THE AWKWARD AJAY
Can a motorcycle get so deeply enmeshed in your psyche that you simply can’t get rid of it? Despite being regularly advertised, concatenations of uncanny circumstances mean that this motorcycle never actually leaves the shed in someone else’s hands. Instead it pauses for effect in unexpected, remote locations and for apparently unwarranted reasons. Is it consciously choosing to embarrass when it highlights your basic motorcycling ineptitude? Perhaps this motorcycle conspires to stay with you but still continues to challenge your conviction that you’ve finally got it sorted.
The biggest question of all is this: Do you dare take it on a long touring weekend?
Such a device lurks about my shed. On rain-darkened afternoons, when I’m pottering about in the endless tidying-up cycle that precedes actually doing some maintenance, I sometimes get the feeling that it knows more than I do about how we stand in relation to each other. For example, I’ve just returned from a 50 mile trundle around the lanes of Somerset, all lovely for the first 35 miles or so then a progressively worsening misfire appeared when opening the throttle hard from low revs. It’s never done this before, and now the plug is sooted up, which it wasn’t before. I’ve come to suspect that this machine is planning, plotting even. Certainly, I notice that each new morning the map marking the extent of its oily empire extends further across the garage floor.
My suspicions are further aroused because this bike is very coy about its own identity. It passes itself off as a humble 350cc AJS 16MS, when really it’s a 500cc beast with an exhaust
