TOTALLY TOP TRIPLE

How come – I asked myself while I was out aboard a really rather fine Trident the other week – how come I don’t have one of these? The reason I don’t have a T150 Trident is simple: any bike I’d like to ride a decent distance needs to have an electric hoof, and not entirely because I have become idle in my old age, although I’m sure that’s part of it. As I sailed back to base on that particular T150 – seen in these grimy pages a couple of issues back – I asked myself once again: why don’t I have an electric start Trident? And I have no answer for this – apart from one. They do sell for a lot of money – except when I’m the one doing the selling rather than the buying, as always.

Which is something of a warm topic around these parts lately. That old conundrum of cost versus value. I’d been chatting with a pal – a pal with a self-raising Trident, in fact – and he was disguising his understandable smugness and possibly attempting to cheer me up and dilute my understandable envy by remarking that I could buy one and a half brand new Triumph Tridents for the money he could sell his old, fairly tired Trident for. I was not encouraged, not really, but it’s a good point.

And oddly enough, along with St Ollie Hulme of this parish, I’d been shambling and bouncing around on a brand new Triumph Trident just a couple of days earlier. It doesn’t appeal to me at all, although I am sure that it’s a wonderful