The rain is coming down hard, soaking us to the skin even though we’re decked out in the finest waterproof gear known to mankind. And we’re freezing because the temperature has plummeted to somewhere down in the single digits, and there’s a gale blowing that means the wind chill factor is enough to make even a seasoned mountaineer grimace.
This wouldn’t be anything particularly out of the ordinary for the UK if we were testing bikes ‘Up North’ somewhere in the middle of winter, but we’re not.
It’s August and we’re on the south coast – an area that is occasionally laughingly referred to as the English Riviera – and we’re not even on the bikes at this point, but Bill is still slowly turning blue and I’m shivering uncontrollably as I fumble with numb fingers to revive my waterlogged phone.
We’re cowering under Brighton pier, trying unsuccessfully to shelter from the rain which is now coming in almost horizontally, as it often does in this ‘green and pleasant land.’
Pleasant my arse – which by the way is soaking wet and in danger of getting frostbite – but definitely green. How could it not be, with all this bloody water falling on it, all the sodding time?
I’m wondering whether my editor at Superbike magazine, and my prospects for becoming his Deputy Editor will be affected if I leave the bikes and take a taxi home when I hear a low growl followed by a string of profanities that border on a severe case of hypothermia induced tourette’s.
Bill is staring at a small metal pipe and the nearly empty space that housed the tiny bit of sodden hash that was in there moments ago. With most of his scarce supply scattered to the wind and lost in the pebbles of Brighton beach, he stares forlornly at the remaining crumbs, mumbling something about death and how he wants to surrender to its dark embrace.
With a manoeuvre straight out of a David Attenborough documentary about exotic birdlife Bill somehow thrusts his head into his armpit while simultaneously summoning flame from a soggy match and emerges with lungs brimmed with smoke, thrusting the pipe into my hands before exploding into a spasm of coughing that threatens to turn him inside out.
Once I’ve stopped my own impersonation of the ageing Marlboro man after his first gasper of the day I let the psychologically warming effects of the assassin’s narcotic take me away to a better place.
That place is where I’ve recently spent three years working for a bike magazine. A place where the sun shines so frequently that you need never look at a weather forecast to plan your next photo shoot. A place where speed limits seem to be only advisory. A place where the weed doesn’t cost a week’s wages for half a week’s supply and where more people seem to smoke it than not.
That place is South Africa.
“For fuck’s sake!” Bill is fiddling with a smouldering hole in his waterproofs where a hot rock has proved that it will always get you, no matter how severe the prevailing conditions. “What the fuck are we doing freezing our tits off under Brighton pier in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the fucking summer!” he yells at nobody in particular.
“Let’s go to the pub,” he adds with what might be the most intelligent thing he’s said all day.
“Let’s go to South Africa,” I reply, surprising myself with this sudden thought that seems to have escaped from my brain through my mouth without any conscious input from me.
Several medicinal pints later it has been agreed that this is indeed a worthy and valid course of action. Although we have what are literally dream jobs – working with the best people on the best bike magazine in the UK, possibly the world – we are both also in the process of being dumped by the women in our lives and always seem to be skint. And wet. And cold.
Three weeks later we’re drinking beer on a BA flight to Joburg with our entire lives stuffed into a couple of suitcases and with enough cash to keep us going for a month or two before starvation and shame sends us scurrying back to Blighty.
This is how Bill and I found ourselves in South Africa, where we ended up working for the nascent Superbike SA, and went on to start 2Wheels magazine that ran for a very enjoyable and successful decade before the world changed and print media began its inexorable decline. The financial crisis of ’08 instigated a chain of events that saw Bill establish this eponymous website and me go into further debt buying enough equipment to start ‘The Bike Show’ that, miraculously, still survives nearly 10 years later.
I will never forget that moment under the pier on Brighton beach towards the end of the 20th century, it was a defining moment in my life. I remember the weather, I remember that it was a two-bike test that we were shooting but I can’t remember who the photographer was and I have only the vaguest recollection that they were two naked bikes. Possibly.
But I remember the pipe, and the calm, warming aura of certainty that enveloped me as the plan for a South African return began to take shape.
I have now known Bill for a very long time, first professionally, and quickly thereafter as a mate. He is in many respects, like me, a bit of an arrogant knobhead, but two things that I have always been guaranteed during twenty-odd years of friendship are – between the epic bouts of whingeing – a massive amount of laughter and an honest, expert and encyclopaedic knowledge of bikes.If you want to know about bikes, then keep reading this website. Chances are you’re going to have a laugh along the way, too.
With over two decades of working together, and a good few years of professional collaboration ahead of us I have many, many anecdotes that I feel it is my duty to record for posterity.
In the telling of these stories I hope to pass on the wisdom I have gained – in this case ‘a hot rock under a cold pier foretells a cool adventure’ – not just about life, but about the thing we all love most – bikes.
In my next Chat I will tell of the scariest winter riding episode I had as Road Test editor at Superbike UK, and the outrageously expensive and monstrously rapid special that so very nearly didn’t make it back alive.
watch The Bike Show on Ignition (DStv ch189) or search The Bike Show on You Tube.
https://www.youtube.com/user/IgnitionBikeShow
Mat Durrans
