My answer to What was your first motorcycle?
Answer by Desmond Last:
A B.S.A Bantam 175. I used to carry a hammer with me to straighten out the foot-pegs. I went everywhere flat out trying to keep up with the bigger bikes which resulted in taking corners too fast for the skinny tyres.
Once I was going to work. I was a civilian apprentice at the R.E.M.E. workshops Bicester when the silencer fell off and the bus behind me ran over it and flattened it.
Another time I was overtaking a bus in the pouring rain and could not go fast enough to get more than midway past the bus. It was a do or die moment.
My moment of pride was parking it outside the local cinema wearing my new leather jacket to watch ‘Easy Rider’ Despite having a very good imagination I could not visualize my Bantam as a Harley Chopper.
The B.S.A was from an era when the U.K was a proud manufacturer of products to around the world.
Today I watch the news reporting that banks are preparing to leave the U.K . The people of ‘Bend over Britain’ have an economic future that like my B.S.A Bantam is consigned to waste-bin of History.
What was your first motorcycle?
Desmond Last. Writer. Poet. Electronic Music. Philosophy. 