19. Sidecars and Lady Gardens
Helen and I weren't able to spend sunny summer days wafting around the Somerset countryside in a bike and sidecar like some modern day Darby and Joan. Why we would be like Darby and Joan I have no idea, it just sounded apposite. Who the fuck were Darby and Joan anyway and more pertinently did they have a sidecar, I suspect not.
However nonetheless any sidecar'ing was strictly verboten due to my fairly extraordinary mechanical ineptitude. It didn't matter what I did I couldn't get the fucking sidecar attached to the bike. Day after day in glorious sunshine I would repair to the garage, haul the ridiculously large garage door open, this in itself was annoying, the garage door was electric but the mechanism had died years ago and now I had to heave it up by main strength to get the bloody thing open. To add insult to injury it was impossible to open from the outside and had a nasty habit of working it's way off of one of it's tracks and becoming impossible to move. Having heaved the door into position I'd wheel the bike out onto the drive and try yet another method of attaching sidecar to bike, retreating in baffled dismay an hour or so later as none of the ideas I tried either worked or even came close to working.
The first issue of the day was not having the correct clamps to fit the bike to the sidecar. In order to find out how this might be done I even jumped in the car and drove 80 odd miles to the home of Watsonian Squire, Englands premier seller of sidecars. Watsonian live and move and have their being in an astonishingly bucolic village nestling in the Cotswolds, they are on a very fetching industrial estate that is made up of old buildings surrounded by trees and closely mown grass.
The estate is full of small companies fixing vintage cars, stripping old furniture and providing all the sorts of services that you used to find in every high street and are now more and more difficult to find. It was definitely the sort of place you would find middle aged blokes in brown overalls doing technical things with their hands and not a computer in sight.
Pleasingly, Watsonian were exactly that sort of firm, they've been attaching sidecars to motorcycles for over a century now and don't show any signs of stopping. My research into methods of affixing the sidecar to the bike had turned up a video online of a man putting an old Watsonian sidecar onto a Royal Enfield Meteor 350 and he had gone to Gloucester to talk to them about it. Further research had uncovered the fact that they supplied a sidecar fixing kit for the Meteor, hence the 80 mile drive.
There was a phalanx of elderly men who came marauding round the corner of the building apparently intent on finding somewhere to serve them tea. They were not who I had come to see.
I wandered around slightly aimlessly until I saw a door that looked like it was the entrance to a workshop. I hovered around the door for a while in a very British manner, hoping that someone would come out. When no one did I finally gathered my courage and went into what was definitely the main workshop. I was right, it was bursting at the seams with middle aged men in overalls doing complicated things to bikes and sidecars. I had reached Nirvana, sidecar Nirvana that is, it wasn't populated by an early nineties rock band.
Sadly, seeing yet another middle aged man appear in their midst was obviously not terribly exciting as no one looked up and I was left dithering slightly just inside the door. Everyone was busy and I didn't want to interrupt, I probably wasn't even supposed to be in there.
Eventually after what seemed about half a day, and was probably a couple of minutes, a man came out of the office and made to go past me.
"Excuse me" I asked diffidently "I was wondering whether I could ask for some advice"
"No problem mate, what is it you want to know"
I explained about my sidecar and asked whether they did a fixing kit for my Royal Enfield Classic 350. They did, hurray.
"Probably won't help you though" he said, helpfully.
Bloody hell fire, one step forward and two back.
"Pray tell me why not", I asked trying to suppress the urge to poke him urgently in the eye.
"Well, your sidecar is a Velorex and all the fittings will be smaller than the ones we supply"
Shit, fuck, bollocks, why me, was what ran through my mind, also a stray thought about the cost of a 160 mile round trip may have intruded somewhat.
"You need to talk to David at F2 Motorcycles, he supplies all the Velorex kit and should be able to help"
Damn and blast, I had avoided F2 Motorcycles as they were in Cambridge, clear on the other side of the country.
I had a few more technical questions for him but it was obvious that this was not going to materialise the magic bullet that I needed to get my sidecar fixed to my bike. He was able to show me a custom bolt that they produced to attach the rear high level sidecar stanchion to the rear of the bike and pointed out where it would attach. So maybe not all was lost.
After a bit more of a look round and a quick drool over the machines in their little museum cum showroom I climbed back into the car to return to Butcombe.
Once home I began a protracted email exchange with David at F2 Motorcycles who was very helpful but also exhibited a strange reluctance to engage. I sent him a bunch of photos of the bike and the sidecar and asked what he would recommend given the fixings that had come with the sidecar.
Eventually we settled on a bunch of fixings that would hopefully allow me to finally attach the sidecar to the bike. I unlimbered the wallet and spent an unfeasible amount of money on an assorted collection of steel bits and pieces that I would hopefully be able to work out how to use as they most definitely did not come with an instruction manual.
However, other events would rapidly overtake the sidecar project and for a short while drive any thoughts of motorcycles from my head, which I can assure you is not easy to do.
During the cancer treatment I had moved to the spare bedroom that overlooks the drive so that I could throw up in peace and not disturb Helen. It was July and was pretty warm so I was sleeping with the window open. I woke up one morning in mid July at 20 past 5 in the morning. This wasn't terribly unusual as when I was working the alarm would go off at 05:20 as I like to start early. Most mornings I am starting to wake up around 5am. So on this inauspicious morning I woke up pretty much as usual at 0520 thinking that I had heard a noise outside. This also was not that that unusual, so I lay in bed idly listening when it came again, a sort of high pitched squeak or screech and a bit of a bang.
Curious, I got out of bed and went to look out of the window, I didn't immediately throw the window open as I my first thought was it might be Jess's partner who was living with us at the time and left early for work, either that or our Airbnb guests leaving early and putting things in a car. I peered a little myopically out of the window and couldn't see anyone below, it occurred to me that it might be our next door neighbour putting stuff into his truck so I looked over at his place but didn't stick my head out, as I'm British enough to not want to be seen being nosy. No sign of the neighbour, now remember, this is mid July in the South West of England, at 05:20 it might as well be the middle of the day it's that light.
No sign of anyone at all, I was just about to return to bed when I caught sight of a reflection in the window of the car, there were people moving about in front of the garage. I couldn't see them as they were round the corner out of sight.
I flung the window open and stuck my head out. You need to picture the scene, I have just got out of bed so I am stark bollock naked, I've not long finished a protracted treatment for cancer and weigh all of 64 kilos soaking wet. Frankly, I am not a particularly intimidating specimen, anyhow back to window flinging. So I fling the window open and stick my head out to try and see what is going on.
At the noise of the window opening, three black clad figures wearing balaclavas came round the corner and to be fair they were extremely intimidating, one of them shone a torch up at me which reduced the level of intimidation somewhat, it was full daylight for fucks sake. This did start me questioning the level of intelligence of these masked interlopers.
He shone the torch at me and rather menacingly said; "Fuck you, ya bald cunt"
It was immediately obvious that what he was trying to say was that they were going to break into my garage no matter what and no bald skinny old man was going to stop them.
To be honest I was now a little non-plussed, he had basically put the kibosh on my next move which would have been to shout at them but they had already indicated that this was unlikely to do any good. I stared at them for a couple of seconds and then darted back into the bedroom. The previous week had been spent assiduously trying to shoot a rat that was invading the neighbours duck pen and thieving food, so my air rifle was leaning against the dressing table in my bedroom. It was the work of but a moment to grab the rifle, dash back to the window and lift it above the sill.
The reaction from the ranks of the ungodly was instant and rather gratifying. En-masse they made a run for the gate, the first two were off and running like contestants in an Olympic 100 metres, the third one slipped on the gravel at the corner and went down on one knee scrabbling for all he was worth as he went round the corner. As it turns out there were four of them because another black clad figure came bursting out of the traps. He obviously hadn't seen the gun but the sight of his companions taking off like Usain Bolt had induced rather a severe level of panic, in fact he panicked so much he ran into the wall opposite, which made me chuckle.
The entire encounter had taken less than 30 seconds from me being called a bald lady garden to the smallest member of the troop bouncing off the wall opposite.
If you think about this from their point of view for a moment then their reaction makes sense. They looked up and there was a naked bald man looking at them so they threatened him, he didn't say a word, just looked at them, disappeared for a couple of seconds and reappeared with what probably looked like a high powered rifle. From their perspective I was obviously a dangerous psychopath.
However from my point of view it was extremely lucky that they ran, for several reasons: the high powered gun was actually a low powered, air rifle that wasn't even loaded and more to the point if they hadn't run then I had basically run out of options other than telling them that they were very naughty boys and could they please leave, but leave they had and disappeared forever from our lives leaving no trace
Nothing on God's green earth was going to persuade me to go downstairs and outside whilst a tribe of crowbar wielding maniacs were on the loose. I am nothing if not an arrant coward. What I actually did was rush into Helen's room to tell her about it and look out of the window to see if I could see them running up the hill, I couldn't. They had disappeared like dew upon the meadow.
Sensibly, from my point of view anyway, I did not go and actually look at the damage for a couple of hours just to make sure that I was not going to be accosted by black clad miscreants.
When I finally surveyed the damage it turned out we had a completely busted garage door. And I mean, it was absolutely and completely fucked to a fair thee well.
They had been levering each side of the door to such a degree that they had moved the door frame about three inches up and split the garage door from the floor to halfway up it's height. It no longer opened with the electric opener and now would no longer open properly without splitting entirely in half.
This was a bit concerning as the garage at the time contained nearly £18,000 pounds worth of motorcycles which were now available for the taking by any of the ungodly that wandered into the drive and gently pushed the door with a feather.
This required immediate remediation, I got a couple of 4 x 2 lengths of timber and bolted them across the bottom of the door. This made the door approximately the weight of a small, fairly well fed elephant. I could open it but it was touch and go whether I could get it above my head and once there, get it to stay and not suddenly crash down and finish off what the cancer had failed to.
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