Summer thoughts… – column

It's summer. I sit with my bare feet on the laminate behind my screen. My socks hang to dry on the central heating radiator. The bottom of my pants legs are wet. My engine is extremely water-cooled outside. A good friend of mine passed away after a short illness and the Bovag expressed the concern that we motorcyclists are all going to become extinct. Then we are an endangered species!

And that is another good option. We will be hugged. We will see recordings of yearning motorcyclists on television. “Just look at his belly. He has hunger edema.” Well, no, that's just because I'm not carrying a six-pack, but a whole keg! Let the relief supplies be flown in and let everyone deposit money into giro 555. Maybe we will make it then. Or not. But then in a few tens of thousands of years someone will have the day of their life if he/she/it finds part of a BMW-O-Saurus Rex during excavations.

In the meantime, importers and regents in The Hague, Brussels and Athens could do something very bizarre. They might wonder, “But how did it happen?”

Then you arrive at a timeline. At first, motorcycles were means of transportation for slobs with too little money for a car. The sidecars were the result of the fact that those wretches did not work and tinker alone. Some motorcyclists got into relationships and were confronted with their own fertility. A sidecar was then the ultimate weakness.

Then, fortunately, cheap cars arrived and incomes increased so that those idiot motorcyclists could finally leave their 150, 175, 250 and very heavy 350 cc machines behind and buy a four-wheeler with the license plate DD. These were VWs, Opels and Fords from Germany. They were taken off the road there as damaged cars, they were given a nice makeover here and provided with a special combination of letters on the number plate. 'DD' was laughably corrupted into 'German Deuk'.

By the mid-110s, no dog wanted to be seen dead on a motorcycle. Only in America are there still some criminals around. That wasn't an advertisement for the species. The father of a friend of mine then bought a well-running Harley Davidson for 50 guilders. His family laughed at him. About the same time, Soichiro Honda decided he wanted to grow his business. Society was ready for it. There was room for something small, reliable on two wheels. The Honda XNUMX cc Supercub was born and conquered the world under Honda's battle cry “You meet the nicest people on a Honda”.

Motorcycling became socially acceptable again and while BMW shareholders had already mentally said goodbye to their motorcycle division… Well. Japan eventually conquered the world. And the economy kept getting better. So the engines kept getting better. Increasing. Heavier. Faster. More reliable too.

The generation of motorcyclists grew along with it. The former student on a rickety Liberator – because he had no money for a real motorcycle or a car – evolved into a university-educated man over forty on a Honda Goldwing or BMW 1600. Strangely enough, it didn't make him any happier. Because his new motorcycle life did not give him a fraction of the adventure of his youth. It also didn't make him twenty anymore.

Could there still be hope?

For us as a species? Maybe. Maybe all those people in the traffic jams will think about it. And the financial limitations of young people and the unreliability of the NS can also put motorcycling back on track. Sales of new motorcycles are apparently on the rise. But there is life in the budget corner too. Just like before…

For example, my own son was a student. He wanted to have his own driving time decision under his ass. And 400 euros for a neat Jawa of the kind that no one wanted until recently was not prohibitive. He mixes the lubricant himself. The parts are almost for nothing. My son learns some tinkering and experiences the pure sensation of riding a motorcycle again. So it will be wet and cold this summer.