TIME PLAYS TERRIBLE TRICKS ON THE MEMORY – a favourite conversational topic among many of my friends. And a common theme within such a broad subject is that while everyone past a certain age (insert your own preferred approximation here) claims to be able to remember in mind-numbing detail events in 1967 or something, they’ve no idea what they did yesterday, or even whose turn it is to pay for lunch. I try to take advantage of this, of course. I can always remember whose turn it is to pay, except when it’s mine.
So I’m sad to report that my memory has failed and I cannot now remember which tower of aching journalistic wit coined the expression ‘soft chopper’, referring of course to a factory custom motorcycle.
Your super-memory of the ancient and largely irrelevant past will remind you pronto that the greasy flick Easy Rider changed motorcycling forever. Everyone says it did, so it must be true. Certainly, in my rustic Somerset homeland it changed the… ah… styling of many of the local motorcycles, and indeed of their riders. I can sadly never forget the first time I saw a familiar Triumph Thunderbird whose monstrous lardy rider had swapped his denture-defying clip-on bars for a set of stargazing apehangers. And never was a handlebar style better named. The poor squashed machine still
