First real motorcycle, first real friend...
Motorcycles have been a part of my life for more than 20 years. I first road a a motorised two wheel vehicle on the road when I was fifteen. My dad had a little 50cc Honda and late at night I grabbed the keys and snuck out on it. I was a rainy night, so I had what I now call a "get-off" which is when friction fails you and your bike dumps you on the road. Youthful zeal and inexperience were my downfall here. That and my dad the next day when he noticed the scratches. Although I very briefly had a little moped myself at 16 my first bike was 1981 Honda CB125T I bought when I was 17. It was beautiful and I rode everywhere on it.

I had just started my apprenticeship at a diesel generator manufacturer in Havant near Portsmouth and needed my own transport to get there. I wasn't interested in cars. My grandfather loaned me the 300 pound sterling it cost to buy and he wouldn't take the payments. He just asked me to give up smoking, I didn't, but he still wouldn't take the cash.

He was eighty something years old and visiting my mother at her house when I turned up on the bike he hadn't seen yet. He had ridden motorcycles all his life but had stopped riding his last a couple of years earlier. He missed them. He wanted to have a look at the bike I'd been lusting for and left the house to see it. After a few seconds a broad grin and a devious look overtook him. "Let's have a go then!" proffering his hand for the keys. My mum came running out the house, but by then it was too late, he was off. "What are you doing Jake?, he's eighty years old, he's not wearing a crash helmet !" Mum was having kittens. My reply was drowned out by the howl of the engine and we watched as the grinning red blurr blasted past. After about ten minutes he'd run out of road laws to break and returned probably the happiest I'd ever seen him.

A rear footpeg fell off it one day and I only noticed when I got home. There was an old CB125T parked around the corner from where my mum lived. A matt silver one with rusty spoked wheels that always seemed to have a plastic bag over the cylinders. I often wondered what the bag was for. One afternoon there was a lad working on the bike and I rode over to ask about it. He had a northern accent, which I now recognise to be from Lancashire. We introduced ourselves and he informed me that the sparkplug threads had been helicoiled but it had been done poorly and when it rained water got into the cylinders. I took this to be a tall story, it all seeming faintly ridiculous and I jestingly asked him if I could have a rear footpeg off of his bike to replace the one I had lost. Much to my surprise he agreed and handed me a wrench to take it off. His footpeg in hand I figured I owed him a few pints of beer to return the favour. The young lad has been for many years, possibly since that day, the closest of friends and the brother I didn't have growing up. I have now known Dave, more years than I have not known him and he is one of the rocks in my life, picked me up when I've fallen down more times than I choose to count. Perhaps one day I'll let you know about some of the glory days we had, before realising that we were mortal, which Dave only discovered about a few months ago when his son and my nephew Thomas was born.

I used to race everywhere, not a roundabout that didn't see sparks flying off the footpegs and hardly a month that there weren't blue lights reigning in my exuberance. I was racking up a thousand miles per month after work and setting the points with an impact driver to stop them vibrating out at the fourteen thousand RPM redline. Every road was a racetrack, every other bike, a challenge and if it would cut seconds off the course and see me in front of a bigger bike that had got the better of me, I'd dash the wrong way across a roundabout. I think I survived because I was the Wile E Coyote that never looked down. He could run off a cliff and all the time he didn't look down, he didn't fall. I've looked down since.

The little red Honda died after a year due to the heavy mileage and a car shunt. I borrowed a bike to take my test on. I sometimes think fondly of my CB125T and how much fun I used to have and it's long enough ago now for me to think fondly of that young tear-away I used to be.