow, like a metal drum being hit with a hammer. Close. I ran back to the garage and found young Alex, my son, sat astride the RT, smiling as he beat out a tune on the tank with a spanner! Fortunately, not too much damage done. A few chips in the new paint job before it had even seen the outside world!

I changed the RT for a black BMW K75S. That was a completely different machine. It handled sweetly, was smooth, quiet and surprising agile. This bike was in immaculate condition and looked as if it was only a couple of years old. In reality it was about 8 years old when I got it and had covered well over 100,000 miles. People would admire the bike when it was parked up and could not believe it’s true milage. I once was looking around a motorcycle dealership in Pevensey Bay, near Eastbourne when the salesman came over and started looking around my bike. He offered me a deal and an extremely good price based on what he read the milometer as being 10,400 miles… not 104,0000!!

The K75 was such a nice bike to ride that I decided that it was now time to do my RoSPA and IAM courses as I had already done them both in the car some years earlier. The police instructor couldn’t believe how I could keep up with him, yet manage to lose all the ‘power-rangers’ on their sports bikes when we were out on observed rides.

After the K75 came a blue and white Yamaha XJ900. This was another very smooth and comfortable machine. Probably one of the best all round bikes there have been, in my opinion.

This was followed by another short period of car ownership before getting back into bikes yet again. Once more I realised that biking is just in me. I needed the freedom of two wheels no matter what it was. I got hold of a ‘project’ Honda 250RS which I did up and then sold.

My journey to a BMW K1200RS. Part Three.

Back to the motorcycle shop. I traded my CM250 for a similar coloured Honda CX500 custom. This was a great bike. Much under-rated. It was smooth, comfortable, and bloody ugly.

This one didn’t last too long. On the way back to work one afternoon, following a lunch break, I was travelling along the A259 towards Littlehampton when a very spooky thing happened. The road was almost deserted. There were three vehicles on the road. A car ahead of me, a car waiting to pull out of a junction on my left and me on my ‘slug’.

The car ahead of me continued straight ahead, as had been my intention. It was bright, clear and sunny. I was doing about 40mph. The car in front was probably 100 metres ahead of me. It cleared the junction and the dozy bloody woman who was waiting to pull out did just that. She waited until I was at the junction then pulled out right in front of me.

I T-boned her car right at the B-pillar. She was lucky really. A fraction of a second later and it would have been the drivers’ door. I still remember, after all these years, the sky being upside down as I floated, seemingly in slow-motion through the air. I don’t even remember crashing to the ground, but the sky being the wrong way up is still so vividly clear. At first I didn’t feel the pain. I lay on the road looking back towards the car and all I could see was the back wheel of my bike still spinning, slower and slower. I could then hear the woman’s hysterical screaming as she got out of her car shouting “Oh no, what I have I done”.

You’ve just knocked me of my bloody bike you stupid cow, that’s what you’ve done! I stood up and then collapsed as the pain hit me. I had broken my right ankle. Fortunately, nothing more, but my poor bike was in a sorry state. The front wheel and forks had bent up behind the engine. That was the end of that.

The ambulance and police arrived and sorted out the mess. I was taken off to hospital. The woman was apparently on her way to pick up a friend and they were then going to the funeral of another friend of theirs. She called her friend to explain what had happened and that she couldn’t make it. Later in the day, after my hospital visit, I called my parents to tell them what had happened. My mother went extremely quiet. It turned out that the woman who had hit me was her friend and that she was on her way to pick my own mother up for the funeral! How spooky is that?

My journey to a BMW K1200RS. Part Two.

After 16 comes 17. Some of my mates had moved onto bigger bikes. We could go straight up to 250cc in those days. One mate had a brand  new Yamaha XS250 bought for his 17^th birthday. Another bought his own Kawasaki KH250 stroker, while another had a Suzuki X7. I wanted a bigger bike too, but my father had different ideas. He hated the motorcycle thing. He never did like me having a 50cc, let alone anything bigger so I was given the words of advice from dear old dad, “IF YOU EVER GET A MOTORBIKE YOU CAN BLOODY WELL FIND SOMEWHERE ELSE TO LIVE”

Instead, my parents gave me my first car. A 1957 Hillman Minx. Column change gears, no syncro-mesh on the first two, bench seat in the front and headlights dipped with a button on the floor next to the clutch pedal. I took to driving like I had with riding. I loved it, but the pangs of desire for riding two wheels never escaped and at nineteen I decided that a motorbike was back on the menu.

I was still living at home so took my chances with father. I had been working for a few years by now and was earning decent enough money, so I calculated that if my dad did decide to kick me out, then I would probably be able to support myself in my own dingy little bedsit. I took the chance. I went to CMW motorcycles in Chichester and bought myself a Honda CM250 custom. Don’t ask me why. I obviously liked it at the time!

I rode the bike home and held my breath. My dad came out of the house. Looked at the bike, looked at me and went back indoors. Not a word was said. For three months he never spoke to me, other than the odd grunt. But I never got kicked out, so it was worth it!

I had been riding my mates 250’s over the past couple of years so hadn’t lost the knack. I regularly used to borrow my mate Dave’s KH250. On one occasion I was riding the bike the bike on the A29 Shripney road out of Bognor Regis and was giving it a ‘handfull’. Youth and inexperience on a bike that handled like a pig!

I was going round a long sweeping left-hander and finding that centrifugal force was throwing me out towards the centre of the road, and I was just about hanging on. At that same moment a Bee, the size of a golf ball hit me square in the face on my left cheek. How it didn’t take my head off and how I managed to stay on the bike I still have never reckoned! I had to make excuses and came up with a story to pacify my father that I had been in a fight at a pub. I don’t think he ever believed me, but I don’t think he ever guessed that I’d been riding a motorbike1

The Honda was actually very comfortable and easy to use, but it wasn’t big enough. I needed more cc’s. So I passed my test. If you can call the 1970s and 80s  motorcycle tests a test! I seem to remember arriving at the test place, booking in and being given some verbal instruction s to ride a particular route around the town, unsupervised. The examiner at one point walked out between two parked cars for my emergency stop (completed in slow moving traffic…. Uggh, what’s all that about?!!!) Then at the end congratulating me and telling me that I had passed. Test passed. Bigger bikes were now the way forward.

My journey to a BMW K1200RS. Part One.

My History:

I am approaching middle age, if you can believe that the average person will live to be 100 years old. If not, then I am approaching half of that and already on the downward slope of life!

I started riding motorised two wheel bicycles when I was in my early youth. My grandfather never had any interest in cars and did all of his local travelling on an old blue Puch step-through moped. That was stolen when I was around 12 years old. He had to buy another, this time a Puch 50cc moped that was bright yellow, with a chrome tank. I think he must have had a local dealership because he never travelled far!

The yellow peril was one of the original mopeds, with pedals to start and looked ghastly, but I was destined to inherit this on my 16^th birthday, little did I know at the time.



The blue step-through was recovered by the police and returned to my grandfather, but was in pieces. Not much left but the frame, engine and wheels. (Did it have any more extras when it was complete?) It was then taken to my uncle’s house on the Isle of Sheppey where it was tinkered and played with until it could be started and ridden again. Uncle Mick, had a lot of land. A rough, unmade driveway about ¼ mile long and extended grounds to the rear made a great substitute for a private speedway track. I spent hours riding flat out, up and down the drive and around the perimeter of his boundary, learning and sharpening my riding skills. I was lucky enough to carry on with this pursuit at every opportunity that I visited my uncle for a couple of years, until his circumstances changed and he emigrated to the  U.S. of A. How selfish! I then had to wait until I reached my 16^th year before I could get back onto two motorised wheels.

The Puch was delivered a couple of weeks before my birthday. Cruel temptation, just waiting to be ridden, but I had a father who would have broken my legs if I had dared to take one wheel out of the end of our house driveway! So there I was. Living in a semi detached house on a main road. Fortunately we had a driveway from the road to the garage at the side of the house. It must have been all of 30 metres long. Never mind. It was time to re-hone those riding skills. I somehow managed by the repetitive monotony of riding from road edge to garage door, to clock up 65 miles before my birthday!

Sixteen. Why do we think at that age we are the bee’s-knees? The photos I now see of myself remind that I just wasn’t cool at all, but the yellow peril was now mine. Leather jacket, flared trousers, long hair down to my shoulders, bum-fluff ‘tasche and a white full face crash helmet. All 6’2” of me, atop and astride that Yellow Peril. What on earth did I look like?

My dad took me to the local secondary school car park one evening to practice before he would let me loose on the road, but with all my experience, it wasn’t needed. Like a duck to water, off I went. That bike travelled miles. Most of it flat out. I know, it wasn’t a ‘Fizzy’ or an AP50, nor even an SS50 from the stables of the famous three, but it was mine and I loved it. Three gears, on a twist grip on the left handle bar. It wasn’t quite as quick as my mate’s bikes, but it would do 40mph and was quick enough and it was certainly different.

I was one of the younger kids in my year so the novelty for them riding to school had already passed by the time I was old enough to take my bike in. But for me it was a proud moment. Riding my gleaming yellow bike into school, at lunchtime, with everyone in the playground, watching, admiring, throwing envious glances and jealous comments. Then, it had to happen. I somehow managed to fall off at 2 mph as I turned into the parking area! No damage to the bike but HUGE dent in my pride.

That first year of riding went so fast. I would ride for fun, ride to college, ride to work. Every opportunity I was out on my bike. For what it was, the Puch was quite reliable. My mates were replacing pistons and rings and whatever else, while mine just kept going. Only minor problems ever stopped me riding it and I made it my goal to ride to a high standard, which I took pleasure in doing. While my mates would fall and slide, after my initial embarrassment in the school car park I got better and better and enjoyed the experience.