Nathan Millward, who is unquestionably one of my favourite characters, has been doing a gig at the motorcycle show in London for a number of years. It consists of putting people on a small stage at one end of this vast arena to tell stories about their travels. He’s run through most of the top attractions in the motorcycle world and this year was finally reduced to me. I played hard to get at first, but he said OK, piss off then, so I quickly changed my tune and bought the air tickets in a hurry, something I later came to regret.
Having called my bluff, Nate could have made me grovel but instead he couldn’t do enough for me. He fixed up a hotel right next to the show for three nights and got a mate of his, an IT wizard called Brian Goodbourn, to fetch me from the airport. He told me thrilling stories, all virtual of course, all the way into town. Here’s the picture he sent me to know him by.
The Motor Cycle News people who run the show believe in fruitful disruption, so they put our stage about 100 yards away from a live race-track, where small bikes roar around in circles at 9000 revs, and a commentator with a mike brings the races to a thundering conclusion about every fifteen minutes.
Of course, as seasoned travellers used to shouting at the natives, we easily rode above their interruptions. This obviously annoyed MCN so every now and again they would take a sports bike engine up to maximum revs right next to us at the McGuiness Bar, but nothing could dim the beauty of our tales.
However, things did begin to go strange. Our books were displayed on flimsy tables that were actually constructed from matchwood, and my books are heavy. I layed them out across the surface of the hardboard top to spread the load but eventually the inevitable happened. Somebody leaned on them, and the whole thing collapsed. Not a disaster, you might think, but I happened to have my hand under the table as it fell, and it took some little bits of finger with it, producing a liberal helping of blood.
The first aid station was a long way away – I would have called it second or third aid – but I am not squeamish. I soon found some paper napkins to mop up the blood and to wrap around my bleeding digits, but there was blood on the books and that did, at first annoy me. Then a realized that far from damaging the books, it might actually improve them.
Would not my most fervent fans be delighted to have a little bit of me along with the book, as a sort of sacred relic? When I announced from the stage that I had books marked with my own precious essence there were loud guffaws of mirth, but when I sat down again the bloody books were quickly snapped up.
My publisher, who happened to be visiting me at that moment was flabbergasted and gobsmacked. In all his years of marketing books he had never thought of offering the author’s blood as an inducement to buy. It will be the saving of many a small bookshop. There is no way Amazon can replicate it, and we can look forward to some bloodthirsty scenes at Waterstones and WHS.
Well things calmed down for while. About three weeks ago a fellow called Peter Ryder, who obviously also rydes, asked to buy a print of one of my pictures. I’ve never done this kind of thing in the past but I told him that if he cared to have a bunch of prints made at my expense he could have one of them for free, so now here comes Pete with a big cardboard envelope of gorgeous prints. I chose two pictures, printed A2 size – that’s 24” by 16”. This is the obvious one:
I did some smaller ones of this one too, at £8 a throw.
Then I had big prints made of this one as well.
To my astonishment, the one with me in it sold out quite quickly at £20, but I only sold two of the other one. Curious because I actually prefer the one of the bike, but that just shows what a shy and modest person I must be. Anyway, this seems to be something people like so I’m thinking of printing some more. Let me know if you’re interested.
So things went along merrily until the show closed. Then came the dénoument, and it was swift and deadly.
Nate and I were strolling to the exit. Contractors were tearing down their exhibits. Suddenly a shot rang out and I fell to the ground. Several people standing around, including Nate, were certain I’d been assassinated and looked around wildly for the shooter.
As for me, I hurt my knee quite badly on the concrete floor, so it took me a moment to get up and reassure everyone that I hadn’t been hit. We never knew where that explosive noise came from, but I have one more reason to be glad to be alive.
That wasn’t the end of my troubles. My knee really hurt, so I had to get a cab to the airport. Then more stupidity. That air ticket I rushed into? I got the month wrong on the return half, so I got stuck at Gatwick. So I hastily booked an airport hotel, and again got the day wrong and had to spend half an hour on the phone listening to jolly Butlins-style music to get my money back.
The moral of the story? I must be getting old. But my blood’s good.
I’m off to London tomorrow, to spend three days at the motorcycle show at ExCel. I’ve never been to one before, surprisingly, so I can’t tell you much about it, but I’m the guest of Nathan Millward who rode a postman’s bike from Australia to England a while back and is one of my favourite people in spite of himself.
I’m pretty much guaranteed to have a good time. I only have to talk for half an hour each day, and that’s answering questions, so I reckon I’ll hold out all right. I’ve got books to sell and this time, just as an experiment, some big posters that people seem to like putting up on their walls. This is one of them.
As Brexit looms over me like a dreadful curse, every visit to England seems more and more like the end of a golden era. Everyone’s fed up with it, but I can’t help thinking about it.
A few days ago I was asked to do a TEDx talk at Warwick and I chickened out – sort of – partly because it sounded like a lot of work, but mainly because I’ve never been any good at doing scripted speeches and I’m getting too old to fail.
Still, I couldn’t help wondering what I might have said. The theme was “Architects of Tomorrow”, and since I am not an architect (although I love designing and building my own stuff) I assume the larger meaning of those who might be designing a future world. Well, I wonder if it’s not a bit ridiculous asking an 87-year-old to divine the needs of a future generation. True, Buckminster Fuller was still at it when he was my age, although the resemblance ends there.
My first reaction to the title was that it was rather hubristic. If there is one thing we should have learned by now it is that you can’t create an environment for the next lot to occupy and expect them to appreciate it. Look at the record. Look at what happened to those brilliant, colourful tower blocks we put up in the fifties. Look at Chandighar, Le Corbusier’s famous celebration of concrete in India, which the inhabitants have done their absolute best to disguise as a tent city by covering it with fabrics, posters, and graffiti.
I am not saying that these endeavours were without merit. They certainly served a purpose, for a while at least, but they do show how impossible it is to anticipate what large numbers of people in the future will find amenable or inspiring.
However, assuming that the theme of these talks is meant more generally than in terms of bricks and mortar, the thought that we could today imagine and create a better future for the next generation seems quite foolish. We have only to observe, right now, in Europe and America, the extraordinary mess we are making for our own younger generation. The sad truth seems to be that the calibre of the people we have elected to prepare for the future is simply inadequate.
In our own case, in Britain, the imbalance between north and south (to put it at it’s crudest) has been obvious throughout my lifetime, and yet our politicians have never seriously tackled this dangerous instability until finally one of them, in an act of consummate folly, put a match to the powder keg. Much the same blind arrogance characterises affairs in the USA, and there are echoes of it everywhere, prompted by the very difficulties that require us to pull together rather than fly apart.
If we are to put our energy and creative talents into anything, it must be into improving ourselves. We need to be led and instructed by better people, better politicians, and of course by that I don’t mean people with better qualifications or more expensive educations. I mean people with a grasp of the diversity and complexity of the world we live in, who recognise the impossibility of separating ourselves off from its problems and the fact that we are all in it together.
The combination of population growth, drastic inequalities and the information revolution is already having lethal consequences, and in combination with climate change will quite possibly lead to our extinction unless somehow we fashion better people to show us how to resolve these tensions.
The British have always been great travellers and on all my big rides I’d say I encountered more Brits than people of other European nationalities. How can that be compatible with the sense of a creeping xenophobia we see in Britain today? I don’t think we’re generally afraid of foreigners, or find them distasteful. From what I’ve heard it might have more to do with large numbers of unskilled workers behaving badly because they are trafficked and exploited by criminal gangs. In which case policing the gangs might be better than closing our borders, but that is a quite uneducated opinion. What I want to see is a body of elected politicians and government officials with the will, the determination and the humility to sort these things out. Those are not the people I hear pontificating about Brexit.
All my emphasis in the second half of my life has been on the virtue of exploratory travel, as a means to finding some perspective on life and an appreciation of the beauty of the planet we inhabit.
It drastically tempers the desire to acquire stuff or to impose oneself on others. It greatly diminishes fear and anxiety, and powerfully reinforces the belief that people, for the most part, share common values and desires, and that it is generally safe and usually a pleasure to be amongst them.
If such an idea were not utterly absurd, I would wish everyone could travel as I did and discover in themselves their own natural compatibility with humanity. I have yet to meet travellers who do not report on the warmth and generosity they are offered by people everywhere, and always inversely proportional to their wealth.
Perhaps we should send our budding teachers and politicians out into the world with the modern equivalent of a begging bowl before we entrust them with our future and the future of our children.
They wouldn’t be so concerned with acquiring wealth, shoring up their self-importance and intriguing in the pursuit of power.
The architects of tomorrow need to do most of their work on themselves, to head off the catastrophes looming over us and ensure that there actually will be a tomorrow.
