Good news, everyone

According to my oncologist, there is now no evidence of bone cancer.

I had a PET-CT scan at the very end of December, which revealed that my large bones, notably my spine and pelvis, were riddled with cancer that had evidently metastasised from the gastric cancer that is the source of these oncological blues.

One course of ten radiation therapy sessions and six sessions of FOLFOX chemo later, and last week's follow-up PET-CT scan shows no evidence of bone cancer. I have 'responded very well' to the treatment. The oncologist has kindly pointed out the the holes in my bones are probably there for life and I'm forever banned from heavy lifting, but these holes in my bones are now not filled with anything malignant.

She fell short of using the words 'cured' or even 'remission', and was cautious in being unable to advise how long the current situation would prevail. I have another six chemo sessions to go, and there will inevitably be further tests at the end of that. FOLFOX doesn 't really care what cancer it attacks, so I hope it's giving the stomach tumour a good kicking.

I'm now experimenting with reduced pain medication in an attempt to wean myself off opiates. A desirable side-effect of being off the drugs means that celebratory drinks become possible.

I am sure that my oncologist simply hates motorcycles, but I now have clearance to ride my Kawasaki 1400, subject to No Heavy Lifting. Fair enough. She says that the riding isn't a problem, and I can use the sidestand more and the centrestand less. Some riders never use the centrestand, and there are many bikes out there that only have a sidestand. I have to be big-bike fit by July in order to undertake my road trip.

Here's a shoutout to all those who have sent me their messages of goodwill and now congratulations and 'likes' on social media. This has been a source enormous psychological support to know that there are people rooting for me. Positive Mental Attitude must surely have helped, even though FOLFOX has probably been of greatest benefit. Thank you all.

]}:-{>

Bike flight fright

Motorcycles do not fly. At least mine doesn't.

My speculative plans  to ship my GTR over to the USA for this summer's Great American Bucket List Road Trip have come to a resounding phutt. This is because I have received a grand total of two responses from my dozen or so enquiring emails to specialist "We ship motorbikes internationally" companies. Ten have failed to see fit to respond at all to my emails or follow-up emails, and one responded with "We don't ship from the middle east."

So that leaves one.

Twenty days after enquiring I got an email response to my reminder.

"We'll get back to you in a few hours."

Some 300 hours and several further reminders later, I got my quote. Eight Thousand Dollars. That's approaching what the bike's worth. And, lest we forget, the quote excludes the costs of a vast pile of known unknowns: Door delivery using a TSA vetted trucker; VAT; other unspecified tax; Customs duty; import duty; loading and offloading; crating; airport storage.

The fact that rather a lot of these listed charges should only apply in the case of permanent import rather suggests that the shipper hasn't thought this thing through.

Temporary import requires a Carnet de Passage. This is essentially a passport for the vehicle, and basically says that it is considered road legal in the country it's visiting, and it'll be taken out of the country again. So it is an utter nonsense that the UAE authorities would charge 5% of the value of the bike upon its return to the UAE as if it's a foreign bike being imported. It would be like driving to Muscat for the weekend and being charged 5% of the value by Oman authorites and then 5% by the UAE authorities on the way back. Nonsense. The shipping company has no knowledge of the Carnet de Passage.

Compare with testimonials on websites from which I never received a response.

"We arrived at the airport and rode away on our bikes an hour later..."

The bottom line, however, is this: $8000 is prohibitive. I could buy a decent used one out of the US small ads and throw it away a month later, still saving a great wad of cash. Always assuming I could get it registered; not necessarily a given, what with me being an alien and all that.

So it looks like I'll be solving the matter by throwing money at the problem. Bike rental is around $100-$120 a day, and I've always wondered what it'd be like to spend some time on a Gold Wing.

]}:-{>

I still aten't dead

The blog and its author remain alive and kicking.

Four chemotherapy sessions down and eight to go, together with 10mg oxycontin a day, and the Goat is now, startlingly, feeling healthy and happy. The latter may possibly be because he's permanently slightly stoned on the pain medication. Or not.

Anyway, he felt so great yesterday that he took the Kawasaki out rather than the Vespa. A few errands later, including a trip to the oncology department to be unplugged from his portable drug pump, and he discovered himself in Bad Odour with Beloved Wife. Apparently he should have cleared everything with his oncologist, with particular emphasis on getting permission to ride a big bike.

Now, the Goat fully appreciates that the consequences of falling off a 1400cc Kawasaki may include broken bones. And in his current state, broken bones would be extra painful and take a long time to heal. But surely at similar speeds this applies equally to a scooter. And, come to that, tripping over a cat and plummeting down a flight of stairs might have a similar effect too.

Not that there is any intent to do any falling off. The big issue with a 305kg Kawasaki is in manoeuvring it at low speed, and this always takes care and attention. This is where pain management comes in, for any aches, twinges, or searing agonies will inevitably imperil the bike's verticality and plastic. So Zero Pain is mandatory before riding big bikes can even be considered.

Anyway, the Goat has promised Beloved Wife that he will discuss the matter at his next oncology consultation. He suspects that the doctor hates motorcycles, but must be led to understand quite how important riding is to the Goat.

On his errands yesterday, and in keeping with a remark above regarding verticality and plastic, the Goat may have scored some inexpensive rear crash bars to protect the panniers in case of a drop. They come from a police bike that was apparently thrown up the road at 80km/h, and one of them is slightly bent. The Kawasaki workshop has procured new bars for the police, and as the Goat is the only one to have expressed an interest, he might be getting the old ones. It should be possible to straighten the bar, and after polishing and powder coating it'll be all good. And a lot less than $250 from the USA plus the frightening cost of shipping several kilogrammes of scrap iron halfway around the planet.

]}:-{>

Coming to America

My bucket list includes the Great American Road Trip by motorcycle, this being a follow-up to the 2012 epic with Beloved Wife.

Unfortunately, bone cancer (or more specifically my oncologist) has forbidden the use of large motorcycles for the near future. Fundamentally, lack of bone mass and basic body strength makes it too difficult for me to wheel a big bike around. That actually riding it would be no problem is of little relevance when you consider what happens at red traffic lights, gas stations, and overnight stops.

Actually, it came to pass a couple of days ago that I had to move my Kawasaki from the front yard to the side of the Crumbling Villa so it would be parked in a less inconvenient spot. Just wheeling it about five metres was pushing the limit of what I could manage.

None of this has stopped me planning a summer of touring the USA. The overriding assumption has to be that I'll be fit enough to ride every day for a month or so. I floated the idea on a Kawasaki Concours/1400GTR Facebook group with a basic request for opinions on options:-

• Rent a bike commercially.  Probably at $100 a day, I'd be looking at $3000 or so. It'd not be a Concours, but someone suggested I should go large and rent a Gold Wing.

• Buy a used one, ride it, sell it.  I'd doubtless have to get my brother-in-law to own the thing because I'm not a US resident, but assuming say $6000 purchase price, it should be easy to sell at less than $3000 loss.

• Ship my own bike to the US and then back again.  I have no idea what this would cost, nor what administrative hoops I'd have to jump through. But if UAE-registered Ferraris can spend summer in Knightsbridge, the principle is at least feasible. I've asked a shipper for cost and details.

Responses from the Facebook group where overwhelmingly positive, with offers of help, temporary accommodation, and one guy even offering to lend me his bike. "Get yourself to Texas with a license and insurance."

There were also many messages of support regarding the cancer. It seems surprising how many people have been or are are going through similar to me. This trip, if I can pull it off, might conceivably turn into a "Route 66 Defiant Cancer-Surviving Old Gits tour"

Back to Dubai and reality for a moment, and a note that I disgraced myself with Beloved Wife's Vespa yesterday. For the first time ever in my life, I dropped a motorcycle away from myself while attempting to put it on the centre stand, and fell over on top of it. Angry and embarrassed, I now have an exceptionally painful shoulder. The scooter's fine, but the incident serves to illustrate that I am currently in no fit state to be aboard anything heavy.

]}:-{>

Uncool

A weekend of planned motorcycling failed to come to fruition.

As usual, I arrived back in Dubai late on Thursday evening and connected the bike to a charger to top up the battery. Then on Friday morning I kitted up, removed the bike cover, fired up the Black Beast, and noticed fluid on the ground where no fluid should be. Upon closer inspection, the said fluid turned out to be antifreeze. It might have been coming from an overflow; I had topped up the reserve bottle last time I rode the bike, but no. It was still dribbling after I took the bike around the block. So off came all my bike gear and out came the tools.

Then off came the plastic, and I eventually exposed a slight dripping of coolant from the water pump. Staining on the engine nearby indicated that this leak had probably started last time I rode the bike, which would go some way to explaining the low coolant level in the expansion bottle last time.

So motorbikes would be off the agenda this weekend. “Sassa, rassa, frassa, rassum…” etc.

On Saturday I rode the bike over to my friendly neighbourhood Kawasaki workshop. I figured I could get that far without losing all the coolant and cooking the engine. Beloved Wife followed me in the car that contained all the bike’s plastic that I hadn’t bothered reinstalling. There seemed little point, as the mechanic would only have to take it all off again. He took one look, nodded in agreement of my diagnosis, commented about a drain hole, and disconcertingly sucked air through his teeth. My cursory glance through the workshop manual had alerted me that removing the water pump would involve dropping the coolant and the engine oil, so I have left the bike to have a service too. And new rear brake pads. And a tyre pressure sensor/transmitter because the front one’s dead. 

I have also checked Cradley Kawasaki in Birmingham, where it is revealed that a TPMS would set me back £154 and a water pump (assuming that the problem isn’t merely a gasket that Sod’s Law says it isn’t because the parts fiche shows the water pump as a single irreducibly complex item with a single part number) a further £174. Naturally, I’ll probably end up paying about 30% more than these because they’ll have to be borne upon velvet cushions by rose-petal-scattering handmaidens all the way from Japan. Theoretically at least, brake pads and filters should be in stock.

There is a silver lining to this dark and pendulous cloud, and it is this: owing to the impending Holy Month of Ramadan, I will be unable to get away from Qatar throughout June, so I’d not be able to ride the bike anyway. Ergo, having the Black Beast in bits awaiting new bits is of no real inconvenience. And it’ll be spending the next few weeks in air-conditioned comfort rather than mouldering under a plastic cover at the Crumbling Villa. And of course I can save up in preparation for the wallet-wilting invoice that will be heading my way.

]}:-{>

Like a Rocket

Another motorcycle post.

The Goat is still suffering from Parked Motorcycle Syndrome. He gets to ride his Kawasaki once in a blue moon, assuming sufficient time in Dubai to install the battery, pump up the tyres, dust off the machine, and then pull out the battery a day later. He’s going to have to replace the tyres sometime soon simply because they’ve been cooking in the heat, not having the rubber worn away at high speed.

Some luminary once noted that “If you really want to, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.”

And here is a selection of the Goat’s excuses.

First, it is the Goat's personal experience that importing a motor vehicle into Qatar is a stressful and expensive experience. Shipping the machine was impossible anyway because it was, and indeed is, more than five years old. And this time last year the Goat didn’t have a Qatar Residence Permit and was thus forbidden by law from driving anything other than a rental car. So any move towards riding a motorbike in Qatar were completely stymied pending a Residence Permit.

Much to the Goat’s surprise, he got his RP in January 2015. At this point, the project was scheduled to finish in April; perhaps May or June… What would be the point of buying a bike in Qatar only to have to sell or export it in four or five months? It did look a bit self-indulgent, to say the least.

And then summer happened. The May or June finish didn’t, but by now it was for practical purposes too hot to ride anyway. Why would a Goat buy a motorbike that he had almost no opportunity to ride?

So the Goat finds himself in October. It is déjà vu all over again, with the only difference being this time the Goat has his Residence Permit at the start of the Middle-East biking season. Furthermore, there’s an 18-month old 3000km Triumph Rocket III Roadster for sale at 75% of the price of a new one. The Goat even knows and used to ride with its former owner, who traded it for a new Limited Edition version of the same model. But when will this job end? Current estimates suggest the end of December, but if the rate of receiving design approvals continues as it has done for the past year, the Goat will be in Qatar until the end of Time.

What to do? The machine is affordable, and because there are few ‘interesting’ roads in Qatar the case for a sportsbike is weak. The size of the country also rather contraindicates the need for a tourer. But a cruiser? Arguably more practical, at least for a given value of ‘practical’ that involves a motorbike with a 2300cc engine. And when the Goat’s job finally fizzles out, if it did so when this putative motorbike was still a valuable piece of engineering, would he sell it or export it? Standby for massive money loss because nobody would want to buy it, or a repeat of the grief of the export process followed by owning a surfeit of large motorbikes.

The Goat is tempted, nevertheless. More money than sense, obviously.

]}:-{>

Festival of the Sacrifice

Animation here

I’m sitting in Sharjah airport as I write this, awaiting my Saturday afternoon flight. After booking flights for an Eid holiday week in Dubai and screwing up the flight times, I found that I'd not be flying out on Saturday evening, but instead would spend all afternoon devoting myself to air travel.

After booking my non-refundable, non-changeable-without-enormous fees flights, the official Eid holiday dates were all postponed by a day, resulting in the glorious prospect of spending all Sunday in Cloud City because everything in Doha will be shut.

Much was achieved during my week in Dubai:

• Beloved Wife and I selected a new dishwasher to replace the dead one. Carrefour sold us one for Dh1800 and phoned a day later to say that it was out of stock, they wouldn’t have any more, no we couldn’t have the display item, and would we like to come back and select a more expensive one? This blatant attempt at bait-and-switch resulted in a refund and our money being directed to a different store. The man came to install the new machine, but the van broke down and he was three hours late. He contrived to drop some hardware down the outlet, and I insisted that we get it out. He wanted me to call a plumber at my expense, but I was having none of this. Eventually we managed to wash the thing down to the floor gully and recover it through use of a garden hose and water pressure. As this is how I unblocked the pipe before; déjà vu all over again. 

• We got Beloved Wife's car in for service. It turns out that the appalling shrieking noises were not coming from the belt tensioner pulley bearing after all, but the PCV. This is a piece of cheap plastic shit that is notorious for becoming broken on VW engines, but the Sharjah branch of Volkswagen lacked the wit or inclination either to stock the part or phone the Dubai branch. Earlier today I phoned Dubai, collected new PCV, and had the mechanic install it in about ten minutes. All shrieking has now gone and the Eos can safely be presented next week for its annual inspection and registration. 

• I installed the new battery in the bike, started it on the first prod of the button, and went off first to get the thing washed and then inspected and registered. Beloved Wife had sorted out the insurance, so all I had to do was phone AXA to get a new certificate that stated Oman was an included territory; not just the UAE. 

• The runaround for my new UAE residence was likely to take all day. It had to be accomplished entirely before Eid, so the Executive Service had to be invoked. A trip to Al Wasl clinic and Dh790 got me a blood test, then across town and a further Dh370 for a new ID card application and Dh555 for a new residence permit. Then back to Al Wasl to collect my blood test result. My blood group hasn’t changed, as eny fule kno. I am so glad I took the bike for this running around town in the traffic. No problem parking, see? Also few issued with traffic congestion. Everything was done by 1330, and I handed in my passport to Beloved Wife’s PRO. I got it back with the new visa the following morning. I now await the delivery of my new Emirates ID card in due course. 

• I went to the airport to renew my UAE e-gate card. As there is exactly zero free parking at DXB, even for motorbikes, I parked for nuppence at Rashidiya and took the metro two stops. 

• Other errands included getting de-worming pills for the cats in order to stop the vet from bombarding me with reminder emails, Beloved Wife and me obtaining lacerations while inserting said pills into said cats, more pills for me which are not for removing parasites, and a new button battery for the bike's keyless start system. Any and all attempts to purchase additional pairs of Vibram™ hobbit feet failed. They're all knocked down to about 25% of the normal retail price, and of course my size has completely sold out. 

• I braved IKEA, then spent a couple of hours balancing on a stepladder – it isn’t a real ladder – replacing burned-out lightbulbs all over the Crumbling Villa including the one at the top of the stairs that involved standing on the very top rung. It doesn’t matter that the halogens are rated for thousands of hours. I suspect wobbly voltage kills them. Anyhoo, IKEA only had LED globes, which have dropped remarkably in price over the last year or so. It remains to be seen if they last longer. 

• There was shopping and cooking, epic binge-watching of Game of Thrones, and consumption of moderate quantities of special beverage and flat-nosed, curly-tailed haraminal. There was nothing on at any Dubai cinema that appealed, so that was a bust. 

• On Friday, I slipped into my old paths of wrongtiousness with a high-speed ride over to Kalba for an egg sandwich. I rode alone, noted the presence of new speed cameras near Wadi Hilo, chatted with members of the Ducati club in Kalba, and then got comprehensively blown into the weeds on the way back to Dubai. Call me slow and old-fashioned if you like, but if the speed limit is 120km/h and I'm just below the speed camera trigger of 140, the guys who whizzed past me at perhaps 200 must have plenty of disposable income. I am a bit out of practice; I frightened myself a couple of times on some very, very bendy road between Hatta and Munay. Must. Not. Brake. In. Corners. Next time I’m back in Dubai I should replace the bike’s tyres. The Pirellis still have reasonable tread, but they’ve been cooking outdoors all summer. I have some new Michelins poised and ready. 

• Finally, I accompanied Beloved Wife to a dead posh dinner out at the Dusit Thani in Dubai (the hotel near Defence Roundabout that looks like a clothes peg), and very fine it was too. 

Putting the events into writing, it doesn’t seem like I achieved much, but I kept busy and my mood has lifted somewhat. I might even be able to face another week back at work.

]}:-{>

Anniversary

Again, Beloved  Wife and her Goat were in different countries for their wedding anniversary. Still, the Goat found a cheap flight, for a given value of cheap, and spent the weekend in Dubai.

Beloved Wife promised that there would not be a massive list of DIY tasks for the Goat to perform. The FUBAR dishawasher appears to have a broken pump impeller, according to an NVQ in Googlomics. It's a fifteen-minute fix following the inevitable Not Coming In Dubaitis and subsequent Amazon. Maybe Beloved Wife can find a suitably-qualified repairman to come to her house while her husband's away...

After Flying Dubai and consuming ale and pork pie, the Goat retired to his pit, and was only disturbed a few times by Los Kittehs and their gifts of - mercifully - artificial butterflies and not lizards and putrefying rodents.

Everything pertaining to vehicle insurance and maintenance is closed on Friday, so after a huge English breakfast, BW and Goat headed off to the cinema to see either Minions or Mr Holmes. They picked the latter; being a talky film with little in the way of explosions, gunfire, or car chases unless you count a thermonuclear event in Hiroshima, it'll doubtless have gone by close of play next Wednesday.

A four-course haute-cuisine on board Bateaux Dubai followed that evening. Happy Eighth Anniversary, Beloved Wife.

Owing to construction works on the waterfront outside the British Embassy, Bateaux Dubai has moved to the other side of the creek. Bear this in mind before your own dinner cruise.

Nobody got the Merlot team hangover and, after Saturday's full English, the errands started. Shisha first, then jump-starting Kermit the VW Polo, moving an irreducibly complex table across town in a small 4x4, buying a motorcycle battery and some teaching supplies, and gassing up the car with newly-expensive UAE petrol.

Let's see... low oil price -> reduced gubmint income -> increased fuel tax.
High oil price -> high raw material cost -> increased fuel price.

Yup. Makes perfect sense.

Yes, yes. Compare with Europe. Know where the airport is, yadda, yadda.

The bike battery will sit dry until the Goat is ready to get his motorcycle re-registered, at which point he'll return to Dubai, add the H₂SO₄, and install the thing. One imagines that in other parts of the world the Goat might have been confronted with "Oh, no, you can't be trusted with sulphuric acid despite your Chemistry A-level and the fact that you're a grownup." But this was - huzzah - also Not Coming In Dubai.

And all too soon, the spell of Goat Banishment was invoked, and off to the airport he trotted to his day job that has now become little more than repeated rebuttals of orchilalia.

]}:-{>

Little and dangerous

It’s really difficult for people to get their heads around stupidly large or absurdly tiny quantities. “I worked it out in nanoseconds” is a colloquialism that doesn’t really encompass quite how tiny a nano-anything is. For what it’s worth, there are around pi seconds in a nanocentury. So we end up using prefixes to produce sensible numbers. Seconds; not nanocenturies. You don’t go into Tiger Treats and ask for 0.0001 tonnes of liquorice unless you’re deliberately trying to be annoying; you ask for 100 grammes, or 4oz, or “a quarter” if you’re still Church of England.

This is not a metrication rant. It’s about the measurement of small but fatal risks.

Typically, for every one million scuba dives there are five fatalities. (75 deaths in 14 million dives, according to BS-AC in 1998-2009). Probability of dying: 0.000005

In nearly 4.9 million skydives over 1994 to 2013 there were 41 deaths: around 0.000009 chance of not surviving a jump.

All those leading zeroes are difficult, hence the concept of the micromort. One μmt = 1/1,000,000 chance of death. Thus:-

• One BS-AC scuba dive 5 μmt 

• One parachute jump 9 μmt 

• Climbing Mount Everest 39,427 μmt

It’s relatively easy to collate micromort data for regulated activities such as diving, or parachute jumping, or flying as a fare-paying passenger. You simply add up the total number of deaths and divide by the total number of customers. For air travel, I found an ICAO safety report for 2009-2013 that says the average risk was 16.6 μmt/departure.

I found a separate figure of 22 μmt/departure elsewhere on the internet. This matches ICAO’s 2009 figures. It’s possible to calculate a risk in terms of micromorts per kilometre travelled, but as no-one has ever yet collided with the sky and most aviation incidents inevitably involve terrain, counting takeoffs is probably more meaningful. Because air travel generally involves vast distances, comparing it with other modes of transport on a risk per kilometre basis probably isn’t fair.

Ignoring airport transfers (the thrill-ride fun bus between Manila and Batangas springs to mind), if you fly to some exotic dive destination and do fewer than seven dives, the flights are more hazardous than the diving. So dive more. Three or four dives a day seems about right.

Problems with micromorts arise when attempting to assess risks associated with unregulated activities such as riding a motorbike. At last, we arrive at what I want to write about.

No amount of dressing up the figures will ever show that motorcycling is the safest way to travel. The rider is projected at speeds well in excess of what the human body was ever designed for, with almost nothing in the way of protection beyond a plastic pot on his head and some animal skins wrapped around his body and limbs. Hardly the same level of protection that is offered by being strapped inside a tonne or more of metal that is designed to crumple and absorb energy in a crash. I’m not going to attempt to show that bikes are as safe as cars; as the figures I’ve obtained from the University of Google offer extremely variable results, I’ll not discuss the subject of the private car and its relationship with the micromort.

Fortunately for me, the Google Elves have provided more coherent data with regard to motorcycles and micromorts.

US figures for 1999-2003 rate motorcycling risk at 5.37 μmt/trip. (3112 fatal injuries in 580 million person trips). Compare this with UK figures: over 2007 to 2013, the average annual number of motorcycle deaths was 460 from a fleet of some 1.1 million motorbikes. That’s 418 μmt/year.

In 2009, the NHTSA rate was 723μmt per US-registered motorbike. That’s 1.7 times the comparable UK figure. Perhaps there is something in mandatory staged licensing and compulsory helmets. More likely is that there’s insufficient data here to formulate any theories.

The US figures include a ‘per hundred million person trips’, and to offer any degree of confidence, the number of trips has to be accurate. How is this achieved? What is a ‘trip’? Is Chicago to Los Angeles one trip, or is each day of the Route 66 tour a separate trip? Commuting to and from work is two trips a day, right? There’s clearly an extremely wide variation in annual mileage too. You have daily bikers who clock hundreds of miles per week come rain or shine, and others who only take their bikes out to shine them and trailer them to Sturgis once a year. On the US-based Concours Owners Group forum, there are members who claim figures like 100,000 miles in three years, or “My 2009 Connie has 185,000 miles and has never missed a beat…” That’s 53,000km/year and 59,000km/year. And another selling a mint 2010 with only 15,000 miles, never seen rain, full service history, etc… (6,000km/year).

How can anyone possibly estimate a single risk based on trip numbers or distance travelled?

The UK figures produce their own set of difficulties. They fail to take into account trip numbers or distance travelled at all. Some owners have more than one machine, and can obviously only ride one at a time. It is theoretically possible by reductio ad absurdum, to die in a bike crash in the UK while your road-legal machine is parked in the garage and you’re at home watching the telly.

My personal motorcycle experience amounts to 385,000km over 35 years; what I regard as a moderate 11,000km/year. According to the University of Internet’s Faculty of Wikipedia, there’s a 2009 article in The Times newspaper that includes risk of mortality as “1 μmt = 6 miles on a motorbike,” or 0.1 μmt/km. That’s 1100 μmt/year with my annual mileage.

Adopting the US figure of 5.37 μmt/trip, the arithmetic throws out 205 trips per year and a typical trip of 54km. Both of these figures seem broadly in line with my own behaviour. Most of my motorcycle trips are commutes to and from the office, and regrettably few are epic tours.

• UK figures: 460/1.1M = 418 μmt/year 

• US figures: 205 x 5.37 = 1,100 μmt/year

I could get my personal risk figures down to the UK values if I did 4200km/year. Does the Average Motorcyclist really cover that little distance?

High mileage implies more experience and therefore lower risk, right? If you have a record of riding tens of thousands of miles without falling off or being hit by another vehicle, you’re obviously doing something right.

Conversely, you can argue that low mileage reduces your exposure to a given risk of riding an unstable machine among other vehicles being piloted by idiots who are too busy updating their Facebooks to look out of their windows... The truth is probably somewhere between the two. There's a low-risk sweet spot where the emptying bucket of Luck and the filling bucket of Experience together produce a minimum overall Risk.



As none of this blog post actually comes to any coherent conclusion, please feel free to cherry-pick the parts that best suit the case that you’re trying to argue.

]}:-{>

Happy Hallmark Holiday

That was a busy weekend. First, I had to explain to my employers that I had a certain need to be visiting Beloved Wife in Dubai for Valentine's Day. Then I had to persuade the same employer of the need for me to have my passport in hand prior to my booking air tickets.

So it was on Wednesday that I finally received my passport complete with Iqama, or "Residence Permit", and my ID card. Despite having had to be fingerprinted - twice so far - the authorities have given me the same ID number as last time and the time before that. I don't suppose either my fingerprints or blood group have changed much since 1996. Doesn't hurt to check, I suppose.

Buying an air ticket was another simple task fraught with unnecessary difficulties. Fly Dubai had sent me emails advertising special offers, but their website fell over every time I tried to book. Qatar Airways had nothing for the return flight except at obscene expense. I'm not paying QAR 1200 one way for a 45 minute flight in cattle class. Eventually I ended up with cheapskate Air Arabia via Sharjah instead of Dubai. Fine. The only problem was the screaming brat at check-in who ended up being King of the Seat-Kickers right behind me. I gritted my teeth, put in my earbuds, and shutted the fcek up.

I spent Friday morning in the dust of a desert rally. About 90  knobbly-tyred motorbikes went past at speed over two hours, and my job as one of the many marshals was to keep track of when each and every bike went through my control, and to call into Base any who missed the gate. This was Round 5 of 6, but I can't be at the final round of the Emirates Desert Championship because of the Scottish Play.

I took Beloved Wife to the pictures that afternoon, and we were surprisingly entertained by "Kingsman." Knowing nothing about the film, we didn't know what to expect, but were treated to two hours of fun being poked at James Bond and Jason Bourne, with a hint of The Avengers (Steed, Purdey, Kinky Boots, etc., and not Marvel). See "Kingsman" if you enjoyed "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz", and be prepared for violence, gore, and copious use of Adult Language. Samuel L. Jackson does not disappoint in this area.

Following a further Valentine treat over at TFI Friday's, Beloved Wife and I returned home in good time for wine o'clock.

I'd promised myself a motorbike ride on Saturday, and to this end, on Friday afternoon I'd reinstalled the battery and fired up the Black Beast. First stab of the starter. Although I had set an early alarm for Saturday morning, when it rang I merely found the excuse of a nearly-flat phone battery to give myself an extra hour in bed.

My leathers not only still fit, but are in fact now comfortably loose around my midriff as well as baggy in the arse. The latter is a design feature to make sitting on a motorbike actually comfortable. My reprofiled seat is still a success. I covered some 400km on Saturday morning, seeking out known bendy roads over towards the eastern UAE and I only actually stopped and put a hoof down when refuelling. If you saw a streak of black lightning whizz past you at near-relativistic speed, it might have been me. If you clocked the registration plate, it certainly was someone else.

The therapeutic benefits of going for a good thrash cannot be underestimated, except by non-motorcyclists, who don't understand.

Beloved Wife wished me a Happy Hallmark with a full English, and I went out afterwards, removed the battery and mothballed the bike again. I suspect that it needs new brake pads, for which I've been quotes a rather alarming QAR778, but it's due a service soon. That will have to wait until I'm not whizzing in from Doha about one weekend in eight.

To finish the weekend, we ran an errand up to Barracuda and I got out of the car at Sharjah airport for my 1830 flight.

I'm now back to bikeless, wifeless, catless Doha. My life is shortly to be taken over by the Bard of Avon; I'll not be able to get away any weekends until the end of March. Beloved Wife says she'll come to see the play, so there is some variety on the horizon to break up the soul-destroying cycle of work/rehearse/eat/sleep that epitomises my life.

]}:-{>

PMS

It’s about this time of year that Facebook is peppered with pictures of motorcycles parked in garages and prevented from going outside by snow and ice. Parked Motorcycle Syndrome. I fully sympathise, but spare a thought for a Goat who can’t ride his own bike when the weather is perfect, because it’s 400km away.

Yes, it’s motorcycle season in Arabia: that glorious period between October and April when dry weather is almost guaranteed, and daytime temperatures are in the twenties Celsius. So why am I not riding?

Because Qatar.

Having landed a job last September, only now in February am I about to obtain my iqama – Residence Permit – without which it’s impossible to have a cheque account, purchase liquor or pork, or own a motor vehicle. I’ve been driving a rented car because there’s no functional public transportation system in Doha. I do look forward to the Metro, but this currently consists of several large holes in the ground where roads used to be and temporary traffic barriers to redirect traffic around the holes. The Karwa taxi service is a semi-functional lottery, whereby it’s easy to get a taxi from a shopping mall, but you’ll wait until the heat-death of the universe before you can hail a taxi in the industrial area.

I was last on two wheels in October, since when I have removed the bike’s battery and the machine languishes in chains in Dubai. A sad situation indeed.

Once I have my Qatar residence, options become available, at least in theory.

• Obtain a Saudi transit visa, fly back to Dubai, and ride the bike overland to Qatar. Previous attempts to do this sort of thing have ended because I wasn’t resident in both the UAE and Qatar. The fatuous rule about not being allowed to import a vehicle that’s more than five years old will not apply because it isn’t an import. The bike would still be registered in Dubai. In principle this must be possible; I see vehicles in Qatar that are registered in Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, and KSA. I don’t see why I can’t drive from Dubai to Doha in the same way as I can drive to Muscat (without a Sultanate of Oman residence), but this is ‘unbossible’ for the Saudi authorities to comprehend, it seems. Or else it’s my careless choice of passport.

• Do exactly the same thing as described above, but do it with my Terios. Here is the sensible ‘head’ option, as it would save close to QAR4000 a month on car rental, I’d have a 4x4, and when time comes to demobilise and go back to Dubai I could fling all my stuff in the back of the car and drive it. The fundamental disadvantage of this option is that it doesn’t solve my PMS.

• Buy a bike. Continue to rent a car, but be self-indulgent in the Department of Large Motorbike. Here is the ‘heart’ option that would cost a fortune. I’d lose my shirt when demobilising from Qatar and selling this putative bike, or I could export it to UAE which would entail expense and heartache (as it did last time, in 2012) and I’d end up with a surfeit of motorcycles.

The bike season will go phut in mid April. Hardy souls such as I usually continue to ride during the summer months, but pleasure rides tend to be nocturnal. In other words, there seems little point in going to the time, effort, and expense of getting a motorbike into or in Qatar for the extremely limited chance I’ll have to ride it. In practice, what seems most likely, and certainly most sensibly, is that I don’t get to ride a motorbike of any flavour except on occasional weekends visiting Beloved Wife in Dubai.

The option of selling my Kawasaki and looking into buying a bike once I know where I’m going to be long term doesn’t make economic sense given my current knowledge of where I’ll be after April. Or after August. Or at the end of 2015... I fundamentally don’t know how long I’m going to be in Qatar, and have even less of a clue as to where I’ll end up next. As the bike is over eight years old it’d almost certainly produce less than AED20k, and a new replacement is now the thick end of AED80k. All for a bike that to me is in perfect order and ready to ride. A used Kawasaki 1400GTR? In the UAE? I think I already own it.

What to do? I work six days a week most weeks except when I’m visiting Dubai, so there’s precious little time to get on a bike anyway. Last time I lived in Doha I used the traffic as an excuse to commute by motorcycle. This time I choose to live literally over the road from the office so the bike would get used only for social events and road trips across a country smaller than Connecticut. I guess that I can simply have motorcycle fantasies until my work in Qatar is done, try not to go insane, and hope that my next job won’t leave me in a semi-permanent state of ‘so near and yet so far.’

]}:-{>

Déjà vu all over again

When I resigned and left Qatar in 2012, the arseh- crazy people I worked for said that they'd provide an NOC: a letter confirming no objection to my changing sponsorship to work for someone else in Qatar. As this promise eventually turned into a statement to the effect that "We told you we wouldn't give you an NOC," I was banned from working in Qatar for two years.

Welcome to 2014, and here I am back again. I'm working for a different firm and in a senior position, so hopefully I'm in a position to avoid a repeat of the previous unpleasantness.

The rest of the situation is eerily familiar:-

• Beloved Wife can't join me for a year because of the enormously long lead times for teachers;

• I have a motor vehicle (two actually) in Dubai that can't be imported to Qatar because of an arbitrary rule that says you can't import anything that's more than five years old;

• I'm living in a furnished apartment, probably for a year.

However, this time there are some significant differences:-

• My apartment is within walking distance of work, so the nightmare commute across Doha is neatly avoided;

• The said apartment is a hotel apartment, so someone comes in and cleans it twice a week, bed linen and towels are provided, and all utilities including internet are included;

• I have several very old friends in town so I'll not be BillyGoat NoMates;

• I don't have a boss who stands in the middle of the cube farm and screams about how everyone is incompetent.

Being a hotel, the place has a 50m pool, gym, Kwik-e-Mart, numerous restaurants, and also 24-hour room service. Now my complaints have been answered the fridge actually makes ice, there's a proper cooker instead of an electric camping stove, and the washing machine works. I think I shall avail myself of the on-site laundry to get my ironing done by professionals who are better at it than I. As I'm right at the top of the building I even have a view. It would be better without another tower in front of me, but how much time does one spend looking out of the window?

I rented the cheapest 4x4 I could find because a Nissan Sunny won't get to the Inland Sea loaded with dive kit, and I'm investigating devious but legal methods of getting my motor vehicles from the UAE to Qatar. The Kawasaki dealer reckons that I can import my motorbike (again) because the fatuous five-year rule only applies to cars, and it isn't a car. However, when I tried that suggestion at the traffic police I got the same sort of look that sprouting antennae might have achieved. I could perhaps drive around on Dubai plates but, despite there being prima facie evidence that this is possible (vehicles with non-Qatar plates in Doha), my previous attempts to get this to happen have stopped with some wag at the Saudi consulate telling me that this is "imbossible."

Meanwhile I'm entertaining the prospect of buying another motorbike, but until I get my Residence Permit this is also imbossible.

I guess I'll have to go back to Dubai every couple of weeks and get by motorcycle fix in the UAE. The roads are better there, actually. In the mountains there are actual bends.

]}:-{>

Fast* track

Photo credit: Pradeep Warrier

“If you wanna go any faster, take it to the track.”

Dubai Autodrome advertises both car and bike track days where, we are told, there are no speed limits, no speed cameras, no manhole covers, no sand spits, no donkeys on the road, and no crazy Afghan truck drivers on the wrong side of the road. In addition, the only other motorists out there are consenting adults, all doing more-or-less the same thing in the same direction. And there are marshals, and first-aid facilities in case of a spill.

In truth, taking my bike to a track session would probably be overall a lot safer than a Friday trip to Kalba. But that had until recently, not got me on to the track. For ever and a day, my excuse was not having any full leathers, and they’re mandatory for bikers. Then last December happened, and I resorted to my back-up excuse: cowardice.

Anyway, a lot of the Autodrome track sessions were for experienced riders only, and I satisfied myself with taking photos.

And then an alert of a ‘Newbies’ evening session dropped into my inbox. I hummed and hawed, and then with a couple of days to go I booked and paid online. No excuses now; I’d be at the Autodrome on Thursday evening.

The advertised itinerary was three groups, and three 20-minute sessions for each group. Because Thursday is a work day, and also it’s summer and consequently ridiculously hot, not many bikers turned up. Most arrived in shorts and flip-flops with their racing bikes on trailers. Muggins rolled up with a small selection of tools in his panniers and fully dressed for action.

I prepped my bike by removing the panniers and clicking the rear suspension up by one notch, and then went to register. They gave out customer loyalty cards. “Do six track sessions, and the seventh one is free.” The summer sessions are on the short, Club circuit because that’s the only one with floodlights, and are consequently cheaper than winter track days on the full GP circuit. “Do six summer sessions,” we were advised, “And save the free one for the full circuit!”

It also turned out that only about four of us were in the Group C “Newbies” and Autodrome management decided to combine Groups A and B. Net result: three 25-minute sessions rather than 20 minutes. Bonus! While we were being briefed in air-conditioned comfort, the bikes were scrutineered, and when I got back to the pit garage my bike had an approval sticker on it. Good to go.

It was with no little trepidation that I queued up on the pit lane for two familiarisation laps, following the leader at relatively low speed to learn the official racing lines where the track was most grippy. The first Group C session followed immediately. As there were only four of us, I felt as though I had the track to myself until a Frenchman on a BMW S1100RR went steaming past me on the start/finish straight and I had someone to race follow. Newbies aren’t allowed to overtake except on the start/finish straight, and he had 193BHP as opposed to my mere 135BHP. I overtook him a couple of laps later and, I’m told, he spent the rest of the session right behind me. I say, “I’m told,” because we all had to fold in our mirrors in accordance with the First Rule of Italian Driving: “Whats-a behind me is not important.”

I got progressively quicker throughout the session, and 25 minutes later I was quite relieved to see the chequered flag so I could come into the pits and have some cold water and a sandwich.

The sun was setting when the second session started, not that this made any material difference to the temperature. By now I was becoming a little more consistent with my braking and gear-changing points. I’d chatted with a couple of the experienced guys and learned a couple of markers on the asphalt. Notably, “Squeeze between the kerb and the pothole on the hard right into the uphill chicane or you’ll be all over the place through the chicane and very, very slow.”

Full-throttle acceleration to the red line isn’t something my bike experiences very often, but it got plenty of that past the grandstand. And I could feel the ABS and slipper clutch doing its work on the hard braking into corners. In over five years and 50,000km I’ve not decked a footrest. Now I was doing so regularly, and the bike remained rock-steady while cranked over. Perceived wisdom for track riding is that at this point one should slide one’s arse off the seat and stick one’s knee out. I’ve never been comfortable with that. My new seat, with its broad cheeks to support my, erm, broad cheeks, rather discourages that sort of behaviour. A bike seat that is comfortable and supportive on long touring trips isn’t the best one for flinging a 300kg 1400cc machine around a track that’s designed for 600cc supersport crotch-rockets. I had to content myself with leaning my upper body and easing off the throttle a little so that nothing other than the folding footpegs actually hit the deck.

I was, on average, one second per lap quicker on the second session, and a further second quicker on the third, despite darkness having fallen. I may have been the only punter on the track by the end of the third session. One guy had gone home because he’d rather foolishly turned up with a tinted visor and wasn’t allowed to participate in the dark.

I’ve learned a lot from my first track session. Firstly it’s a lot of fun, even when not riding as fast as you dare. Second, I now know that my bike handles in a predictable and steady manner, even when cranked over as far as I dare. Previous bikes have squirmed and protested under those conditions and threatened to pitch me off. And I think that’s pretty good for a heavyweight, shaft-drive tourer. I now know that in my road riding, I’m well within the bike’s performance envelope. My normal sport/touring tyres I ran to their edges. There is evidently no need for me to consider softer, sportier rubber than Pirelli Angel ST or equivalent.

In fact, the single problem came on the way home. I got stuck at two sets of traffic lights and spent about eight minutes having my bike pour boiling hot air all over my legs, and by the time I got indoors I was bordering on heat exhaustion. A litre of oral rehydration salts and a cool shower sorted that out.

* In the grand scheme of things I'm not very quick. My best lap was 1'25" which is distinctly unimpressive when compared to UAE Sportsbike Championship times of around 1'06".

]}:-{>

Game of Thrones

The Goat admits it: his grand tourer doesn’t have a particularly comfortable saddle. It should have, bearing in mind that the 1400GTR is supposed to be capable of crossing continents, but the Concours14/GTR forums are full of complaints about how uncomfortable the seat is, and which after-market custom saddle is best.

Here, then, is the Game of Thrones. Opinions are like arses, in that everybody has one. And every one of them is slightly different. Understandably, this fiscally astute Goat is reluctant to lash out many hundreds of dollars on a throne that may or may not improve his personal seating arrangement upon his own Black Beast. It’s fair enough for Seth Laam to say he’ll adjust his custom seat if he didn’t get it 100% right first time, but this is an option that isn’t realistically available to Muggins who’s half a planet away.

Muggins did notice that the police GTRs imported to the UAE for reviewing by the Sharjah constabulary came with Corbin single seats, and the Goat asked his friendly neighbourhood Kawasaki dealer nicely if he could borrow one of these saddles for a weekend. The idea was that, if he liked the Corbin, he’d order one of his own. But no, that option wasn’t available. Neither was borrowing  a police-spec GTR with all the blues and twos. No surprises there, then.

Just in case a random surfer happens upon this blog in an effort to find a customised motorcycle saddle, here’s the list of links:-

• Baldwin                
• Corbin                  
• Seth Laam          
• Rick Mayer 
• Russell Day-Long              
• Sargent     

And for air cushions:-

• Airhawk              
• Road Zeppelin    

It’s very quickly obvious that pretty much any option involves the expenses of specialist craftsmen working with high-quality materials, plus the shipping charges from the USA and import taxes. Plus, in some cases, a need to ship the old seat so that it may be adjusted. Few if any of the options are realistically available for an impecunious Goat living in Dubai. It’s not solely a cost issue. The Goat would happily pay full price for the right product, but would very much prefer a ‘try-before-you-buy’ option.

However, a solution has presented itself in the form of Mr Rasheed of Delmon Upholstery Est. in Satwa. (Opposite the Municipality office).

Old cover off, and
cutting about to commence

Day 1:    The Goat brought his existing motorcycle seat into the shop and, assisted by various photos of customised seats downloaded from the internet, supervised as Mr Rasheed removed the old cracked vinyl and started to hack at the foam with an ancient breadknife.

Trimming the foam.

Draft final. Old foam cut and new blue foam added.

Day 2:    The Goat dropped into the shop to review the draft final shape of the foam. The seat had been adjusted to move the low point further back, widened slightly, and had a saddle horn added at the front. The Goat sat on his reprofiled saddle and declared it good.

Day 3:    Mr Rasheed covered the foam with a smoothing layer of spongy interfacing, and stitched a marine-grade black vinyl cover. By mid-afternoon on the third day, the seat was back on the bike.

More photos of the process, along with some finished custom saddles from which the Goat may have obtained inspiration, are here.

The Goat is to try it out and come back to the shop if there are any adjustments required, which is nice.

Oh, and as the Goat also owns a Road Zeppelin, motorcycle seat comfort, or the lack of it, should hopefully no longer be an issue.

]}:-{>

Cupid stunt

Photo: 7DAYS

Pictured is "one of 'tens' of 'worrying' images received by Dubai Police on a daily basis".

According to today's 7DAYS front page, it's irresponsible recklessness that is the traffic offence du jour, and we are all to be appropriately outraged. Of course; the biker in the pic isn't wearing boots, gloves, a jacket, and presumably no armour in his trousers. If he falls off, he may live to regret it. Notwithstanding his behaviour, I think the guy in the pic is a bit of a dickhead.

But biking attire isn't the point. Reckless driving by motorcyclists in general is. Apparently, the police have been confiscating bikes at a rate of about eight a week in Dubai so far this year, and Daddy simply pays the fine so that Offspring can continue on his headlong trip off the bike on to the ground or maybe six feet under it.

These guys are giving all bikers a bad name, and from a personal point of view, I don't need to get tarred with the same brush, just because I happen to ride a motorcycle.

But how about getting the level of two-wheeled lawlessness into perspective?

'Tens of worrying images'. Not dozens, scores, or hundreds. Assuming for a moment that Dubai police would have said 'hundreds' if they'd received more than 101 pictures, then 'tens' means no more than 99. Last May, 7DAYS reported how two million traffic offences had been recorded in Dubai in the first four months of 2013. That's around 16,500 offences per day.

'Worrying' images constitute less than 0.6% of the total reported traffic offences. I think it's the remaining 99.4% that should be worried about.

]}:-{>

Video kills the way of the car

The rise of the portable and affordable high-definition video camera has produced video blogs, uncountable numbers on YouTube of videos featuring Russians running out of talent, and copious potential material for the purveyors of law and order. It’s this last point that I want to address here.

Dubai Police actually promotes a campaign that is imaginatively called “We Are All Police,” with a couple of contact telephone numbers: 800 4353 and 800 7000 since you ask. You’re welcome. The basic idea is that you pick up your phone and report an alleged offence, and the police will follow it up. Getting twenty calls all with variations on a theme of “Black Land Cruiser with this registration number driving at speed up the breakdown lane” might produce some police action. However, using a hand-held mobile phone while driving is illegal, so a lot of these witnessed offences presumably go unreported.

Anyway, my business proposal is to combine We Are All Police with a GoPro (or similar) camera. I’m sure many drivers spend their days wondering why there’s never a police officer around when someone displays a monumental lack of regard for safety or the law, and my proposal is to do something about it. Publishing a video on YouTube of someone publicly assaulting a van driver is illegal, and the material should, we are told, be handed to the police. So here’s the plan.

In essence, I ride my motorbike around Dubai with a GoPro camera stuck to my helmet, and I record the registration number of each vehicle along with the offence being committed, all in the same take. Dubai police get a copy of the video, and I receive 50% of the fine as payment. I estimate that I could clear several hundred dirhams a day just going about my daily business and only noting mobile phone use. Dubai police receive the other 50% with little effort beyond entering the data on the RTA’s database. Imagine how much cash I could make if it were my day job…:-

Selected traffic offences: 

Reckless driving                   (AED 2000 and 24 black points),

Mobile phone use                   (AED 200 and 4 black points),
Not wearing a seat belt            (AED 400 and 4 black points),
Inappropriate use of hardstrip     (AED 600 and 6 black points),

Tailgating                         (AED 400 and 4 black points),

Running a red light                (AED 800 and 12 black points),
Stopping on a pedestrian  crossing (AED 500).(I could make a packet every Friday just by taking a GoPro down to outside the mosque on my local street corner!)

The benefits are obvious, from an income stream for Muggins for doing little more than riding his motorbike, but go on to improved driver behaviour and consequent reduction in collisions once the idea that any motorcyclist out there might be a police deputy, in much the same way that wearing a POLITE fluorescent tabard might. Then drivers might actually notice motorcycles, which would be of further benefit in the area of motorcycle safety. Oh, and I’d get to feel as if I was getting back at some of the knuckle-dragging morons who have inexplicably been allowed control of a motor vehicle.

What of gainsayers who say that “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”? How about I only report offences that I never commit? And yes, I would undertake police training if I were required to demonstrate some level of competence on two wheels.

And what of resentful motorists who take it into their pretty little heads to run bikers off the road, much as what happens already? Would you risk it if there were a reasonable probability of the incident being caught on video and used in your prosecution? No, I didn’t think so.

]}:-{>

Rorty Zorst

During this year’s Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge, where I was marshalling all week, I got to thinking about motor vehicle noise. It’s obvious that racing cars and bikes produce a lot more noise than normal road vehicles.

Bikes on the Desert Challenge may not exceed 115dB(A) at 2 metres when inspected at the scrutineering just prior to the event. That’s very loud indeed, and it was just as well the test that was being carried out on each competitor just a few metres from where I was working only took a couple of seconds. It’s a lot louder than normal road vehicles, for which I suspect most of us are grateful.

Quoting numbers of decibels is actually pretty meaningless without specifying the distance from the source. The further away you are, the quieter the sound. By way of example, in the United States, the Federal limit from the EPA for motorcycle noise is 80dB(A) at 50 feet. Some high-school physics tells us that this is the same as 109dB(A) at 20 inches, or 98dB(A) at 2 metres. So when New Hampshire specifies a limit of 106dB(A) at 20 inches, this is actually fairly close to the EPA limit. The whole issue of distance is deliberately obfuscated by manufacturers of after-market horns: “138dB(A),” the blurb says, “at 100mm.” That’s 112dB(A) at 2 metres. It’s still a lot louder than the comedy horns fitted by most vehicle manufacturers, but less than the noise made by Marc Coma and his buddies on the ADDC.

Here’s the thing. There are plenty of people who believe that motorcycles alone are responsible for antisocial vehicle noise. If you live in JBR in Dubai, or the Pearl in Doha and you’re not deaf as a post, you’ll have been disturbed by the late-night antics of the Inadequate Silencer Owners Club. And some of these are indeed motorcycles. I wonder how many are performance cars? One solution, the one adopted by Sharjah Police in January this year, is to ban motorcycles from Sharjah’s main roads after 10pm. This, instead of ticketing the driver of every antisocially-loud vehicle.

Typical government reaction is to legislate for ever more stringent noise limits. Manufacturers comply with larger, heavier, more complicated, and more expensive exhaust systems. This in turn encourages an increased proportion of motorcyclists to switch to after-market systems. Reasons include saving weight and cost; another is to make the machine sound like a motorcycle and not a sewing machine. I contend that if the legal limits were set at a more easily achievable level, fewer bikers would replace their stock systems.

My own machine has a manufacturer’s plate stating “95dB(A) at 4400rpm.” It doesn’t specify a distance. When I bought an after-market silencer (yes, I too dislike the gigantic 28lb bazooka dangling off my bike), one feature that I liked was that the manufacturer was extremely candid about how noisy it was. 93dB(A) at 20 inches – the EPA test. This is an identical result to the OEM system, and less than what's on the manufacturer's plate and what's engraved on the original silencer. The “race” performance full system from the same exhaust system company produces 99dB(A) at 20 inches, which is significantly louder but still below the EPA limit.

For cars, the limit set by the European Union from 2012 is 71dB(A). I’ve been unable to find the distance, nor the speed, nor even the pavement surface. All these factors are significant. You experience around 80dB(A) from traffic when you stand on the kerb 5m from a busy road. I wonder, given this 71dB(A) limit, why a Mustang, or a Lamborghini, or a Ferrari all seem to be allowed, in standard manufacturer’s trim, to be significantly louder than pretty much any stock motorcycle? I guess most cars are very quiet compared with motorbikes, and most bikes are pretty quiet. Bikes are invisible anyway, so it’s generally assumed that all bikes: the ones that Mr Joseph Public notices, are loud.

EDITED 21 April. I've discovered a source for how motorcycle noise is measured in Europe. It's EEC Directive 78/1015/EEC. The test, essentially, is to accelerate the bike over a 20m distance in second or third gear between two microphones 15m apart. I found a research paper that compared the results of the European Union test with a static test. It's here. In short, the static test produced sound pressure levels that were up to 13dB(A) higher than the EU drive-by test, with almost all results falling within two standard deviations of the drive-by mean. A factory standard Honda Fireblade produced 83dB(A) in the drive-by test and 95dB(A) in the static. That's equivalent to 83dB(A) at 2m.

I’ve tabulated some sound pressure levels below, all sucked out of the intertubes and corrected to measurement at 2m, unless noted otherwise:-

Noise source              SPL at 2 metres

EU limit for cars         71dB(A) distance N/A

My bike at 5000rpm        81dB(A)

Inside A340 cattle class  85dB(A) distance N/A

Race exhaust for GTR      87dB(A)
Kerbside of busy road     88dB(A)

Inside London Tube train  94dB(A) distance N/A

EPA limit                 98dB(A)

Performance horn         112dB(A)

Diesel truck             114dB(A)

ADDC Moto                115dB(A)

The situation with dodgy after-market exhausts has improved over recent years. Manufacturers of many systems now dyno-develop them and get them certified as road legal. Beowulf in UK and Staintune in Australia, for example. The days of every chancer with a pipe bender and a supply of two-inch stainless steel tube are almost over.

Oh, and lest we forget, these are maximum noise levels. If you don’t ride around at maximum, wide-open throttle, your machine will be a lot quieter. Everyone, surely, owes it to common decency to keep the noise down when leaving at the crack of sparrowfart or getting home after a session of midnight oiling.

And then there are Harley-Davidsons. Mysteriously,these machines are “expected to be loud” and, with the exception of residents of JBR who have to be up for work at 6am, are tolerated by everyone including the vehicle inspectors at registration time, whereas riceburners have to sound like wristwatches…

Found on a HD forum:
Stock muffler 98dB(A)  (the EPA limit, measured at 2 metres)                          

Aftermarket 107dB(A)  Jeez…

]}:-{>

The Moggy Whisperer

The idea was laudable enough. Pet and feed the feral cat, get her to trust me, and then book her in for a 'spay-and-release,' which was being offered free by Al Barsha Veterinary Clinic throughout February. I made a booking, but the earliest appointment was late in the month.

By the time the appointment date was only a few days away, it had become startlingly obvious that the said cat was pregnant. We suspect that the Long-Haired Lover from Over The Road is at least partially responsible. Our stray cat ballooned. She looked as if she'd swallowed a foopball. I quipped that she looked like the moon.

"That's no moon," exclaimed Beloved Wife.

And as I'm not allowed to name her DeathStar, she's now called Luna.

It was clearly way too late for a trip to the vet, so I cancelled the appointment. If Luna decided to have her kittens in the Crumbling Villa, we'd look after them and deal with weaning, house-training, and eventually disposal of the bundles of joy that Luna was eventually going to produce.

It is now obvious that Luna is nowhere near as feral as we'd been led to believe. She's instantly litter-trained, she knows she's not allowed on the furniture or worktops, and she's extremely friendly even when she doesn't want food. We think Luna got the proverbial Sandal Up The Jacksie the moment she got buns in the oven. And she's now obviously mine - or I'm hers. I am now officially the Moggy Whisperer.

Naturally, my popularity with The Family Under The Stairs is reinforced daily by the unfortunate fact that I don't seem to be able to secure any gainful employment. I'm at home every day providing food, water, attention, and removing cat truffles from the litter box. The post of Moggy Whisperer does not pay well, or indeed at all.

LinkedIn has produced nothing by way of job interviews, and applications through multiple employment agencies, company websites, direct mailing, and even personal visits with CV in hand have yielded precisely one Skype interview that went nowhere.

Even my attempts to volunteer for motorcycle marshalling work were also inexplicably ignored. So much for this year's RAK Half-Marathon, the Dubai Marathon, and the Abu Dhabi Triathlon. I know that I was passed over for the Dubai event because of my careless choice of motorcycle brand: it isn't a BMW, but my attempts to volunteer for the Triathlon, even after receiving an email request for volunteers, didn't even elicit a "No thanks, we don't like Japanese motorcycles" response.

At least I managed to do some voluntary work at Yas Marina Circuit last week, and my continuing unemployment does mean that I'm available for marshalling this years Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge.

If only any of these were salaried posts.

 ]}:-{>

Furious driving

Blogging about motoring; it's not that there aren't other subjects, but this one really got up my nose yesterday. So here is my letter to the gentleman concerned. He'll doubtless never read it.

Dear Sir,

Thank you for alerting me of the presence of your FJ Cruiser yesterday, during the evening rush hour. Actually, I knew you were there, thanks to your daytime running lights and your car being only a metre or so behind me on my motorbike at 80km/h in heavy traffic. I didn't really need you to lean on your horn too.

Neither did I need you to squeeze between the central reservation and my bike, the instant I moved to one side of the traffic lane. There was barely enough room for us both, and obviously neither of us could change lane. Rush hour. Too much traffic.

I do hope my shoulder didn't damage your door mirror too much as you shot past me. I believe you were able to stop before rear-ending the car in front, judging by the shrieking of your tyres. My shoulder is fine, thank you for asking.

I have learned a valuable lesson. I now know what FJ stands for, when applied to you and your particular vehicle.

Have a nice day.

]}:-{>

It's good to be polite

Genuine British Police Officer

Confession, they say, is good for the soul.  Back in the 1980s I owned a plain white Ford Cortina. I also worked for a local authority, and the job required that I made frequent trips to construction sites in all weathers. So I got into the habit of throwing my bright fluorescent yellow jacket on whenever I drove the car. This was fine, right up until the day came when I was pulled over by the Kent Constabulary for both “Driving at 29mph in a 30mph zone” and “Resembling a Police Officer.”

I confess: I was indeed driving at 29mph. What speed would you have done when being tailed by a traffic cop in a 30mph zone? As for the other allegation, there was absolutely nothing that made me look like a traffic cop in an unmarked car beyond driving a plain white Ford and wearing a bright yellow jacket.

But I had wondered why the Porsches that came up behind me on motorways at enormous speed seemed suddenly to notice that they were accidentally exceeding 70mph, slammed on their brakes, and tucked in behind my Cortina at a sensible and law-abiding 69mph. It also now occurred to me why, when my car alarm accidentally malfunctioned while I was driving through Loughborough, the traffic parted like the Red Sea in front of a multitude of Israelites. Something to do with flashing headlights and an earsplitting  Bee-Doh-Bee-Doh klaxon. I’d bought the alarm secondhand, and didn’t know about the wire that should have been connected to prevent the thing going off when the engine was running.

Moving forward in time now, and I note that over the past 35 years, precious little has improved in the Department of Motorcycle Conspicuity. I have tried the Dayglo Derek approach; my current bike has 110 watts of unswitchoffable headlights; I’ve put reflective tape on the bodywork. Yet all seems to no avail. Motorbikes, because they’re smaller than Land Cruisers, are utterly invisible.

An ordinary fluorescent jacket with retroreflective stripes isn’t effective. Actually it is. It increases conspicuity by an astonishing margin, but other motorists apparently don’t give a shit. “They look, but they don’t see,” a grizzled old motorcycling instructor once told me.

Absolutely completely different from,
and definitely unlike, a Police uniform

But now, a supplier of safety gear in the UK has come up with a genius solution. Highvisibility.uk.com started with equestrian gear – Dayglo for horses. They’ve now branched into motorcycle safety gear. The crucial difference between this new stuff and previous is some clever text on the back: “POLITE NOTICE – THINK BIKE” 

Funny how a small word that resembles at first glance the possibility of being prosecuted for a moving traffic offence is so much more effective than acres upon acres of Dayglo. And in the UK at least, it’s legal.

Dubai motorcycle cop

It’s pointless buying one of these tabards for use in Dubai. The desired effect wouldn’t happen here because the Plod looks significantly different.

However, there remains talk of Dubai Police adopting the black Kawasaki 1400GTR as weapon of choice, and if they do I’ll accidentally have a bike that looks exactly like theirs.

]}:-{>