Out we go into Poland and my mind is immediately mobbed. It’s overwhelmed and totally consumed. It’s running scared by all the things I’d put to the back of my mind suddenly running to the front. Thoughts I’d run away from all catching up with me at once. FUUUUUUCK OFFFFFFF. I can’t deal with this right now. Take a ticket and I’ll try to deal with you one by one. Tomorrow. Or the next day. Maybe. Never put off till tomorrow what you can put off till year is my motto. But I’ll have to face them soon i know.
And this shitting tossing bloody traffic is making me MAD. I’m on the motorway to Gdansk. It all comes to a stop. Fantastic. Just perfect. I filter for a while but the wanky steering has my arse holding its breath and eventually it has to breathe out. I’m paranoid about the bike overheating and i need to stop. There is an exit in a couple of miles but, of course, the Polish have decided to use the emergency lane to get to it and it’s blocked. So I just think bollocks to it. I stop in the fast lane up against the barrier. I put the side stand down, turn the engine off and I read my book. Yes I do because I’m English and I don’t care. At some point recently a robber came in the night and took all my fucks. The cars drive slowly past me and stare but who cares. I read a couple of chapters then I look for an alternative route but Google just says “Don’t bother. Come back tomorrow”. Filter out onto the A road and it’s just fucking chaos. Slow, tortuous and maddening. I stop to check where I am and some people are staring at me. Probably because I just shouted “CUIUUUUUUNT” 20 times at the top of my voice. I am very very very hangry indeed so I stop at a random station and chug a sausage which calms me right down. Has the same effect on my wife now i come to think about it.
Ride the last 100 miles chasing the sun and playing mental dodgeball with all thoughts of my impending mundanity when i get home. I can’t dodge them forever, but I can dodgeball them today.
The Bitch tries two more times to kill me a couple of times on the way into town to my hotel, just for a laugh. The last one she tried to throw me onto a curb. I guess at least this puts a big green tick in the “thank God I didn’t keep going east” argument, but a big red question mark in the “Will the bike get me home” one. Why are things never simple
As I ponder my fate, I wonder, did anyone ever ask for this as their last meal? I know I would
Woke up and went for breakfast, whistling “that will be the day that I die” for some reason. Really lovely food. Sunny weather. A good day for it. Is it suicide if you think something bad might happen but do nothing to stop it? Don’t ask me why I didn’t. I just like to trust to fate and let circumstances decide. Otherwise known as the stick your fingers in your ears and cross your fingers approach.
Pack the bike. Check the steering. No notches. Smooth but noisy. Take the callipers off, pump the pistons, inflate the tyres. Feels perfect. Let’s ride. It’s all bat shit boring fast motorway today anyway. 360 miles to run. If this is all you have to look at, then your mind tends to wander. I’m very quickly into muse control. The bike rides itself, just settles into its stride.
100 miles down. All fine. No problems. It’s bladder o’clock. Stop for coffee. An ever more impersonal and generic experience on the motorway. Just a function without any pleasure. I hate these places.
Back on the road. Another 100 miles and j pull into another motorway services. Bike still feels fine. I’ve been doing about 65. Some big filtering in some sections. All good. But I can’t put myself through the queue for spew experience again so I look up local cafes and find one out in a village about 15 miles away.
On we go. After this much riding my body is part of my bike. It’s completely wired in. It’s beginning to raise some concerns. Low level. Just monitoring. Get to the exit, take a tight right, ummmm ok. Not perfect but nothing too scary.
Stop. Wiggle the bars. No noise and no sticking. Go a couple more miles and come to a left right chicane up to a junction. Not too fast. Maybe 30-40. Left is fine. Right…. RIIIIIIIGHT. The steering locks straight. I instinctively punch the right of the bar hard to counter steer and it moves but it’s too much and the front wheel slides. Fortunately I catch it, get out the slide and make it round and to the junction.
OOOOOOOOO. KKKKKKKKK then. I survived. I don’t think my pants were so lucky though. They ARE Russian so they took the brunt of it and protected the rest of me. The odd thing is though my pulse is normal, no adrenaline in my mouth, no shaking, just nothing. That can’t be normal. What the fuck is wrong with me? I’m about a mile from the cafe. Bike feels 80% so I ride slowly to an old building in a small village that I suspect gets one visitor a day max. Leave the bike in the sun. That will make it better I’m sure.
Go in and it’s a proper old mess. Like a horder’s front room. Shit everywhere. It looks like the local house clearance van discharges directly in this room. Excellent Now I promised myself at breakfast I’d have something savoury for lunch. I promised myself I wouldn’t have cake.
I order cake, with cream. Made with rhubarb out the blokes garden. Given that I only just shit myself 5 minutes ago, the rhubarb is unlikely to push any more poo out in the near future.
This is exactly what I want. A personal experience. The bloke is German and this building has been in his family since 1896, except when the communists forced them to leave during the war. He lives here with his Hungarian wife. The walls are covered in an eclectic collection of items from all over. Pictures from his family, his handball playing days, boomerangs, camels, chickens. All sorts. But I can’t stay here all day. I wonder if the bike is healed yet?
I ride very very carefully about 5 miles to a petrol station. Fill up. Put it on the centre stand and turn the bars. It sounds like it’s eating a sandwich made of bricks. The bottom bearing has collapsed. Take it off the stand and it’s totally fucked. The steering is super stiff and locking.
Saturday afternoon. Perfect. Beam me fucking up snotty. Do it. Do it right now!
But as bad as this is, it’s not nearly as bad as it could be. Google says there is a motorcycle repair place a couple of miles away, and a KTM dealer (closed for the weekend) about 20 minutes further on. I could have been standing at the roadside in Mongolia with this problem. At least I know where Shit and Happens have been waiting for me now. They’ll use the fact it could have been worse for mitigation but those little wankers are due a proper fucking slap.
I very very very carefully and extremely slowly ride the bike round to the repair shop. It looks an odd setup. Maybe even some sort of collective thing. I dunno. A bloke comes out and declares the bearings deceased but it’s too late to do anything today. We have a chat and I’ll talk to the Ktm dealer Monday and see if they have bearings, otherwise he will order some for Tuesday. I can disassemble my bike outside and borrow a few tools and they can help press the bearings out and back in.
There is a hotel about 15 mins walk away. By the time I get there in my leathers carrying my luggage in 30 degrees heat I can’t even sign the paperwork without dripping all over the counter and the form. But I’m safe. I’m alive. And I have a plan. The holy trinity I live by
I need some liquid. My dick is a dog end again and my neck has gone full on chicken gizzard. There is a supermarket just up the road. Walk in.. WTAF This is by far the biggest supermarket I have ever been into in my entire life. 2 stories.
Shit absolutely everywhere. It’s soooooo big that they have trollies with fucking GPS like terminals on to help you find anything I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s too much. It’s completely overwhelming. I almost have a panic attack.
It does confuse me that I can be on my bike going into a corner at maybe 40mph, have the bars lock solid, go into a front wheel skid and just make it round without throwing myself into the undergrowth and my body just goes “bovvered?”, but I step into an air conditioned shop offering everything known to mankind and my first reaction is to flee in terror.
But, as you know, my tracking skills are legendairy, and I can find what I want wherever they hide it
As much as I’m fucked off and frustrated and feeling hard done by today I know deep down inside that the situation I find myself in today is really why I do these trips. Yesterday I didn’t plan to nor expect to be where I am today. Yesterday I didn’t know anything about the nearest Ktm dealer or bald bloke at the repair shop or the world’s biggest supermarket. And as much as I ever very loosely plan the next few days, the actual future is only ever as far as I can see. Anything can happen and everything can change at any time. And that’s the joy. I can plan to do the things I want but quite often fate will plan things I will enjoy a lot more. It’s sometimes like it knows me better than I do. My wife would absolutely hate every single second of a journey like this. And I know plenty of others that would feel the same way. Nothing wrong with that. But I love it. I like the chaotic and unpredictable. I like having to constantly negotiate and navigate my way through. I like to quickly make plans A, B and C and moving from one problem to the next. It gives me some sense of achievement. I love the ever changing galleries I ride through. Whether I’m walking, riding, sitting and eating, on a train, a platform, a bridge or having a piss in the woods my eyes are constantly scanning, looking for photos. Looking for angles, watching and waiting for exactly the right moment, for the clouds to pass, for the car to move, for the fat ugly bastard in a bright yellow shirt to fuck stop taking selfies and get the fuck out my shot, for the long hair of the woman with the backless dress to blow and reveal her skin, for everything to just come together and ‘click’. I’m a sniper photographer. I watch. I wait. And if I get a perfect hit I smile. I print the pictures out and put them all on the walls in my escape capsules. Each one a bookmark into memory I can wander through at will.
These trips give me the ammunition I need to survive. And that’s why I do it. It’s cheaper than therapy. It’s not optional. Same with the blogs. I can talk to you and turn myself inside out in a way I would never ever do to your face. I’d flatly deny all knowledge of these written words because they’re from a different time and place when a very different persona was in charge. By the time we meet that persona will be safely locked away, totally separated from my other life. You’ll just see the facade persona. The wrapper. Unless you try very hard and dig very deep that is. Just be careful. You might not like what you see.
Anyway. Enough of that bollocks. How am I going to waste another day of my life without hurting or insulting anyone or getting arrested for taking a picture with a skin content of more than 20%? There are days when I like to have a few, select people around me and there are days like today when I think I need a separate planet just to myself.
I take a tram into Potsdam. It’s Sunday though and vertically everywhere is shut. Lazy bastards. I’m sure these two were on a tool shop website I was looking at. I NEED SOME TOOLS. GET BACK TO WORK YOU FECKLESS WANKERS.
And this is another of my pet hates. Buildings seem to be like people nowadays. They’re not allowed to age gracefully. They’re not allowed to settle and lean a bit, maybe have a few scars and wrinkles, they have to have cosmetic surgery and it makes them look like pert tits on a pensioner. Just completely wrong. The whole world is going fucking Disney
I need a leg fix. Yep… That would definitely fix it
A few hours killed I get back to my room to face a grim reality. Last night bought 2 litres of milk, a litre of cold latte and some juice. And now I’ve got about a glass of milk left to last me the next 12 hours. I may have to phone a help line
