Josie's Bike Page

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Josie's Bike Page


Josie's a biker 1976...		...Josie's a biker 1998

This page was written 14/06/1998 updated 14/02/03

I've been biking from a very young age, tho' not as young as this photo would suggest. Here I am in 1976, at the tender age of 5 years on my uncle's bike. On the right is the bike I most recently owned, with me on it.

My first proper ride on a bike was when I was 15, almost exactly a decade since the above photo was taken. This was on an MZ TS150 on some waste ground near my home at the time. It was around the time that the M42 was being built and there was a stretch of unopened motorway just waiting to be revved down. After that trip I just had to have a bike.

So I waited till I was 17 and legal, as you do. I got an MZ TS125 as a gift and this took me to school and back. I was at boarding school so I used to travel 25 miles to visit home and this was around country lanes. Had a couple of run-ins with trees and bushes because I would zoom around the lanes of Warwickshire a bit fast.

My first major trip out was to Dublin for my 18th birthday. Here's me by the fire at a youth hostel just outside Dublin.

Me with bare feet making toast on a log fire, was I pretentious or what?

I actually travelled at the end of October, on the night the clocks went back. I started out at 9 o'clock from home in North Warwickshire, along the A5, through Bangor around 1am and to the ferry in Holyhead for 2.30. While I was there I stayed at Youth Hostels, drank a bit of Guinness and had a puncture which I had to fix myself. And here's the bike, half fixed.

I hung around at the back of a garage for most of a day doing this.

On the way back, and having run out of money, I arrived in Holyhead at 1am. I hadn't envisaged the problem of a 150 mile journey in the rain when I was so knackered. So I found a convenient spot to park the bike and sleep. This was a warehouse awning and I managed to curl up between the bike and the warehouse doors for some kip. Kept my helmet on for the first few hours because it was freezing. Then at 6.30am - still raining - I started off home. Apart from sleeping in a ditch at Stonehenge on Autumn equinox 1990, this is the only time I've slept rough. Anyway - I made it home by midday and spent the rest of the week in bed with 'flu.

On New Year's Day 1989 the bloke over the road backed into my lovely bike as it was innocently parked in front of the house and wrote it off. Luckily I'd passed my test the previous week so I went out the next day and bought an MZ TS250.

I was 18 now and the world my squidgey crustation. I had the TS250 for six months or so, riding it to college as before. It's claim to fame was that it was used as a prop in one of the 'A' Level Theatre Studies Group's drama productions. It was in pretty poor condition, having a petrol leak because of a dodgey carb. I bought it for Ł100 and spent about the same again on it. Then in the end sold it for Ł60 because I was fed up of people shouting at me at traffic lights to tell me there was petrol spurting out of the engine.

I used a bicycle over the summer and was surprised at how unfit I'd become during the last year. I'd done my 'A' Levels at this time and was working over the summer as an auxiliary nurse. I was paying rent at this point but still managed to save up a bit of cash. So I started to look around for a bike that would take me to university at Bangor (having decided this was the place to go since that fateful trip on the ferry).

Finding the bike and buying it for Ł200 wasn't too difficult, a Honda CX500, riding it was a bit of a problem though. It was far too big for me, not so much the engine size as the sheer weight of the thing. I couldn't have pushed it very far if I'd run out of petrol (like I'd pushed the MZ two miles at one point). And I certainly couldn't lift it off the floor when I dropped it. But I was persuaded to get it by its shiny throbbing hugeness.

I'd only had the bike for a week before I smashed it up. In retrospect, this was inevitable really. I'd had a few knocks but this was my worst accident. Here I am showing off my injuries in my room at Bangor. Suffice to say that I couldn't walk properly for a while and went back to riding small bikes.

I had an old bike for a while, a TS150, and fixed up the TS125 which was still officially mine. I had to give it up in the end because paying bike insurance and living on a student grant is well nigh impossible. I love bikes but not so much as to starve myself. So the next bike I had was a little Honda moped, which I rode in full leathers much to the amusement of my fellow students. There was one particular hill in Bangor, Coed Mawr which the moped wouldn't go up. I used to walk it up with a kind of wading motion.

After graduating I went on the dole for a while so I had more money. The next bike I got was this one:

which I had for a year or so. It's good, cheap transport, but I got fed up with all the wet leathers and luggage and you don't really want to be turning up for job interviews on a bike. So when I got a full-time job, I got a car. At this point I was about 23. Well, then I moved to Stoke and was on the dole again so I had to walk everywhere. Soon enough I decided to get a bike again. This one:

I had this bike for about eighteen months. When i got a job a bit further away from home it was too far to be travelling on a 125 so I started looking around for a bigger bike. The GN (photo at the top) is what I settled on. When I moved off to be alone in a Greta Garbo fashion, I took the bike and then promptly blew it up after riding it from Birmingham to South Wales several times with no oil. That'd do it.

My dream bike would be a Virago - a purple one. But I'd settle for a Harley like this one:

Though not actually having a bike at the moment, I'm always looking...

Here's me showing off my tatt, she's a tiger called Red.
Ok so she's not a bike but she kind of makes me look like a biker n'est pas?.

Me 2K

josie.henley [at] talk21.com

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