Bonding with my bike

She's no showboat. In fact this is the cleanest she's been for a while. But we look after each other. What goes around, comes around - especially on a motorcycle. More dependible than most other things in my life of late. A time machine, a space machine. She takes me far away and looks after me and only asks for respect and reaonsable affection in return. Fickle, dangerous, but uncomplicated. Why can't people be so straightforward?

And that is the power of being in love with my bike, and having a burning need to escape from a life I just don't recognise as being my own.

This may always have been the power of the Road.

At these times serendipity often strikes. I'd not long ago rediscoved Two Lane Black-Top with Taylor, Oates, Bird and Wilson. On Sunday morning, on the Moray Firth, some 40 years later, I found self eating breakfast in the diner near the end of the movie just before 'the Girl' fucked off with a younger good looking dude on a bike, and the Driver & the Mechanic set of to burn for ever.

You get to recognise lonliness, yearning and hurt - especially, after a night with the 21-81 year old souls washed up on the Moray Firth roadside.

It all don't mean a thing man - it don't mean a thing. 

The 'Old Salt', Hopeman, on the Moray Firth. Home of tall sea fearing tales and lost souls between 21 and 81.

I arrived in the sunshine six hours after riding down the Royal Mile in Edinburgh in support of the Rifles returning from Afganistan. Not worthy - I certainly wasn't. But those men who marched down the Mile an hour later certainly were. Their faces were something everybody should see and nobody forget.

Young men marching with precision pride and emotion. Men, who had seen 30 of thier closest come back from patrol in bags if not blown to bits at their side. Men who felt pride and heartache in equal measure. They made it home - many didn't. Why?

And the welcome home was heartfelt. These young men are the front line of all we are. And they did it, and they took the pain, and some of them came home, and they are proud, and they are hurt, and they are welcomed, and they are frightended, and their view of the world will never ever be the same. 

They have something most of us never have - for better or worse.

I cried - and by 6.30, I was on the Moray Firth looking for a place to pitch my tent and find a pub.