I am used to writing for work, but the material is rarely personal and presented in the first person. A blog post I wrote that bucks that trend has just been published on my employer’s website. The article was in connection with the Brake’s 2018 Road Safety Week Campaign. My contribution was about motorcycle riding and you can read about it here -  Road Safety Week 2018 – Part 1

There isn’t much point in reproducing the content verbatim here because it would just confuse the search engines and mess with my company’s rankings, but please have a read and see what you think.

Despite its distinctly conversational, rather than corporate tone, my post survived largely without censorship. If you’re interested though, the last bullet point on my top ten tips was toned down a little – it originally read “Finally, if you spit, throw your cigarette, or any other rubbish for that matter, out of the window when you have a motorcyclist behind you … you are an inconsiderate arse.”

Since I acquired my Yamaha YBR 125 Custom at the end of August (previous article available), I have ridden it over 1600 miles and am getting more experienced/adept; I have even had to alter my insurance to increase my mileage allowance (and I am already getting close to the increased number).

Though the YBR is/has been brilliant, next year I will have the acquisition of my full motorcycle licence high up on my list of priorities. It’s not because I am bothered by my “L” plates, in fact I think of those as being my friend – other road users make allowances for me because of them. The main reason is that I already want a bike that is faster and safer than the 125 I am entitled to ride with my provisional.

You might be wondering how I can combine faster and safer in the same sentence, I’ll admit it sounds counter intuitive, but bear with me and I’ll explain it.

If you have read the Road Safe piece, you’ll have noted that I mention in the "advice for other motorists" bullet point list, that the bike will lose speed when going up hills, a twenty MPH drop is not unusual. That lost speed takes a while to put back on too.
 
To be safer, I think that the ability to stay with the car traffic at all times would reduce the likelihood of frustrating other drivers and prompting risky overtaking manoeuvres.

I’ll admit that I am not ready for a bike that does 180 mph or gets to 60 in 2-3 seconds, but a bike that will cruise without missing a beat (or being thrashed too hard) at 70mph and get there in 6-7 seconds would, I genuinely believe, be a safer proposition on the road.   

The reality is that most people driving cars will never have ridden a motorbike and the expectation that they have about a bike’s performance may not be aligned with the truth. When cars have been following me more closely than I’d like, and when I am losing speed without braking (and the brake light glowing), the chances of being driven into are not insignificant.

But the provisional licence doesn’t allow for a bike to be bigger than 125cc, so taking the full test is the only way to get to ride something a little more powerful. From a parochial perspective, I’d like the rules to be loosened to allow 250cc on a provisional, but I am not negatively disposed towards the motorcycle licencing process at all. I think that getting a provisional, getting on the road and getting some proper riding experience before having to go through a more rigorous test on a big bike is a much better approach than that imposed for car driving.
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We all suffer from a little bit of OCD don’t we? It can’t just be me, right?

I am an easy going kind of a guy but there are certain things that need to be just so in my life, not many but a few.
Examples for me include:

• The cutlery tray – no mixing of knives, forks and spoons and all eating irons facing the same direction in the tray
• Toilet roll – I want the leading edge on the underside to pull down rather than pull over
• Books in author sets and/or subject areas
• Ties sorted by colour
• My CDs – really need to be in alphabetical order

I am practical and believe that some things need to be ordered to allow stuff to be achieved in an efficient way – like finding a particular album when I have a great many of them in my collection.

Since moving house, almost two years ago now, my CDs have been all higgledy-piggledy and it has been a source of nagging irritation ever since. In my defence, they were packed in alphabetical order but when it came to unpacking the boxes into the new house, it became too great a task and too low in priority. Some boxes were in the house, some were in the garage, the boxes I wanted first were inevitably at the bottom of a stack etc. Mrs Baldwin had 65 things for me to do and alphabetising my CDs at that time would have resulted in violence and/or divorce. You get the drift.

Being an old and avid music fan, I have amassed circa 3,000 CDs since I began buying them in the 1980s. Having the collection randomly distributed around the house resulted in a range of frustrating outcomes. Taking ages to find a given album, buying it again because I couldn’t remember/prove if I had it or not, wanting to listen to a particular album but then selecting something else because it was easier etc.

Last weekend, having failed my own OCD standard for so long, I decided to get to grips with the alphabetising task …

​And bloody hell, I have been at it on and off since Saturday and have only finished to “C”. Hours more work awaits me before I can relax in the knowledge that the music collection will be properly accessible once more.

But the work will be worthwhile, I’ll be able to tick off a job on the list before I end up ticking over it.

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This month sees my site complete its seventh year of service, which, in my opinion, is at least worth a passing comment.

Life has been so hectic for me recently that, perversely, this latest anniversary comes at a time when I haven’t actually published anything for a little while. On the bright side though, the volume of material previously shared continues to generate a reasonable volume of traffic.

There has been plenty to write about over the last six weeks or so, but the time to dedicate to the written word has been limited and other priorities have been more pressing. So as not to beat myself up about it, I have been viewing the break as a bit of a holiday (and in my defence, some of the time not spent on writing was genuinely spent on holiday).

I have been to a few gigs, clocked up 1500 miles on my motorbike, written plenty of material for work, organised a conference and have even been a Poppy Appeal authorised volunteer door-to-door collector for the Royal British Legion (my second year of service) ... so I haven’t been lazy.

This post is of course meant to be a low-key celebration rather than an abject apology so I am going to stop with the excuses and state …

“YAY”

And in my best Len Goodman voice …

“Seven”.

Before I go, and in a desire to add some actual value to the self-congratulatory nonsense above – you have to watch “They Shall Not Grow Old” if you missed it on BBC2 on Sunday night (11/11/18). If you wore your poppy with pride, you really should see the Peter Jackson documentary.

Jackson took old WW1 footage and used modern technology to remaster it, adding colour, introducing sound and slowing the film speed down.  He used lip readers to enable him to add back in the dialogue of the soldiers filmed and the results were (in my best Craig Revel-Horwood) “A mazing”.

I saw Jackson interviewed when the film was released in the cinema and his view was that people could be forgiven for thinking that the war was something that happened in silence and black and white. Obviously, WW1 happened in vivid colour, was noisy and smelly and TSNGO was all the more poignant for bringing it to life (and death). 

When you wear a poppy (or like me, knock on doors to fundraise), you can have a much better appreciation of why it is so important to “remember”.

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