A new beginning

Have you ever looked back at a point in your life and thought ‘yep, that was a pretty sweet time, and wouldn’t it be awesome if I could feel just a little of that raw, youthful happiness I felt back then‘?

Looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses? Probably. Mid-life crisis? Maybe – although it wouldn’t be my first. But nevertheless, there it is.

The year was 1997, just over twenty short years ago. Life was much simpler then in so many ways. I had been in the workforce proper for less than a year, having just escaped a largely wasted couple of years flailing around pretending to be a PhD student. I was working for a small government agency, earning more money than I had ever seen in my life, and had no mortgage, no kids and very little common sense. I had also been riding motorbikes for the past three years, and my ride at the time (a battered Yamaha RZ250R) was ripe for an upgrade.

I saw her in a long-since-defunct bike shop in Adelaide, and it was genuinely love at first site. A 1989 Yamaha FZR600, with thirty thousand on the clock and in pristine, unmolested condition. Black, with a red pinstripe, and although having been long since overtaken by the dominant Honda CBR600, Yamaha YZF600, Kawasaki Ninja and more recently the Suzuki GSXR600 SRAD, it was still a fair old weapon for its time. It was one of the rare vehicles that I connected with as soon as I touched it. It just felt right, and for the loaned amount of six grand it soon came home with me.

The next three years were happy ones. All the standard mods were done – aftermarket (and obnoxiously loud) pipe, stage one Dynojet kit, progressive fork springs, tinted visor and sticky tyres – and countless hours were spent making the most of the twistiest sections of road that could be found in the Adelaide hills. It was a simple time, a carefree (and somewhat reckless) time, a relatively happy time, a time that I wouldn’t necessarily revisit, but one that will always exist as an enjoyable one. To pin that point in time down even more, I took it to Mallala for an open track day in perhaps early 1998, and it was one of the most singularly awesome days I’ve ever had.

Then 1999 arrived, and the R6 happened. Sticking with my ‘first bike of the generation’ as I had done with the FZR, I bought myself one of the first iterations of this transformational mid-sized road rocket.

It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the R6, it was an amazing motorbike, and even the early ones still are. But in a sense it felt too good. I knew even at the time that on the road I couldn’t get within cooee of the limits of it, whereas the FZR had the odd pegs-down moment and violent head-shake that told me that I was indeed starting to reach its limits. What it boasted in power, handling and refinement, it lacked in pure hooligan feel, but I knew that when I bought one, the FZR had to go.

If I could go back to that time I’d ask my parents to buy the FZR from me and store it in their shed until further notice, and I’d have bought it back from them twenty years later for pretty much whatever price they’d named – it would have been worth every penny. C’est la vie.

This isn’t in any way a new story, it’s only the vehicles that change from person to person, and the FZR just happens to be mine. On the plus side, at least I didn’t get attached to the GTR Torana that my parents forbade me for purchasing way back in 1992 – that would have been a far costlier obsession (or a far more profitable one if I had bought it at the time and kept it tucked away in a shed until now, in which case I could have paid off a good chunk of my mortgage with the proceeds – c’est la vie).

Parenthood in 2004 saw me sell the R6 and walk away from bikes altogether. The voice in my head told me that it was time to minimise risk for a while, given that I had someone else’s life that for the first time meant more than my own, which up to that point I’d never really cared much for. I rode a bike once in the next ten years, only jumping on once to help a young lad who had just binned his learner bike at low speed right in front of me at a local intersection to get it home – he was shaking like a leaf and in no fit state to ride the couple of clicks to his place. Other than that, I didn’t go near one.

It was thirteen years after getting rid of the R6 that I thought it might be nice to have a little commuter to get into work and back, and once I jumped on again the seed was sown. It was early 2018 when the idea struck me – why not find an FZR like the old one to have, even if just as a weekend ride once it turned thirty and was eligible for classic registration. Same old story as with so many other, dare I say it, middle-aged men – perhaps just having this one small connection with those simpler times might spark some sort of nostalgic, misty eyed feelings of days gone by.

That was over a year ago now. In the meantime I’ve also realised that my writing on online learning, leadership, change management and various other high-falutin’ topics just aren’t that interesting to anyone. I thought I’d test this theory, so a couple of months ago I took down this blog altogether to see how many people would notice and protest that they could no longer read my previous works. The fact that I had exactly zero people contact me for a ‘please explain’ told me all I needed to know.

This reality was made even harder as I reflected on the counsel provided to me by a senior member of the Higher Education community a little while back which, in essence, suggested that I stick to writing only about things that I’m qualified enough to write about. I had done that, and nobody was interested, so why bother writing at all?

The answer, of course, was to write for me, and not for anyone else, and that’s what this new beginning is all about. Who will read this? I honestly don’t care. There will be some posts that will have some technical stuff specifically about the FZR600. There will be some stuff of interest for anyone who is considering rebuilding a project bike. There will be a few personal reflections for the stalkers and voyeurs out there. The primary goal though is to document the processes, the thoughts, the work and the feelings that have happened along the path to date, and those which will come between now and hopefully later this year when the project will hopefully be complete.

But the story needs to play catch up first, and for that we need to go back to early 2018 after the decision was made in my mind that the time had come to recapture even just a sniff of my life twenty years prior, and the first step in the process was to find the right bike.

Next up: the search begins.