Brilliant article and well written John and despite being just round the corner, Covid has conspired to stop me from seeing it in the flesh.
As I've said before my first ever ride on a motorbike was on an outfit. My dad's uncle had a wooden leg (as you did post war, but he eventually got an upgrade to a tin one
) and he couldn't afford a car so he had a chair bolted to the side of his bike and off he went.
He would often ride down from Wigan and whisk me away for an hour or two, no helmets, no protective anything apart from a couple of pairs of goggles and we would always stop at The Saracen's Head for a shandy or two, sitting in the car park listening to it tick and crack as it cooled down. I have no idea what the bike was but in my young schoolboy mind it used to fly along those empty Cheshire lanes of yore.
Too much of a compromise for me but the sight of the beasts squirrelling through Ginger Hall at the TT always made my hair stand on end and think of Uncle Dick
