I was confident that my time with this slightly striking Bullet would be mostly under water. My ride over had been through a decent deluge, and indeed my ride back saw more of the same. How appropriate, thought I, to take out a pristine replica of an ancient singular trials machine and get it dirty! The joy - one of many, in fact - of borrowing bikes for stories is that I never have to clean them. How nice. For me.
Sadly - or not - by the time I set helmet upon head and hands into gloves, the roads were dry and the sun was paying an unexpected visit. Oh well, my grand plan to discuss the Bullet's abilities on streaming wet, muddy and leaf-strewn roads would have to be abandoned. It was even fairly warm - for late October - so I was more than a little overdressed in heavy kit and waterproofs. Professional to the end, as you can see.
Like lots of others, I have long been a somewhat bemused fan of Royal Enfield's seemingly immortal 500 Bullets, in both non-unit and unit construction forms. My favourite is probably the limited edition Woodsman, several examples of which I've been lucky enough to borrow for a nice day out-the first of them was a carburetted pre-unit, and the last an early example of the unit construction EFI engine, similar to the model seen here. I always liked them, and have indeed tried to buy one a couple of
