Second time lucky

In a world that seems to change so rapidly and as the years roll by with frightening speed, it’s reassuring to have something solid and tactile that is capable of defying advances in time, technology and evolution, and for most of us, that would be an old motorcycle. The majority of riders of old and classic motorcycles that I know are in it for the long haul, in that there’s at least one bike that has been kept by the same person for many years, decades even. It’s like a marker on a person’s timeline, a constant, always present in the background. I’ve owned one old bike for 30 years, and I couldn’t imagine it not being part of my life. From only form of transport, through crashes, incidents, miles ridden, breakdowns, countries visited, memories formed, people come and gone – it’s still there.

My friend Mauro Papucci is the same, and his attachment to his beautifully restored MV Agusta 250B has been forged from similar experiences, but in his case, two separate periods of ownership of the same model of MV, the first painfully truncated by circumstances beyond his control. Mauro lives and has lived most of his life in Livorno, Tuscany, where I go and chat to him and look at his MV, and he is currently president of the local Livorno Motoclub. Not surprising as his love of motorcycles was passed down from