Tales from the Trees (October 2022): Ducati motorbikes and fixed penalty notices

LIFE is hard, but not as hard as tree surgery.

Although I’ve given over most of my business to my son, I still do a bit; actually, rather a lot. This week I was landscaping. I didn’t want to be engaged in such, but the customer had a lot of tree work (for Dougal) and he had in his mind that we could build a set of railway sleeper steps and a fence as part of the job.

“I’m sorry; we don’t really do landscaping any more,” I said, standing in his garden in the cold of late winter and wishing I wasn’t.

“Can you quote anyway?” he asked, seeming to completely misunderstand my career change.

READ MORE: Tales from the Trees (August 2022) : Phone cables, broadband and Easter eggs

Reluctantly, I agreed, sent the quote alongside that for tree work and he immediately accepted them both, leaving me with the distinct feeling that I’d been outwitted.

In a last, desperate bid to save me the horrible job of chopping manually through the soon to be felled ash roots (it was a steep bank so no possibility of grinding) I told him it would be mid-summer before I could do the job. I added to my case by suggesting he look around further for someone else, but he reckoned that there was nobody and he’d wait for me.

Brilliant, I was now a landscaper again, not a journalist after all.

So, I’ve just returned from three days on the mattock with elbows that are better suited to leaning than the shock of bouncing off ash roots on the end of an axe.

Somehow though, I managed to complete the task.

I am at least financially better off, so I decided to invest some of the profit into getting my current motorbike – an old British army Harley Davidson – back on the road, because hard work needs to be rewarded.

With that underway, I opened the diary from 2001 to see what I could write about for this feature, elbows cushioned and as comfy as was possible, given the trauma I’d subjected them to.

I opened the book and something fell out, so I picked it up and realised that it was a speeding ticket for doing 63 mph in a 40 mph zone.

In Bristol.

And then I remembered.

In that year I had three children, one of them brand new and the son I alluded to earlier.

I was also building a huge extension on the house and from the diary I can see that I was very, very busy at work.

At the time I had a Ducati, a 900 cc machine that was pleasingly called Monster; not by me but by the manufacturer.

In the evenings I was keen to ride this bike, for reasons of stress relief, baby avoidance and the sheer thrill of it, but I was also trying to build a house, which was costing a lot of money.

I took it for one last spin and advertised it for sale, probably in a magazine – I’m not sure I’d fully accepted the internet back then. I possibly still haven’t.

On the Sunday afterwards two fellows showed up as arranged to view the machine. In itself, the fact that they had bothered to come was a good sign, so many purchasers just pretend to want something you are selling, but there was another clue to their intent – they had a van.

I opened the garage and showed the bike, which was beautiful, red and in good condition.

“Looks a bit rough mate …” said the first, a swarthy-looking chap in tattered leathers.

I wanted to say: “You want to look in the mirror yourself.” And add something clever about pots and kettles, but instead, opted for a slightly offended silence.

The cohort, another mean-looking character in denims, rather than leather, agreed with his accomplice, but they decided to take it for a spin.

“Are you insured?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Oh, I suppose it’s okay then …” I said that last part with no conviction at all, but

Leathers was on the bike before I could say much more and was suddenly roaring off into the village.

All I had now, if I was being robbed, was Denims as a hostage and a beaten up Transit van.

I tried to make conversation with my new hostage, keen to keep him on the premises as some sort of guarantee, but chatting wasn’t really his thing. Silence prevailed, broken only by the sound of my Ducati turning onto the Bath Road and screaming west at alarming rates of acceleration.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

Denims snorted. “Bris’ol,” he said, using the dialect and abbreviation familiar to the locals of that town.

I thought about it. Bristol was due west of where we lived, in the same direction that my motorcycle was now racing. I eyed up Denims, wondering if his skinny frame was hiding a specialist fighting skill, or a knife. If I were to take him prisoner, which was now my plan, I’d need to overpower him without getting stabbed, so I eyed the garage for a weapon. There were plenty, I was a tree surgeon after all.

In the end, unwilling to try and saw the man in half with a Stihl ‘66 or 020, I made my excuses and went into the house to tell my wife she might need to call the police.

Meanwhile, and rendering this move unnecessary, I heard 900 ccs of Italian Monster burble back into the village, so cancelled the call for help and returned to the garage at the same time as Leathers.

He pulled off his helmet and sat astride my lovely motorbike.

“Wheelies alright,” he said, smirking.

WTF! I thought, angry that he’d abused my machine and equally jealous that he could pop a wheelie and I couldn’t.

“Yeah, I know,” I said, untruthfully and resisting the temptation to ask if he’d managed this at 90 mph or just pulling away, which I could just about manage.

Leathers wanted the bike, I could tell from his adrenalin-pumped demeanour, but it wasn’t going to be an easy sell. “She’s a bit rough, I can’t pay you the asking price.”

This wasn’t true, the first part at least. I had no idea whether or not he could find £2,000 but that didn’t look likely.

Denims chipped in, with a story about a second Ducati they had just looked at which was only £1500 and ‘in better nick’.

Puzzled, firstly that I hadn’t seen the other bike in the ads, and at why they were bothering with my bike at all, I asked why they had come.

“The other one’s yellow, I wanted a red bike.” This made sense, Ducati motorbikes and Ferrari cars need to be as red as Land Rovers should be green.

The chap on my motorbike opened the bidding with a joke. “I’ve got £1200 on me, I’ll give you that and take it away today.”

Instead of resorting to any Anglo-Saxon-based language, I politely declined and reiterated the asking price.

An example of a Ducati motorbike

“Nah mate, I’ll walk away at that.” 

Leathers was suddenly quite hostile and once again I scanned the garage, wondering whether I could fight them off with a hedge trimmer that was the only unlocked tool in my workshop. I decided against it; the machine was currently out of action with a broken recoil spring.

I waited to see what was going to happen next, and noticed that Leathers and Denims were hesitating.

The man who’d been pulling the wheelies dismounted my motorbike and announced that he was off and I had one last chance to accept the comedy offer which he’d now bumped up by a further £100, odd considering he had only £1,200 with him.

I was getting fed up and said that I had stuff to do, which was true, there was always plenty to be getting on with. Everyone was now playing hardball, to use an Americanism, and the three of us departed meaningfully in separate directions, me into the house, the two bikers to their van.

I peeped out of the curtains from the front of our home and watched as the buyers sat awhile before inching slowly away in their van. They really wanted my bike, but I assumed they had given up.

It was about half a cup of tea later when they reappeared, knocking gently on the front door.

“Hello,” I said politely. “Have you forgotten something?”

Leathers looked a bit defeated and made me another offer which I immediately declined;

I felt I now had the upper hand. The driving off technique had failed and there was little else to do but agree on a sensible price, which I forget now but probably covered the cost of some essential building supplies I needed.
Eventually they caved in.

There was a small amount of paperwork and then they were gone, not as I expected in the van with the bike in the back, but separately; Leathers was keen to ride back to Bristol.

The last I heard of the beloved Monster as I counted my money, was its engine screaming as it headed westwards to a new life; except not quite.

A few days later I received a fixed penalty notice, my first ever and the last one to date.

Apparently I’d been caught on some early spy device giving it the beans down a side street in Bris’ol. The overlap between sale and re-registration had named me as the owner, and by assumption the villain, which I wasn’t.

As usual it took a while to clear it all up and I was proclaimed innocent and wondering how many wheels were on the ground at the time of the infringement; a part of me hoping it was one.

Many years and several motorbikes later I find myself in elbow aching misery trying to insure my recently MOT’d Mt 350. Why is it so difficult to do this most simple of tasks?

Unlike tree surgery, which is complicated and skilled at times but practical and understandable, doing anything online isn’t. I’ve messed it up spectacularly, meaning that any post-landscaping R&R is now delayed into an unforeseeable future. The catalogue of disaster started with the most unusable internet speed in England, .25 mbps download speed, whatever that means. But worse, I’ve tried to do everything by phone, paid the fee and only then realised that I have to send in documents online.

This being virtually impossible, I tried to cancel the policy.

Next, I rang to ask for a refund and somehow agreed to stick with it, because I’ve paid and I still want to ride my bike. But I still had to send a document, which I managed with great difficulty only to discover that I now need to set up an account, to view my documents.

I can’t do this; all I get is an error message.

Now I have no idea whether I’m insured or not, the only way to find out is to ring the helpline, which takes forever, or ride my motorbike too fast past a policeman to see if he stops me and then checks my insurance like they do on those police camera programmes.

Opting for plan C and still trying to claw back some rest and relaxation, I treated my new director to a week’s sea fishing off the south coast. Here, there were no drawbacks to being an under-equipped internet user other than failing to work the sat nav properly.

In the end, several hundred casts later I managed to land a conger eel, and a lonely mackerel, which doesn’t sound like enough and barely justifies the additional strain on my mattock damaged elbows. But that isn’t true.

Dougal, the new director/son, and I had a good time, away from the rapidly diminishing internet which is in direct correlation with the need of such.

My advice, to all business owners is to remember the leisure time, whether that includes motorbikes, fishing rods or aeroplanes. The last in that list featured in the week off one of the men at work opted for; R&R for him apparently includes skydiving!