Well one thing's for sure, I ain't big enough to manoeuvre mine when I'm not on it unless it is on a perfectly flat, hard surface and even then I struggle.
I called into the Post Office on the way back home yesterday. It is at the end of a cul-de-sac with a hammer-head turning area. I've been there a gazillion times in the car but this was the first time on the bike. I stopped with my front tyre touching the kerb across the head of the T, kicked down the stand, posted the letter, got back on and couldn't budge the bike so much as an inch. It was only the invisible 'crown' of the head of the T that I was pointing down, so slight I couldn't even detect it but I could not move the bike back.
Eventually an old guy and his even older wife took pity on me and pushed me back enough to get under way! Talk about embarrassed, not to mention hot and sweating from the exertion 😅
The couple got a round of applause from the gaggle of schoolgirls giggling at my predicament.
You would have thought that I would have learned, back in the day when bikes were much lighter, never to park nose down after parking an Isetta bubble car nose down into a parking space up against the RAF hanger where I worked.
Front opening door, no reverse gear and the laughing stock of the squadron for hours till someone hoiked me backward to let me out.
Not quite as daft as the co-owner of said car who had cause to get out and get underneath when the handbrake wouldn't release having parked it on a slope in the high street in Calne in Wiltshire. Of course, as soon as he unstuck the partially seized cable crank the car rolled forward and trapped him underneath it. If it hadn't been for my soon-to-be mother-in-law who worked in the shop he had just been in, he would probably be there still.
