From Watsonian to Dodgem

Watsonian has been building sidecars since 1912, which places it among that select group of British manufacturers whose products have survived wars, recessions, changing fashions and the repeated efforts of the British motorcycle industry to abolish itself.

Its sidecars belong to an age when a motorcycle combination was not merely an eccentric weekend toy. It was family transport, commercial transport and, for many people, the nearest affordable alternative to a car. Over more than a century, Watsonian developed the curved glass-fibre bodies, polished fittings and traditional coachbuilt appearance that made its name almost synonymous with the classic British sidecar.

That history is part of the attraction. A Watsonian does not look like a plastic box attached to a motorcycle as an afterthought. It gives the whole outfit presence. There is something gloriously civilised about a proper chair, with its upholstered seat, small windscreen and polished trim, travelling beside a motorcycle that would otherwise carry little more than its rider and a modest quantity of luggage.

A Watsonian sidecar on the Yamaha Virago 535 is therefore an attractive idea. The Virago is low, compact and has exactly the sort of faintly old-fashioned cruiser appearance that suits a sidecar. Add a traditional Watsonian chair and the result would look as though it had always been intended, rather than assembled during an unusually energetic weekend with an angle grinder.

There is, inevitably, a slight difficulty. Watsonian sidecars cost money.

Facebook Marketplace, however, offers an alternative universe in which sensible engineering decisions compete directly with things that seemed amusing after 2 glasses of wine.

A complete Squire sidecar appeared for about £550 - Squire merged with Watsonian in 1988. That was probably the rational answer. It already had a chassis, suspension, wheel, seat and body. In engineering terms, most of the difficult work had been done by somebody who presumably understood sidecars.

There was also an unfinished Watsonian project at around £600. It was elegant, traditional and potentially very suitable, although the word unfinished in a vehicle advertisement can cover anything from requiring a coat of paint to requiring the recreation of several missing decades of British manufacturing.

A motorcycle sidecar looks rather like a heavily disguised fairground dodgem, and that sparked a thought. Why not start with an actual dodgem and disguise it as a sidecar?

Old dodgem bodies seem to sell for between £100 and £250. Most are glass fibre, approximately sidecar-sized and designed to carry a passenger while surviving repeated impacts from members of the public. This is already a more impressive specification than that of some production vehicles.

One multicoloured example, proudly marked Dodgem III, had particularly promising proportions. Beneath the fairground clutter was a long, low body with enough room for a passenger and a shape that might conceivably complement the Virago.

Not immediately, obviously.

The rubber bumper would have to go. So would the steering wheel, lights, metalwork and towering rear bodywork. The passenger seat would need lowering, the excessive rear overhang removing and the shell reshaping so that it no longer presented the aerodynamic qualities of a garden shed.

A small windscreen could be added. The body could be smoothed, repaired and painted to match the metallic green-grey of the bike. Properly done, it might look less like a retired fairground ride and more like something produced by a small European coachbuilder during an eccentric period.

The body is not, of course, the sidecar.

It would still require a proper chassis, suspension, wheel and correctly engineered mounting system. A £55 vintage sidecar chassis also appeared for sale, although its age and condition raised the possibility that the low price merely reflected the cost of the rust.

The chassis would need to be examined carefully, particularly its suspension, bearings, alignment and ability to accept secure mounting points. The Virago itself would require a properly designed subframe. Attaching a dodgem shell directly to a few convenient-looking parts of the motorcycle would produce something memorable, but probably only once.

A sidecar needs properly triangulated upper and lower mounts. It also needs correct wheel lead, toe-in and lean-out. These are not decorative details. They determine whether the outfit travels along the road or spends its time attempting to visit the opposite verge.

There is also the question of weight. The dodgem body is likely to be relatively light, which is useful, but an excessively light chair can lift readily on left-hand bends. Ballast might be needed when travelling without a passenger, although the final requirement would depend upon the finished weight and geometry.

Braking would also need consideration. A light unbraked sidecar can be perfectly workable, but the completed outfit would have to be assessed as a whole rather than on the comforting basis that each individual part once belonged to a vehicle.

The complete Squire remains the sensible option. Buy it, fit the correct subframe, set it up properly and go for a ride.

The unfinished Watsonian is the elegant option. It would suit the Virago and produce the sort of combination that attracts approving nods from men wearing waxed jackets.

The dodgem is the interesting option.

It is cheaper only if one places no monetary value on fabrication, glass-fibre work, paint, suspension repairs, engineering, repeated dismantling or the gradual transformation of a garage into a small and badly managed vehicle factory.

But it would be unique.

And once you have imagined a Yamaha Virago 535 with a fairground dodgem beside it, the complete Squire begins to look depressingly sensible.

However, this one looks as if it escaped from a maritime exhibition.

Then I spotted this one on Facebook Marketplace for £250.

Make unknown, but it does have a 1960s Watsonian Monza look about it. Unfortunately the owner is not responding to my enquiries on his advert. Could be away on holiday.

I uploaded the image to ChatGPT instructed it to renovate it and paint it in the same colour as my Virago.

Now, that does look rather attractive. Unfortunately ChatGPT is a bit squonk when lining the bike and sidecar up in the same plane, but you get the general idea.

I contacted Watsonian about a subframe for the Virago 535. They replied that they don't have enough data on the 535 to produce one off the shelf, so they'd need the bike to fabricate a bespoke subframe. The price was £595. That's not cheap, but it would be the proper job. It may be something to do over the winter.

I then made the mistake of joining a Virago owners' group on Facebook. You know the sort of place. You ask a perfectly straightforward question and receive every answer except the one you were looking for.

I asked whether anyone had drawings or measurements for a Virago 535 subframe so I could get a tame fabricator to make one. Instead I got the usual pearls of wisdom. Buy a BMW. Buy an 1100 Virago. In other words, don't answer the question at all.

Fitting a sidecar to a Virago 535 isn't impossible. Plenty of people have done it. Yes, it blunts the performance, but I didn't buy a Virago because I have an overwhelming desire to frighten sports bikes. I bought it because it's a pleasant, steady plodder. My comfortable cruising speed with a sidecar would probably be 60 to 65 mph anyway.

The trick is to keep the sidecar as light as possible. A lightweight Squire or Watsonian is a far better match than some enormous touring chair. The engineering challenge isn't whether the Virago can pull it. It's designing a proper subframe that spreads the loads without abusing Yamaha's rather unconventional frame.

Facebook Marketplace and the 32-Inch Waist

There is a small absurdity in buying second-hand motorcycle clothing on Facebook Marketplace.

Motorcycling is supposedly a pastime built around speed, machinery and a faint disregard for convention. Yet the used clothing market appears to have been designed almost entirely for fat bikers with 40-inch wastes. Waist, obviously, but given the amount of surplus material involved, the misspelling seems oddly appropriate.

Search Facebook Marketplace for summer-weight riding gear and the same things appear repeatedly: black jackets, black trousers, dark blue jeans and enough reflective piping to suggest someone briefly remembered visibility before surrendering to fashion. Anything in a lighter colour is rare. Anything with a 32-inch waist is rarer. Finding both at once is apparently regarded as an unreasonable demand.

The reason I was looking is that I already own a Texspeed heavy-weather suit, which is excellent when Britain is doing what Britain does best. What I wanted was something lighter for warm, dry summer riding, rather than spending every sunny journey gently poaching inside waterproof textiles.

Then, among the acres of black polyester, a complete JTS jacket and trouser set appeared in RAF-style blue camouflage, with armour, in the right size, advertised for £10.

RAF camouflage is not really camouflage on a motorcycle, unless you ride in the same manner that Ron Weasley drove the Ford Anglia. On an ordinary road it is light, distinctive and considerably more visible than the regulation biker uniform of head-to-toe black.

Better still, it had already been reduced and still had not sold, suggesting that the overlap between bikers with a 32-inch waist and bikers willing to countenance RAF camouflage is not especially large.

Naturally, the seller's idea of Facebook Marketplace ended at the marketplace. Collection only.

I reckoned the suit was worth £50, so that is what I offered delivered. That was apparently enough to persuade the seller to abandon her no-posting ethic. A Japanese deal: she received enough to make the inconvenience worthwhile, and I paid what I believed the suit was genuinely worth. Both sides were happy.

Buying second-hand always carries some risk. It may not fit. The armour may need upgrading. The waterproof lining may have retired before its previous owner. But the important thing is that it appears to be genuine JTS motorcycle clothing in excellent condition, and exactly the sort of lighter-weight outfit I had been looking for.

The alternative was spending £240 or more on a brand-new summer suit that might still fit like a marquee, because finding properly protective clothing in a 32-inch waist is apparently a specialist requirement.

At £50 delivered, the downside is modest. If it fits, I have acquired a complete, conspicuous summer riding suit for a fraction of the new price. If it does not, I can probably put it back on Facebook Marketplace without losing much.

Sometimes being cost-conscious is not about buying the cheapest thing available. It is about recognising when the market has briefly made a mistake in your favour. Or perhaps, in this case, recognising that a bargain is simply what happens when two people value the same thing differently and both walk away smiling.

Stop press: I discovered today that I'd not bought a complete ensemble of jacket and trousers, but just the trousers. And yes, I hadn't read the advert fully, as usual. Still, £50 for a pair of highly conspicuous motorcycle trousers isn't really a bad deal.

An Accident Waiting to Happen?

I drive for a living. I have now covered thousands of miles without an accident.

There are 2 tempting conclusions. There are 2 tempting conclusions. The first is that I must be an exceptionally good driver. The second is that the law of averages is waiting behind a hedge with a clipboard.

Neither is quite right.

Experience matters. The more miles I drive, the better I become at spotting the little signs that somebody is about to change lanes without looking, brake for no obvious reason or discover their turning only after they have passed it.

You learn to expect the unexpected, although that phrase is rather ruined by people who use it to mean absolutely anything.

You notice the car drifting slightly within its lane. The driver looking sideways. The brake lights appearing for no obvious reason. You begin to recognise the difference between someone who knows where they are going and someone who is about to make their uncertainty everybody else's problem.

That must reduce risk.

But every extra mile also gives something else another chance to go wrong. Experience may make each journey safer, while the sheer number of journeys increases my exposure overall. Both can be true.

A clean driving record probably indicates patience, anticipation and at least a reasonable degree of competence. It also contains a fair helping of luck. I cannot control the deer in the road, the tyre carcass falling from a lorry or the driver who has decided that looking at a telephone is more urgent than looking at the carriageway.

What it does not mean is that an accident is somehow due.

Probability does not notice that I have escaped trouble for several years and decide that fairness now requires a collision. Yet people think like this all the time. A long run of success becomes proof of brilliance. Then, when something goes wrong, it was apparently inevitable because the good run had lasted too long.

This sort of reasoning becomes even worse when politics enters the room.

A government takes office and inflation falls. Its supporters declare victory. Inflation rises and its opponents declare economic sabotage. Energy prices, interest rates, wages, exchange rates and policies already in motion are quietly pushed aside because they complicate matters.

Something happened after something else, therefore the first thing caused the second.

Sometimes it did. Quite often it did not. The awkward bit is showing how.

The same trick appears everywhere. Migration rises and crime rises, therefore migration caused the crime. Police numbers fall and crime also falls, therefore police numbers do not matter.

The conclusion comes first. The explanation is then bolted onto it afterwards, usually with great confidence.

A proper explanation has to show what changed, how it affected behaviour, what else was happening and what would probably have happened anyway. That is harder work than pointing at 2 events on a graph, so naturally it is less popular.

Without that missing mechanism, the argument is no stronger than blaming the driver because the car developed a fault after he bought it.

Personal anecdotes are no better.

I have driven thousands of miles without crashing, therefore I am a superb driver. My grandfather smoked until he was 90, therefore smoking is not dangerous. I once knew a dishonest claimant, therefore claimants are dishonest.

The anecdote may be entirely true. It may still prove next to nothing.

Most outcomes have several causes operating at once. Skill matters. Luck matters. Policy matters, but so do circumstances that no government controls. Individual choices matter, but those choices are made within wider conditions.

This does not make explanation impossible. It merely means that explanation requires rather more effort than spotting that one thing happened after another and announcing causation.

My accident-free record deserves some credit. I would be a fool to think it proves immunity.

Experience improves the odds. Exposure gives the odds more chances to go against me.

The danger begins when we turn that uncertainty into a tidy story, then mistake what happened next for why it happened.

They Lived the War. We Inherited the History.

A recent conversation with my 90-year-old father-in-law took an unexpected turn. He mentioned that the SS Great Britain had had its name changed, because some people - certainly not me - had supposedly associated “SS” with “slave ship”.

That led to a separate discussion about the other meaning of SS. He then asked me what SS meant in Nazi terms.

I was taken aback. I would have assumed that anyone who had lived through the war, even as a child, would know that the SS was the Schutzstaffel, the organisation that became central to Nazi repression, racial policy, concentration camps and mass murder.

But why should he necessarily have known?

There is a curious paradox about the generation that lived through the Second World War. They experienced it directly, endured its restrictions and carried its memories for the rest of their lives, yet many of them knew far less about the war as a whole than their children later did.

My father’s generation knew their own war. They knew their regiment, their ship, their airfield, their convoy, their factory or their bomb-damaged street. As children, they knew rationing, air-raid warnings, blackouts, absent fathers and anxious adults. What they did not necessarily know was how their small piece fitted into the vast machinery of a global conflict.

That was not because they were ignorant. It was because they were inside it.

Operational secrecy meant that servicemen were told only what they needed to know. Censorship limited what could be written home. Newspapers and radio reported what the government judged safe, useful or good for morale. Propaganda was not merely something the enemy did. Britain used it too, often for entirely understandable reasons. A country fighting for survival could hardly issue a daily bulletin listing its mistakes, shortages and secret plans.

Children knew even less. They heard scraps of adult conversation, saw newsreels and absorbed the official version. They might know that Hitler was the enemy and that British forces were fighting overseas, but that did not amount to a detailed understanding of Nazi institutions, the Eastern Front, the machinery of occupation or the developing evidence of genocide.

A soldier in North Africa might know very little about the Battle of the Atlantic. A sailor escorting Arctic convoys might have only the vaguest understanding of events in Burma. A family sheltering from the Blitz would not know the scale of what was happening on the Eastern Front, nor the political bargains being struck between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin.

The war was too large, too dispersed and too secret for any ordinary participant to comprehend in real time.

The generation born afterwards met it in a very different way. By the time the war reached the History curriculum, the pieces had begun to be assembled. Campaigns had been mapped. Axis records had been captured and studied. Commanders had published memoirs. Historians could compare Allied accounts with those of their enemies and examine decisions using documents that had been unavailable while the war was being fought.

We were not taught only about Dunkirk, the Blitz and D-Day. We learned how the theatres connected. We learned about the Eastern Front, North Africa, the Atlantic convoys, strategic bombing, resistance movements, intelligence, diplomacy, occupation and genocide. We learned what the SS was, how it developed and what it did.

We were shown the map rather than merely one muddy square of it.

That formal education mattered. It gave the post-war generation a structure into which individual stories could be placed. A veteran might remember a retreat, a bombardment or a sudden change of orders. The historian could later explain why it happened, what was occurring elsewhere and how it affected the wider campaign.

The classroom was only part of it. Boomers were also surrounded by war films. They appeared constantly on television, especially at weekends and during school holidays. However simplified, patriotic or occasionally myth-making they were, they supplied a rough chronology and a mental map.

Dunkirk, the Atlantic convoys, Colditz, the Dambusters raid, Arnhem and D-Day were already familiar before the teacher reached them. We knew what a Lancaster, a U-boat, a Spitfire and a Bailey bridge were before anyone thought to examine us on them.

School History therefore did not operate in isolation. It filled in, corrected and connected a story that films, family memories, comics, documentaries and remembrance ceremonies had already made part of everyday life.

Then television carried the assembled history into the living room.

Programmes such as All Our Yesterdays and, above all, The World at War did something extraordinary. They brought together archive film, official records, military analysis and testimony from people on every side. They allowed millions of viewers, including veterans themselves, to see the conflict in a form that had never been available while it was happening.

But many veterans did not watch them. Some had no wish to see again what they had spent years trying to forget. The war might have become history to their children, but to them it remained memory, and memory was not always something to be invited into the sitting room on a Sunday evening.

Trauma did not yet have its modern vocabulary. Men simply changed the channel, left the room or said they had seen enough of the war already.

Others did watch, and must have learned more about the overall course of the war from television in the 1960s and 1970s than they had known in uniform. For the first time, they could see how their own experience fitted into the larger conflict.

Later generations encountered something different again. There was simply more history to cover. The Cold War, decolonisation, civil rights, the Middle East, the fall of communism and the development of modern Britain all demanded space in a curriculum whose timetable had not obligingly expanded.

Teaching methods changed as well. Continuous political and military narrative increasingly gave way to selected depth studies, source analysis, social history and broader themes. None of that was inherently inferior, but it meant pupils could study important parts of the war without ever being given the complete sequence that joined them together.

The result was not necessarily a less accurate version of the war, but a more fragmented one. Pupils might study Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, the Home Front or a handful of turning points while lacking the wider framework: why the war began, how its theatres interacted, why Germany lost, how Soviet manpower and American industrial power altered the balance, and how the settlement shaped the world that followed.

The war films also faded from everyday television. The veterans disappeared from family gatherings, the old stories became second-hand, and the shared broadcasting culture that had repeatedly exposed almost everyone to the same films and documentaries broke apart. The war ceased to be the national backstory playing continuously in the background. It became another historical module.

The Boomers may therefore have occupied a brief historical sweet spot. We were far enough from the war for the evidence to have been assembled, but close enough for its people, stories and imagery still to surround us.

This is not to diminish what the wartime generation knew. They possessed a kind of knowledge that no classroom or documentary could reproduce. They knew the fear, boredom, noise, cold, exhaustion and grief. They knew what it was to wait, to obey, to lose friends and to carry on because there was no alternative.

But lived experience is not the same as historical understanding.

Memory is local. History is assembled.

My father-in-law had lived through the war as a child, but that did not mean he had been taught the structure and vocabulary of Nazism. I encountered it later through the History curriculum, books, war films and documentary television. His generation inherited the memory of wartime Britain. Mine inherited the assembled history. Those who followed us were often taught its most important parts, but not always the continuous story that joined them together.

The Bureaucratic Skull

Apparently, the human skull has a sophisticated understanding of vehicle classification.

At ordinary cycling speeds, a cycle helmet is regarded as appropriate. Travel more slowly on a small motorcycle, however, and the same helmet becomes legally inadequate. Not because the likely impact is necessarily greater, but because the machine beneath you has crossed an invisible bureaucratic frontier.

I have some personal experience here. I once came off what was, in essence, a bicycle with a 50cc engine attached, at well under 15 mph, and suffered a bilateral subdural haematoma.

So I am not arguing that low-speed motorcycling is harmless, nor that proper motorcycle helmets are unnecessary. Quite the reverse. Low speed is not the same thing as low consequence. The road, the kerb and the inside of the human skull are entirely indifferent to whether the machine has pedals, an engine or both.

A cycle helmet is accepted and recommended for a cyclist travelling at 15 or 20 mph, yet becomes legally inadequate when worn by a motorcyclist travelling more slowly. The road does not know which vehicle category you selected. Nor, as I discovered, does the brain.

The absurdity is not that the motorcyclist must wear a motorcycle helmet. It is that the law treats the adequacy of the helmet as depending more on the vehicle category than on the speed, the fall or the actual risk.

Naturally, there is a reason. The law likes simple categories. Bicycle: helmet optional. Motorcycle: approved helmet compulsory. It is tidy, enforceable and saves everyone the distress of having to consider circumstances.

But it does leave us with the curious conclusion that physics concerns itself with speed, force and impact, while British law concerns itself with which box the vehicle occupies on a form.

The skull, having once expressed a fairly robust opinion on the matter, remains unconvinced.

Two Carburettors, One Useful Question

Since tracing the Virago’s fuel leak to the rear carburettor breather, I contacted the FJ Owners Club workshop near Yate, less than 2 miles from home. The club takes its name from Yamaha’s FJ1100 and FJ1200, the large 4-cylinder sports-tourers around which it was formed.

Their first reply was reassuring, although the figure quoted was for a 4-cylinder machine rather than the Virago. A complete carburettor overhaul would be roughly £300, they said, with another £50 to collect the bike from Old Sodbury. The only difficulty was timing: they were busy and would need about 3 weeks before they could fit the job in.

Even £350 to collect a 27-year-old motorcycle and overhaul its carburettors was not going to turn a £1,750 purchase into a financial catastrophe.

There was, however, one small detail. The £300 figure was for a 4-cylinder motorcycle. The Virago has 2 carburettors.

This is why it pays to read what people have actually written rather than what you expected them to mean. Had I simply accepted the figure, nobody would necessarily have done anything dishonest. I would merely have failed to ask whether a price for rebuilding 4 carburettors also applied to rebuilding 2.

The answer came back at £250. With £50 for collection, the total is £300.

That is an entirely fair price, and the correction is almost more reassuring than the saving. They did not attempt to preserve the higher figure once the difference was pointed out. They adjusted the price to reflect the actual machine.

That matters.

We have become used to businesses where the person answering the telephone knows little about the work, the person preparing the estimate has never seen the machine, and the person carrying out the repair is expected to follow a screen rather than understand what is in front of him.

The FJ Owners Club appears to be something rather different: essentially one experienced man, perhaps 2, working from a workshop that is clean as a whistle and dealing with older motorcycles because he understands them rather than merely tolerates them.

I have been there before with my son’s Hero Bullet. It had a fault that needed diagnosing rather than a part randomly replaced in the hope that the problem would disappear. They found it and fixed it. I came away impressed then, and nothing about this exchange has changed that opinion.

A spotless workshop does not prove mechanical genius, but it is rarely a bad sign. Carburettors contain tiny jets, passages, needles, seals and diaphragms. They are not improved by being dismantled on a bench that resembles the aftermath of a jumble sale.

I have therefore asked another question: whether he would charge me more for allowing me to stand beside him while he dismantles and reassembles the carburettors.

Carburettors are something I really ought to know how to dismantle, inspect and rebuild myself. They are not sorcery, although the arrangement of springs, diaphragms, needles, floats and microscopic passages can make them appear designed to punish the merely curious.

Watching somebody competent do the job properly would be more useful than repeatedly studying exploded diagrams and then discovering, halfway through my own attempt, that I had misunderstood which way a tiny component was fitted.

Time spent explaining a job is still working time, so I would not expect the lesson for nothing. Nor would I expect him to tolerate a customer leaning over his shoulder, asking questions and slowing the job down without being compensated for it. But if he is willing, the additional charge would buy something more durable than the repair itself: the confidence to understand and perhaps deal with the system next time.

The 3-week wait is not a deterrent either. A busy specialist is generally preferable to an empty workshop advertising immediate availability. It suggests that other people have already discovered the value of somebody who knows what he is doing.

It also gives me time to attend to the other parts of returning to motorcycling: finding crash bars for the Virago and locating a decent pair of armoured motorcycle trousers that do not cost the equivalent of a small mortgage.

The crash bars are the easier part. They must fit the XV535, protect something useful rather than merely decorate the machine, and preferably provide somewhere sensible for my feet without turning the bike into a mobile scaffold tower.

The trousers have proved more difficult. I want something pale enough not to absorb every available ray of sunshine, roomy enough around the calves not to cut off the circulation, and fitted with proper armour. Apparently this is an exotic specification.

The market will happily provide endless varieties of black, charcoal and slightly different black, generally described as ideal summer wear by people who have never sat stationary on hot tarmac.

Add a 32-inch waist, a regular fit and Level 2 knee protection, and the prices begin to resemble the opening negotiations on a house extension.

Still, the delay means the search can continue without the temptation to buy the first unsuitable thing simply because the motorcycle is waiting outside. The trousers matter more than cosmetic accessories, and probably more than the crash bars. Chrome can be replaced. Knees are less readily available as pattern parts.

There is also a wider point here about old vehicles. The cheapest repair is not always the one with the lowest invoice. Paying less for somebody to guess, clean half the system, replace the wrong component and return the machine with the original fault still present is not economy. It is simply paying in instalments for the privilege of remaining stranded.

The Virago does not need somebody searching fruitlessly for a diagnostic socket. It needs somebody who understands floats, needles, seats, diaphragms, fuel levels and the consequences of petrol emerging from a breather above a hot cylinder head.

That expertise has a value.

At £250 for the carburettor overhaul and £50 to collect the bike, I am not merely buying a repair. I am buying the judgment of somebody experienced in diagnosing and repairing older carburetted motorcycles, and who knows the difference between a symptom, a cause and an expensive guess.

Should he agree to let me watch, I shall also be buying a little of that knowledge. Not enough to become an expert in an afternoon, but perhaps enough to stop the inside of a carburettor being treated as forbidden territory.

It also makes joining the club seem less like paying for a badge and more like supporting the survival of a useful institution. Owners of old machinery often complain that nobody knows how to repair it any more. Then, when they find somebody who does, they haggle over every pound and wonder why specialists disappear. There is a limit to what expertise can be expected to survive on goodwill.

The plan is for the Virago to be collected in about 3 weeks and for the carburettors to be dismantled, cleaned, inspected and rebuilt. The float system and diaphragms can be checked rather than guessed at, and any contamination can be dealt with before the bike is asked to cover serious mileage again.

Meanwhile, I shall continue searching for crash bars and protective trousers while trying to establish why motorcycle clothing manufacturers believe every rider wants to dress as a member of a heavily armed burglary team.

The original £300 estimate turned out not to be the price of my job. It was the price of a larger one.

One question saved £50.

Another may teach me how the carburettors actually work.

And the 3-week wait may yet prevent me from spending £200 on a pair of black trousers that do not fit.

The First Tank Tells the Truth

I had only just bought the 1999 Yamaha Virago XV535 when it began introducing itself properly. It had passed its MOT, looked sound and had covered only about 80 miles during the previous year. At the time, I regarded that low mileage as reassuring.

The first warning came at Bromyard, where I filled the tank for the first time after buying it.

There was no petrol leak that I could see. Instead, almost immediately after filling, the bike began popping, misfiring and operating at roughly half power. It felt as though one cylinder had decided to become an occasional contributor rather than a full member of the team.

Because the trouble began immediately after filling the tank, the filling itself became the obvious suspect. Perhaps I had brimmed it too enthusiastically. Perhaps excess petrol had found its way somewhere it should not. Perhaps filling the tank had disturbed some contamination lying quietly at the bottom. At that stage, all I knew was that the bike had been running properly, I had filled it with petrol, and it had immediately begun behaving like an asthmatic lawnmower.

The bike would still run, so I carried on to home, following Hay who was driving the motorhome..

After about 15 miles, the popping and misfiring disappeared and the bike appeared to be running normally again on both cylinders. By the time I reached the M5, it had recovered its full power. I could still hear what sounded like backfiring, which was not encouraging. Then I moved my head down and the noise disappeared.

The position of my head could not possibly affect a backfire, so I began moving it around deliberately. Head up: popping. Head down: silence. The engine had not developed a posture-sensitive ignition fault. The loose strap from my helmet was flapping against the skid lid.

That was reassuring, but also slightly misleading. The motorcycle genuinely had recovered its full power, and the remaining apparent symptom had turned out not to be mechanical at all. It therefore seemed perfectly reasonable to conclude that whatever had happened after filling the tank in Bromyard had worked its way through and cleared itself.

That was the comforting interpretation.

45 miles further on and back home, No. 2 Son took it out for a ride. When he returned, he said it had been cutting out. I immediately noticed petrol leaking from the right-hand side of the bike, but only while the engine was running.

That changed the nature of the problem.

The fact that it appeared only while the engine was running suggested that the active fuel supply was involved, rather than petrol simply draining continuously under gravity.

At first, the source was not obvious. Petrol was appearing around the decorative air-filter housing on the right-hand side, but on an old motorcycle the place where liquid becomes visible is not necessarily where the fault began. Petrol runs along pipes, castings and brackets before eventually dripping from whichever point happens to be lowest.

The answer came from following the hose rather than continuing to theorise about it. The hose ran across the bike to the rear carburettor. It was not a conventional overflow pipe hanging safely beneath the machine. It was the carburettor breather routed into the right-hand dummy air-filter housing, directly above a hot cylinder head.

A breather is supposed to carry air. It is not supposed to pour petrol onto one of the hottest parts of the engine.

That meant the fuel level inside the rear carburettor was rising far above where it should have been and entering the vent passage. The likely cause was a sticking float, dirt beneath the float needle, wear in the needle or seat, or some combination of old petrol deposits and contamination from the tank.

Suddenly, the trouble at Bromyard made rather more sense. The popping, misfiring and half power may not have been an unrelated episode caused by overfilling. It may have been the first indication that the rear carburettor was flooding and overfuelling one cylinder. After 20 miles, the fault may have temporarily cleared, allowing the engine to run normally again.

It had not repaired itself. It had merely become intermittent.

This is one of the traps with old machinery. When a symptom disappears, we are inclined to treat the problem as solved. The engine stops misfiring, the warning light goes out or the strange noise vanishes, and we decide the machine has recovered.

Machines do not recover. They either continue to malfunction or wait until a less convenient moment to demonstrate that the fault is still present.

I tried the simple remedy first. Tapping the carburettor bowl did not free the suspected float valve. One float-bowl drain also appeared blocked, strengthening the suspicion that old fuel deposits, or possibly rust from the tank, had contaminated the carburettor.

None of this should have been entirely unexpected. For a 27-year-old motorcycle that had covered only about 80 miles in the previous year, it was a problem waiting to happen. That is not really use. It is occasional proof of life.

The MOT showed that the bike met the test requirements on the day, but an MOT is not a mechanical health certificate and never has been. It cannot establish how an ageing fuel system will respond when the tank is filled and the motorcycle is suddenly asked to cover real mileage again.

Like many people, I instinctively equated low mileage with good condition. What this episode reminded me is that machines do not simply wear out through use. They also deteriorate through inactivity.

A motorcycle ridden every weekend may be healthier than one that has spent years sitting quietly in a garage. Regular use keeps fuel moving, valves operating, seals wetted and passages clear. Standing preserves the odometer. It does not necessarily preserve the machine.

In hindsight, the bike was not failing. It was introducing itself. The important point is that the fault has appeared now. Thank God it happened at home rather than on another long journey. A leaking carburettor on the drive is an inconvenience. The same fault miles from home, with petrol escaping above a hot cylinder head, becomes a recovery problem at best and a fire risk at worst.

Fortunately, the remedy is neither mysterious nor ruinous.

There is a workshop experienced with older carburetted Yamahas only a couple of miles away. A mechanic accustomed to rebuilding banks of 4 Mikuni carburettors on Yamaha FJs is unlikely to be frightened by the Virago’s pair. The sensible course is a proper carburettor rebuild, inspection of the tank and fuel supply, replacement of any worn needles or seals, and possibly a tank flush before the carburettors are balanced and the bike returned to service.

The anticipated cost is somewhere around £250 to £400, depending on what parts are required and whether the tank needs attention. For a motorcycle bought for £1,750, that is entirely acceptable. It is not a catastrophe that suddenly makes the purchase uneconomic. It is a reasonable recommissioning cost on a 27-year-old machine that has spent too long doing almost nothing.

Nor is there any value in disguising the fault. Extending the breather hose would merely arrange for the petrol to leak somewhere less visible. That is the mechanical equivalent of moving the bucket rather than repairing the roof.

Once the carburettors have been properly cleaned, rebuilt and set up, and any contamination in the tank has been dealt with, there is every reason to expect years of happy riding.

Buying a classic or modern classic motorcycle is not like buying a new appliance. You do not simply acquire an object; you begin a relationship with a machine that has accumulated its own history, habits and weaknesses.

The purchase price buys the motorcycle. The first proper journey starts the conversation. The Virago had passed its MOT. What it had not yet passed was its first full tank, its first proper run and its first opportunity to reveal what 27 years of age and 80 miles a year had been quietly storing up.

I should be back on the road within a week.

Marrakech and the Death of Greige

I was watching one of those Sunday afternoon television programmes the other day. You know the sort. Somebody wanders slowly around a foreign city while soft jazz plays underneath and a presenter in expensive linen says things like:

“Marrakech assaults the senses.” Which is television shorthand for: “There are lamps.”

It was on PBS, which, as a pensioner, I am increasingly drawn towards, along with Sky Arts. Between them they appear to contain the only two vaguely worthwhile things left on Freesat that do not involve either house auctions, serial killers or a celebrity learning pottery while crying.

Normally these programmes are little more than visual chewing gum for the overfed and mildly sleepy. Half travel documentary, half DFS advert. But this one drifted into the world of designers who became obsessed with Marrakech, and suddenly it all became rather interesting.

Because Marrakech appears to have a very particular effect on wealthy Europeans. They arrive as sensible minimalists and leave wanting seventeen courtyards, three fountains, carved cedar doors and somebody quietly hammering brass in the background at all times.

At first it is innocent enough. A tile pattern. A courtyard. Some lanterns.

A few days later they are discussing “texture” with alarming seriousness and wondering whether the downstairs loo in Swindon might benefit from artisanal plasterwork.

Six months on, they are trying to persuade a man called Tariq to hand-finish seventeen thousand zellige tiles while a Labrador named Basil lies exhausted beside an olive tree in Surrey wondering where everything went wrong.

What fascinates western designers about Marrakech is not really Morocco itself. It is the discovery that decoration can be unapologetic. Britain, especially modern Britain, became terrified of visual confidence somewhere around 1997. Since then our interiors have largely consisted of fifty shades of greige interrupted occasionally by Farrow & Ball knock-offs and a sign saying LIVE LAUGH LOVE.

Then people arrive in Marrakech and discover rooms where somebody has clearly said: “No, keep going. More pattern. More colour. More carved wood. Hang another lantern there. Put a fountain in the middle. Yes, under the banana tree.”

And somehow it works.

The extraordinary thing is that Moroccan design manages to feel both disciplined and sensual at the same time. Beneath all the colour and ornament there is structure, geometry and craftsmanship. Repetition. Precision. Balance. Nothing is accidental. It is rather like looking at a beautifully engineered classic car underneath all the polished walnut and leather.

Designers like Yves Saint Laurent and Jean Paul Gaultier did not merely visit Marrakech. They inhaled it. Suddenly fashion collections became drenched in jewel colours, embroidery, strong lines and theatrical silhouettes. European minimalism briefly got shoved aside by people returning from Morocco muttering: “We need more texture.” Which, translated into English, usually means: “I would like the sitting room to resemble an extremely expensive spice market.”

Even Pierre Balmain succumbed. His Marrakech pool, tiled in the style of a Persian carpet, looked less like somewhere to swim and more like somewhere an exceptionally wealthy sultan might quietly discuss silk exports while being handed a fig on a silver tray. It was gloriously over the top and, annoyingly, utterly elegant at the same time. That is the Marrakech trick. It marches right up to the brink of absurdity, peers over the edge, then somehow lands gracefully on its feet.

The amusing part is that Britain cannot quite carry this off because our climate fundamentally disagrees with the concept. Moroccan interiors are designed around blazing sun, cool courtyards and shadow. British houses are designed around horizontal rain and asking whether the radiator is on.

A real Marrakech house belongs in Marrakech. It belongs behind heavy walls keeping out heat and dust, with shadow falling across a courtyard while water quietly trickles somewhere unseen. Transporting the entire thing to a new-build in Swindon feels faintly like wearing a dinner jacket to clean the wheelie bins. Unless, of course, you are actually Berber, in which case you can probably do what you like.

So what happens instead is that people attempt a sort of Marrakech-inspired compromise. One brass lantern, two cushions and a vaguely distressed side table from Homesense, then they stand back believing they now live in a riad. Meanwhile outside it is 7C and Dave from next door is pressure-washing algae off his wheelie bins.

Still, I rather admire the ambition. Modern Britain desperately needs reminding that decoration is not a moral failing. Somewhere along the line we confused minimalism with sophistication.

Marrakech never made that mistake.

Marrakech looks at your beige open-plan kitchen, quietly orders another mosaic fountain, then watches while somebody in Wiltshire tries to recreate the effect with a £14 brass lantern from Dunelm and a reed diffuser called Arabian Nights.

HouseholdJobs

I spent yesterday cleaning the doorbell.

Schrodiger's Spreadsheet

A quick update on yesterday's post - the Yamaha Virago passed its MoT. That's a 100% pass record over 26 years.

On to today's observation.

I made a small mistake in my solar power spreadsheet the other day, which briefly suggested that my fairly modest domestic solar installation had generated enough electricity to make Gloucestershire glow gently in the dark.

This was not, strictly speaking, true. My roof had not become a small nuclear fusion facility. The National Grid had not rung up to ask if I could take the edge off peak demand. I had merely entered something catastrophically stupid into Excel, which is not really physics, but does have a tendency to create strange effects in the observable universe.

The interesting bit was not the mistake itself. I can make mistakes perfectly well without troubling the Nobel committee. The interesting bit was that the wrong figure fed a chart on another worksheet.

So the question wafted through my mind: did the chart change the moment I entered the wrong figure, or only when I opened the chart worksheet and observed it?

This is where Excel became unexpectedly philosophical, which is not something one wants from a piece of software that still thinks 1-2 is a date. The underlying data had changed. The workbook had accepted the madness. Somewhere inside the file, the future graph had already become ridiculous. But the chart itself, sitting on another worksheet, had not visibly changed, because I was not looking at it.

Then came the more awkward question: did the chart still exist?

This is not the sort of question one expects to ask about a spreadsheet. Normally the difficult questions are things like why has column G turned into dates, why is this formula referring to a workbook I deleted in 2018, and why has Excel decided that 1-2 means the second of January rather than, say, a subtraction sum, which would seem a reasonable enough guess.

But there we were, asking whether an unobserved chart actually existed.

The answer, rather annoyingly, is yes. It existed. But not as a fully alive, continuously updated visual thing sitting there nobly redrawing itself in the dark while nobody was watching.

The chart existed as an object in the workbook. Excel knew where it was, what it was linked to, and broadly how it was supposed to look. It had not lost the chart behind the sofa.

The last rendered version also existed. That was the old visual state: the chart as last painted, calm and respectable, still pretending my solar panels had behaved themselves. In that sense, the visible chart existed in the old state.

But the new visual chart did not yet exist on screen. The underlying data had changed, and the next rendering was already doomed, but Excel had not yet painted the new evidence.

So it was not, strictly speaking, a quantum superposition. The chart was not both old and new at the same time, like a cat in a box with an attitude problem. It was more prosaic than that, which is usually where Excel lives. It was an old rendered picture attached to a changed underlying reality.

Then I opened the chart worksheet.

At which point the graph suddenly leapt into its new and absurd position, like a startled cat finding out it had been assigned to PivotTable maintenance. The old visible chart vanished, the new ridiculous chart appeared, and for one brief moment my solar panels appeared to have outperformed the Severn Barrage, had anyone actually got round to building it.

Observation had not collapsed a probability curve. It had merely forced Excel to redraw the stale evidence from the changed data.

But that is enough for me.

This is not proper quantum mechanics. No serious physicist is going to win a Nobel Prize by staring at a line chart and asking whether June’s solar yield is both 243 kWh and the annual output of Dinorwig. Excel is not Copenhagen. It is more Swindon with formulae.

Still, it has the important ingredients. There is a hidden state, an observer, and a sudden change when the observer looks. There is also, regrettably, Microsoft Excel, which does rather lower the intellectual tone.

So no, the chart was not both old and new. It was old on screen, wrong underneath, and waiting to embarrass me the moment I clicked on it.

Schrodinger’s Spreadsheet: the data is wrong, the display is stale, and the observer is standing there with a cup of tea wondering why June has produced 14 gigawatt-hours.