Motorcycle Blues, Part Two

Back in November of 2011 I posted a long whine about how I was trying to get my motorcycles licensed to ride here in the UK.  I ended that post with one import document having been received from the authorities, and the other one having been sent a day later, but not received. I expected anxious readers to be pestering me with questions about how it all turned out.

Alas, I have given up waiting to be prompted for the REST of the story (thanks Paul Harvey) and I’m just going to tell you. If you remember, or more importantly, if you don’t; I was planning to license the Honda Hawk first as, being more than ten years old, it didn’t require a single vehicle inspection to get licensed. The Suzuki GSX-R750 did need such an inspection, another bureaucratic hoop to jump through which I hoped to postpone.

Alas, the Hawk turned out to have two blown fork seals and a broken tail section from the move, problems which have yet to be remedied. So instead I decided to focus on getting the Gixxer on the road. This was all brought to a head when I got a job in May 2012 and needed the bike to ride to work, as they did not have car parking but would let me squeeze the moto into the car park. They are so civilized about that sort of thing here, and I love it.

After waiting on the document from Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue, I finally got a duplicate sent out to the DVLA licensing office. I then managed to find a lovely bloke to come and load the bike up to take it down for inspection, and of course he knew the bloke at the place who was doing the inspecting, and the whole thing went tickety-boo like that.  Next, I trotted down to the licensing place. From there I had to take the papers in to the moto shop up the road to get my plate made, and then I was shockingly on the road all completely legal (well, except for the tax disc not being mounted on the bike somewhere, but I did have it right there in my tank bag!).

Those first few days in traffic were absolutely hair-raising. If you’ve never driven or ridden in England, you have to realize that the roads here are approximately the width of one lane of a North American freeway. On this road, you have vehicles, including giant lorries (semis to you TransAtlantic-ers), going both ways, cars parked on the verges, bicycles and motorcycles lane-splitting up the middle. Both ways. There are, out here in Hicksville, very few stoplights, but a great many roundabouts, some of which have three lanes of travel or more, and multiple exits.

Anyway, I survived, and am now a happy veteran of more than six months of motorcycle commuting. Unlike the hardcore locals, I have put the Gixxer away for this season of ice and snow, darkness and incessant dampness, and look forward to riding again in the slightly warmer dampness in the spring.

 

Epilogue

That missing document? OK, well, months after I spoke to the fellow and got a new one sent out to the DVLA so I could license the Gixxer, we got a knock on the door of our house on Hempstead Road. It was the lady who had moved into the house we had been renting when we arrived here, up in Tom’s Lane. She had mail for us. You guessed it: the document from HMRC for the Gixxer was in there!   The guy had sent the one for the Hawk to our correct address, and sent the one for the Gixxer ON THE SAME DAY to the old address on Tom’s Lane!

God Save the Queen

I went to London to visit the Queen. Well; I went into The City to watch the Diamond Jubilee flotilla. I went largely because someone I know and used to work with in Vancouver was here to paddle in a dragon boat in the flotilla, otherwise I may have been tempted by the hideous weather to just stay home and watch it on telly like everyone else.

But a curious thing happened. I became intensely interested in the Queen and everything about her. I mean, I grew up singing "God save our gracious Queen, long live our noble Queen" in school in Canada. The night before the flotilla, we watched her son, Prince Charles, talk about her in a BBC television program that shared many minutes of private film footage from the Windsor family.  From the earliest days of her marriage to Prince Phillip, Elizabeth wore her destiny, not like a hair shirt, but more like a shining mantle.

 

As the culminating proof of her almost zealous commitment to her people, Sunday afternoon the 86-year-old monarch stood bravely in the face of wind and rain, for four miserable hours as she was paraded down the Thames on a barge to the delirious approval of almost a million of her subjects who gaily lined the banks of the river in the rain, waving and wearing flags in equal measure. She never once sat down in the on-board throne specially designed for her rest and comfort.To my amazement, I have concluded that she has been, and continues to be, gracious and noble. I'm not sure I even knew what that meant before this long holiday celebration weekend.

To those of you of a republican bent, you may still not know what it means. But something else occurred to me, perhaps as Hosni Mubarak received his jail sentence and civil war by any other name rages in Syria and Charles Taylor is finally brought to justice: the sovereign has another, less talked-about role in this otherwise very modern democracy.

What if the Queen (and the monarchy) plays a very real and critical role in legitimizing the government and deterring any coups? What I mean is, maybe having a Queen or similar benign despot actually helps to prevent the violent overthrow of the democratic system?  I mean, if you want to sneak in and start making things autocratic, you would have to either have the consent of the monarch, in which case the people would very quickly catch on and make Parliament DO something about the uppity monarch, or, in the case where it is the Parliamentarians wishing to usurp power, it would  become apparent when the first thing they wanted to do was to get rid of the monarch (or replace them with some hand-chosen variant not of the House of Windsor).

I realize this is a very cursory treatment of what could be a vast and in-depth political treatise, but it is late and I have been going quite hard for the last four days or so, not wanting to miss any of the excitement. A lot has been written and said about Her Majesty this week, here and elsewhere. Goodness knows I'm no Plato or Aristotle, but I feel that the wheels of politics and of society sometimes, or oftentimes, turn within each other and it doesn't hurt to think about what some of this stuff means.To me, tonight, it means that I have a new respect and admiration for Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II, that will not soon leave me. God Save the Queen.
God Save The Queen at St. Paul's

Spring Garden Chronicles

Quince flowers herald spring

 The five stages of spring gardening have stayed remarkably static for me, whether I was living in B.C., Oregon, or here in Hertfordshire.  This account being chiefly about spring, it omits the hopeful months of late fall and winter, when you stand in the garden with your beloved discussing how next year will be different, and envisaging all the wonderful things you can/should/will do  in the off-season and planning wonderful new heights for the garden. It goes something like this:

Aren't the bluebells lovely?

1. Joy.  Sometime between January and March, you see the snowdrops and crocuses rise defiantly up through the snow or the grass, depending on the year, and you can't help it: your heart fills with joy. As the weeks pass, more and more of the garden comes to life, and you thrill as the garden fills with flowers from bulbs: daffodils, tulips, bluebells, lily of the valley. Fruit trees bud out then blossom in riotous pinks and whites. Giddy with spring fever, you get out the garden table and chairs, prudently leaving on the rain covers. Maybe you even make a hopeful trip to the garden centre.

2. Concern.  As the sun comes out, and showers start, you wonder when the explosion happened. All the old stalks you left for the over-wintering critters now stand dead and ugly amongst the greenery. The trees you didn't get around to pruning early enough go from bare branches to a breathtaking array of green within hours. The lawn is looking shaggy and suddenly one day appears to be more dandelions than grass.

Forsythia in Bloom

3. Panic. You have been glancing with growing alarm at the garden as you dash from the car to the house in the pouring rain carrying sixteen grocery bags.The grass that was dormant now stands three feet tall and surely harbours everything from giant rats to tigers. The vines have overtaken all the trees. Weeds have choked out nearly all the flowers in the beds.Now, after several consecutive weeks of rain, panic sets in. At the first sign that the downpour is letting up, you dash outside and fire up the mower, which groans in dismay as you wade into the lawn, and dies.

4. Despair. As the weeks pass, you manically hack and cut and pull at every opportunity. It never seems to make any difference. One day you realize that the horrible brown-specked scraggly plants you have just industriously cleaned out of the beds were your gladiolas. Your shoulders slump and you drag yourself inside, dolefully clutching the few small stalks of rhubarb you have managed to salvage.

5. Apathy. As the weeks of summer wear on, your sense of community pride shrivels. You mow the lawn every 3 to 4 weeks.With what you won't admit to yourself is a sense of relief, you finally don the mantle of utter failure. You invite people over for garden parties or BBQs and just before they arrive you halfheartedly run the mower over the grass where you'll be sitting.  After a few Pimm's or margaritas, no-one notices anyway, right?

Wisteria temporarily under control

I am hoping to cling to my hapless urge to garden for another few weeks, maybe hang on until the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in June, in case anyone comes over or they have a street party in my neighbourhood. Then all bets are off. I even have a vacation abroad planned this summer; any residual guilt feelings that I harbour can be shrugged off with "What can I do? I was away."  So if you're planning to visit us this summer, do it now before it's too late and you have to hack your way through the holly to get in the front gate, and get tangled in the wisteria before you get to the door.