It was a dark and stormy night… Ok, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it was just after 19:30 and it was raining. Not a proper rain, not a hard Highveld thunderstorm or anything dramatic, but that soft soaking rain that manages to get in everywhere if you give it long enough.
London transforms at night; It goes from this sad grey city populated by these sad grey people into a mess of sodium and neon, and when it rains you get bonus reflections off of everything. I had one simple job – keep Bird Flew shiny side up all the way from Islington to home with bonus points for keeping the rain from going down the back of my neck.
In the dark with the rain pouring down and the visor dotted with drops, it’s like you’re in another world. Tip the bike into the first big turn, wait to see the exit of the corner and turn on the power… there’s a slight wobble as the back wheel spins up a little, but the Michelins do their job and grab the tar. Then it’s time to sit and wait through a couple of sets of lights.
Around Liverpool street there’s an intersection that fascinates me. It’s one of the longest red lights on my run, but it’s lit up like a stadium for a night game of rugby. Most places have street lights that illuminate, but this crossroad wants to be seen. From space. As you approach it you get the feeling that you’re driving into a sunrise and for a few seconds after you leave it, you believe that the world has become very dark, but it’s just your eyes adjusting back to normal.
Every turn, every stretch of blacktop has lights reflected in the wet sheen of its surface. Sometimes they’re the sickly yellow of sodium, other times a clear white light from someone running HID lights and others a blue or an orange reflected from a sign. On the quieter stretches where you’re taking it slow, you can see the occasional vibration sending concentric circles outwards on a particularly big puddle and the lights wobble at you. Other times you’ll catch a glimpse of a perfect reflection exploding into a thousand drops when the front wheel blows through the water, like a mirror shattering into shards… a neon explosion at 8000rpm!
As I clear the last high-speed section far too fast, I find myself hugging the tank tightly and leaning into the corner that takes me up the ramp. Straighten it up, wind the throttle open, hold on and I’m nearly home.
Yep – last night I had to do 11 miles in the wet, over bad road surfaces while surrounded by idiot cage drivers trying to kill me out of sheer apathy, through a new road layout that was designed by a drunken chimpanzee going through Ritalin withdrawal.
But when I left the office I was tired, angry and depressed. By the time I got home it wasn’t all sweetness and light, but at least I’d had a smile on my face for a while. Who’d take the tube huh?