This is a strange and terrible tale.

I have wanted to tell it for a while, but I felt the main character was not yet dead, so I could not tell it. I did not want to cause him any embarrassment because I loved him a great deal. So, I felt it best to wait until he was dead. And I hope he is, because I’m now writing this bastard, so if he’s still alive, I’m thinking he’d be too old to murder me.

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After reading this piece, unkind souls might remark this was the absolute nadir of man-swine relationships. I would disagree. Indeed, the sheer emotional and fiscal costs incurred by all parties involved demonstrates quite the opposite. This, in fact, was an apogee in man-swine interactions.

I was fourteen when it happened and almost 16 when it ended. It began with death, death occurred while it was happening, and it ended, rightly, but also a little tragically, with some more death.

But among all that death there was great joy. Not a lot, but now and again in small and very civilised amounts. Did it balance itself all out? Hard to say. There are no rules in these things, and nothing is ever fair – in this life or the next, if there is one.

The hero of this tale is called Pane. That is pronounced “Pah-neh”, because he is Serbian and that is how his name is pronounced. Pane was a skilled engineer and a draughtsman, and he ran his own engineering company. He made good coin and lived with his wife and two young daughters in a very nice house overlooking the water in the Sydney suburb of Putney.

Nice suburb that. I’d lived there myself for a short time. I’d lived there with my best friend, Mark, in what was the worst house in the whole suburb. Which was fine by us, because we were hands down the worst people in that suburb and a few surrounding suburbs as well. Our awfulness was to be expected because we were starting to get seriously involved with an outlaw motorcycle club, so no-one liked us and we did not care. Our landlord, a nice young Italian bloke whose father had bought him this shitty house in a great suburb as an investment, was too scared to evict us. The one time he’d felt he should have a word, Mark said we would plant drugs in his car and call the cops if he kept paying attention to the neighbours’ complaints. It was an empty threat. We did not have near enough the drugs to waste planting on someone, and the only way we could have gotten into his car was by breaking a window, and that would have looked very suspicious when the cops came to investigate.

The house Mark and I lived was not all that far from where Pane’s house was. But by the time I was living in Putney, he was long gone. And you will soon understand why.

I met Pane when I was a few years younger than 14. It was on my very first hunting trip with my Serbian father and his Serbian war buddies. I wrote about that HERE if you have some need of context.

I liked Pane because he was kinder to me than my father and his friends. I think this was because Pane was in his thirties and my father and his mates were in their fifties. He spoke great English, was smart, funny, and had a lot of time for the wide-eyed tubby kid with glasses out on his first hunting trip. He stank like a corpse in a kimchi barrel, but that was because he ate pretty much nothing but onion, salted bacon fat, and chilli peppers, and farted endlessly.

Like my father and his friends, Pane was also an ex-soldier. He had done his two years national service in the Yugoslav Army, but since there had not been any wars at the time, he’d missed out on seeing what battle was all about. Consequently, he was not able to relate all that much to the half-a-dozen steel-eyed old Nazi-killers who made up my father’s hunting trips.

So, when they all got nostalgic and crazy and started singing the “old songs” with tears running down their faces, Pane would take me out and supervise my target practice. It’s not like he didn’t know the songs. Hell, I knew the songs and I was only eleven. All Serbs know those songs. We learn them via the mother’s milk we suckle on as babes. Thing is, those songs take on a different meaning for the actual soldiers who fought in the wars.

Anyway, by the time I was 14, I considered Pane a friend, even though he was way the hell older than me. But the older I got, the closer he and I got. I ended up being friends with him way into my early twenties. I even worked for him for a while as a draughtsman.

But after the terrible events of 1975 and 1976, he was never the same. And soon, you will know why.

The year of 1975 was when we came across a wild sow with a new litter of piglets. We were hunting in the vast swamps and wetlands of the Macquarie Marshes, and the hunting there was always good. It was especially good that year.

All of us would take the pork we had killed and butchered back to our families. And Serbs, in case you didn’t know, love pork. My people are some of the greatest pig farmers on earth. We take our pigs very seriously. We even went to war with the hated Austro-Hungarians over our pigs in 1906. The vile proto-Nazis imposed a customs blockade on our little country. We therefore had to kill a bunch of them, and some nosey Bulgars, before they all came to their senses. It lasted for two years, and considering what came not long after that – the two Balkan wars and WWI – the Serbs have always felt they simply didn’t kill enough Austro-Hungarians back in 1906.

Anyway, someone shot this sow, and her piglets all ran around their mother, squealing. They were very young, and from what I understood by the enthusiasm with which I was yelled at, quite delicious. So, fuck my mother, I had best set about catching as many of them as I could. I caught one by falling on it. It was about the size of a silky terrier, but covered in very coarse black hair. It was also almost as strong as I was, and very vocal. I was laying on top of it, and it was kicking and squirming and squealing, and then it started to bite me.

Now we were both squealing and squirming, and if Pane hadn’t grabbed it by the back leg and pulled it out from under me, it would have run off, likely with a chunk of my belly in its mouth. Then there would have been a lot more discussion about fucking my mother, fucking the sun that shone on me, fucking my blood, fucking my dumbness, and so on. If you’re not familiar with Serbian swearing, you should check it out. It’s pretty fucking awesome.

Pane and the others admired the squirming piglet, announced it was a male, then shoved it into a hessian bag and made me carry it back to camp. This was not too bad, because it calmed down inside the bag and other than the odd little cloven hoof hitting my spine now and again, it was no great chore. It was just a little weird, as you can imagine.

It was after all this weird stuff, for me, anyway, because I was very new to man-pig interactions, that shit got even weirder. And I mean batshit, moon-howling, slap-your-mamma weirder…

We left for home the following morning, an epic fourteen-hour drive. I can now ride the same distance in less than six. You might need to read the aforementioned piece on my first hunting trip to understand why it took so long back then. The only reason I am even bringing the drive-time into all this was because the piglet was under my feet the entire time. In the hessian bag, of course. I felt very sorry for it because I was a child. But I also understood that it was slated for Pane’s dinner table in the near future.

Have you ever eaten young pork? You should try it. It’s quite incredibly delicious when spit-roasted over coals by someone who has mastered this skill.

This spit-roasting was discussed in detail the night before we left. The piglet was in its hessian bag, silent and not moving around all that much, and it would have heard what its future held. Pretty basic, really. Pane would bring the piglet home, feed it wondrous food designed to make it fatter and even more delicious, rid it of any parasites, then, at the appropriate time, cut its throat, sear off all its coarse black hair, spit-roast it, and invite us all over for a feast.

My opinions and feelings about all of this were not under any consideration at all. The piglet travelled with me in the back of the car, it on the floor in the sack under my feet, as I sat on the seat with the now traditional wooden orange-crate full of things Pane, my father, and the driver Sima, would like to eat as we traveled – so salted bacon fat, onions, salami, chilli peppers, tomatoes, and bread. I was also welcome to eat as and when I felt like it, and given this was my sixth hunting trip, I was getting pretty used to these unique munchies. I adore salted pig-fat (or slanina as the Serbs call it) to this day.

I may have been young, but I was not a naïve kid when it came to understanding where my food came from. I had seen animal slaughter, engaged it in myself, and even learned how to butcher meat at a very early age. I was not at all squeamish, and I harboured no cutesy animal-rights ideologies when it came to food-animals.

So, the bag full of piglet under my feet for fourteen hours was nothing more than an ongoing physical discomfort for me, rather than a conscience-eating morality crusade. The animal had of course pissed and shit itself several times, so it smelled pretty bad – the urine stank more than the scat – and when I did make an inquiry about maybe watering it, I was told feral pigs are among the hardiest animals on this earth and can go several days without food or water. I was also told to consider how such a thing could be accomplished on the side of the road with a wild animal that would immediately try to escape the second it was removed from the sack.

We eventually arrived in Sydney, and dropped Pane and his piglet off at his home in Putney, and I very quickly forgot all about it. Weeks and months went by and no invitation for a spit-roast came from Pane.

I remember asking my father if he knew anything about this, but he just shrugged and went about his business.

Some six months after this, the men began to plan another hunting trip and my father called Pane to tell him to make preparations. And he asked him about the piglet. That evening at dinner, he told my mother what Pane had told him.

“Pane has gone mad,” he said. “Completely. He has decided he wants to keep the piglet. His two daughters like it and play with it. His wife goes out and pats it. He has built it a pen and a little house, and he lets it come into his home.”

My mother absorbed this information. “Maybe he wants to fatten it up more and when it is bigger he will kill it and eat it,” she said.

“I asked him that,” my father replied. “He said that was totally out of the question. The piglet was now a pet, and he could no more eat it than we could eat our dog. So he’s gone mad. Is there any more soup?”

About a month later, my family went to visit Pane. Serbs often visit each other without calling ahead. It’s what they have always done, and it’s no big deal. It’s just how they roll.

I think what drove this particular visit was Pane’s madness. My old man simply had to see for himself how mad he was and if indeed the piglet was a family pet.

And it was. But it was no longer a piglet. It was now a pig and it was huge. Actually, it was more than a pig. It was a fucking razorback. If you didn’t know, this is the term Australians use to describe their male feral pigs, and it refers to the hair-covered hump that sits behind the male pig’s enormous, tusk-filled head. Sows can be bigger than razorbacks and sometimes more aggressive, but on a bad day, a couch-sized razorback is an evil-minded locomotive of hairy aggression.

“Cunt of your mother,” my father said gently in Serbian as he stared at the vast feral pig rooting around in what was once a very ordered garden. “You are completely insane.” The term he used was actually “Ti si skroz po-pizdeo” which vaguely translates as “You are totally en-cunted”, which means gone mad. Like I said, Serbian swearing is a treasure and a linguistic gift to the world.

Pane would have none of that. He just laughed and gazed benevolently at the pig, which was now looking at us looking at him. It had tusks.

“Misha!” my mum spat. “Take us home!” Then she went inside and dragged me with her. Dad also came inside while Pane went over to his pig, squatted down and was scratching it behind the ears. The pig looked very pleased with itself and nuzzled him.

Pane’s family was not home. He had mentioned this to us when we arrived unannounced, but then he immediately led us outside to meet “Svinja”, which is what he named it and which means “pig” in Serbian.

My old man was aghast. He kept muttering about how Pane was clearly insane, and how that pig would turn on him and shred him, then murder his wife and children. It had already largely demolished his backyard, which was once a wonderfully organised series of vegetable beds and fruit trees. Now it looked like it had been excavated by meth-freaks digging for treasure.

Word got around to our Serbian friends and many more went to meet Svinja and Pane. This went on for a few months and then things got worse.

Pane’s wife left him. She was apparently able to tolerate the ever-growing razorback menace in her backyard, but when Pane invited it into the house and it took to sleeping on her beautiful leather couch, and following her from room to room, she took her daughters and left.

Pane was upset. He told my father he was upset. My father told him to stop being a madman, slaughter the pig, his family would return, and we would all laugh about his mental instability as time went past.

But Pane was having none of that. He loved Svinja. He explained Svinja was smart – and pigs are smarter than many dogs, so he wasn’t lying – and could do all sorts of tricks. He had taught it to sit, to lay down, and to roll over, but said he was struggling to teach it to beg because pig anatomy worked against such acrobatics. It would come when he called and it would curl up beside him on the couch when he watched TV. He swore it wasn’t at all destructive, just clumsy. So, he explained, there was no malice in Svinja’s porcine heart.

More time passed. Svinja had now been Pane’s adored pet for almost a year-and-a-half, and it was essentially fully grown. I went with my dad to see it. Mum only gave me permission if I swore to stay inside and looked at it through the window. I readily agreed.

Things had clearly changed in Pane’s house. We saw this the moment we arrived. Much of the furniture was gone, and Pane had put a big double-bed mattress in the middle of the lounge room so Svinja no longer had to climb onto the shredded-by-cloven-hooves couch. Pane had thrown blankets over it, but you could see the ruined and torn leather the blankets did not cover.

“Do not let that thing inside while we are here,” my father said to him when we arrived.

“It’s OK,” Pane said. “Svinja likes people. He wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Leave it outside!” my father barked at him. “You let it in and I will shoot it and you.”

Pane grudgingly agreed and we went to look at Svinja through the back window. The yard was even more destroyed than before. There were now two wallows and everything was basically piles of dirt and tracks where Svinja would walk. I saw the wooden-paling fence had been braced with steel poles.

“He has tried to get out a few times,” Pane smiled. “I think he’s looking for company.”

Right then, Svinja was looking at us. Pigs have great hearing, so he had no problem hearing us through the glass. In fact, given the sheer size of him, he seemed to have no problems doing pretty much anything he fucken pleased. And he was huge. My father guessed him to be some two-metres long, about a metre high at the shoulder, and his tusks could be seen from space. Pane agreed he was close to 270kg.

“Look at how beautiful he is!” he beamed.

Svinja did not look at all beautiful to me. He looked dangerous as fuck. I had encountered razorbacks in the wild and they usually run away. Unless they decide not to for whatever reason. In which case they stand pretty much like Svinja was standing, and prance around a bit on their legs making hate-circles. But their enormous, tusk-spiked heads are always pointed at you.

And their heads are huge. Their skulls are so thick small-calibre rounds sometimes don’t penetrate. We would hunt them with big calibre guns and 12-gauges full of SG cartridges or solid balls. Even then, they sometimes proved hard to bring down if you didn’t hit them in the sweet spot.

The only difference I could see between wild razorbacks and Svinja, was that Svinja was really well groomed and clean. Pane washed him all the time – he had to because the bastard loved to wallow in the mud-holes Pane would keep filled with water from the hose. And since Svinja was allowed inside (I wasn’t actually sure how you could stop him going inside), Pane was pretty much bathing him on a daily basis.

Pane went outside and Svinja trotted up to him, and they nuzzled and hugged for a while. I was tempted to go outside, but my father had a vice-like grip on my arm and was standing in front of the closed door.

We left shortly after Pane came back inside and he and my father exchanged some hissed and rather angry words. My father did not speak to me on the way home, consumed by his own thoughts. He was no doubt wondering how to deal with a friend who was manifestly crazier than a box of bats, and liked cuddling up with a full-grown razorback.

But like all insurmountable problems, this one eventually solved itself.

Svinja got out. The work Pane had done on the fence was simply insufficient. Nothing short of some proper zoo fencing and maybe a moat could have stopped Svinja. So he got out, and went a-wandering through Putney. Pane later explained Svinja had not gone very far. Just down to the nearby park, where people take their kids and dogs. Three dead dogs, and a bunch of horrified Putny residents later, the police showed up, having followed Svinja back to Pane’s house.

I was told later something like a siege took place. Pane and Svinja were in the house, and the cops were outside the house. They wanted to come in and shoot Svinja, and Pane was not good with that, so there was a lot of yelling, much of it in Serbian. This was probably just as well, because the cops may well have shot Pane along with Svinja after he’d spent an hour or so telling them just how many of their mothers all needed fucking.

In the end, Pane shot Svinja himself. He told me later it was the best outcome, because the cops would not listen to reason, and he did not want them trying to kill his pet with their .38s. They were all shit shots, he explained, and would not have done it quickly or neatly. So, Pane took it upon himself to put a 30.30 round in behind Svinja’s ear.

Yes, of course he was arrested and charged. And Svinja’s corpse was hauled off to be disposed of. All the neighbours came out to watch, and I think it even made the local papers the following day.

Pane was heartbroken. He had to pay a bunch of fines, which he was alright about because he had money, but he was really grieving over his beloved Svinja. He did get over it, because people get over much worse things than putting a bullet into the head of a full-grown razorback they were very fond of.

A few months later, we went on another hunting trip. We shot many feral pigs. But this time, we were the only creatures that came home alive.

As a somewhat legit author, I get off on not only writing books, but selling them. It’s almost the same buzz. But the former feeds my ego, while the later feeds my family. It’s not at all like begging, which basically relies on you feeling good about giving a poor person some of your money.

While I am not exactly poor, I ain’t exactly Stephen King either. So you will not get the same feel-good rush if you give me money. You will, however, get a different feel-good rush if you buy one or all of my books and read them. And it will be an exchange, rather than a simple act of charity.

I get your money, you get my books. And, hopefully, some deal of enjoyment from them.

There are four of the wretched things. The first two were published By Hachette Australia, and I was very happy with that, but soon realised that getting ten per cent of the cover-price meant I would have to sell millions to be remotely wealthy, and that would not happen because not that many people can read in Australia.

The following two books I self-published. Once I paid off the printer, what I made was all mine. But I did not have access to the bookshops a worldwide publisher has, and Amazon has way too much of the robber baron about it for me to want to contribute to the Bezos family trust. So that was a struggle too.

Thus, I sell the books where and when I can, online and at various events I go to.

And now on Substack, I guess.

Please buy them. It feeds my family.

This was my first book. It concerns the riding of motorcycles and what happens when that riding takes place. There are sweary words, terrible deeds, and poor outcomes.

I bought the leftovers from the warehouse and you can now buy them directly from me because that is how free market capitalism works. And if you buy them from me, I make more money than if you buy them from somewhere else, which will be hard because most places have run out of stock. I will of course sign each copy, because that will devalue your purchase and cause resentment.

Still, you should enjoy it. Other people apparently have.

‘Boris has more fun on two wheels than should be legally possible…’ – Richard Fidler, ABC

‘Mihailovic uses humour like most people would use their fists.’ – Courier Mail

‘His love of motorcycling, mateship and frequent, subsequent mayhem is matched by a natural writing ability that graphically, often hilariously, brings to life the two-wheeled experiences that have shaped his life… Highly recommended.’ – 4 X 4 Magazine

‘There is no requirement to love everything on two wheels to enjoy this book but it would seriously help, as our resident bike nut said about Boris: “This guy lives and breathes motorbikes. He’s the epitome of two-wheel freedom.’ – Mining Chronicle

‘I couldn’t put this book down, was a laugh on every page. Brilliantly written of stories from childhood to adulthood that every biker should read and even those who are not into bikes.’- David James

‘Do we have enough police dogs for him?’ - Victoria Police

This was the second book. You can read it before you read the first book. It won’t matter. They’re not like Game of Thrones.

This one is also filled with terrible tales of motorcycling catastrophes, swearing, blasphemy, poo, and dark deeds. Some say it is darker than my first book, but I think they’re only referring to the cover.

I feel you will enjoy this as much as you enjoyed the first one, or maybe less. Or maybe more. It’s hard to pin down. It’s also hard to get, like the first one, but I have a few I can sell you, which I will sign whether you want me to or not.

Others have enjoyed this one too.

‘A pulse-pounding, white-knuckle ride’ – PEOPLE MAGAZINE

‘Laugh-out-loud funny . . . compelling’ – TraderMotorcycles.com.au

‘Will delight the motorbike-mad dad’ – TAKE 5’

‘Couched in beautiful Australiana, Boris’ book is an exploration of a life that most of us would never dare to live. Boris describes one of his sharehouses as being “a cross between a Marxist utopia and a pirate ship,” but it may as well be a description of the entire book. Boris writes like a more abrasive Hunter S. Thompson.’ – Aden Dale GOODREADS

‘Needs to be jailed and shot. Now.’ NSW Police Force

And this is book three. It’s fatter than the first two because it has more words in it and the pages are thicker, and I even got it illustrated if people wanted to get something they could colour-in.

You will never read a funnier or more honest journey than the one I hopefully take you on here.

Apart from the expected tales of terrifying misdeeds, motorcycling bastardry, and a profound and general degeneracy, you will join the me on a most amazing motorcycle journey through the Balkans – the land of my forefathers.

I travel through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia, examining the bones of my ancestors, and search deep inside myself for redemption and absolution, all the while trying not to be murdered by Magyar killers, or riding off a Bosnian mountain.

People kept insisting I write a third book and this is what they got for pestering me so much.

‘Just get on the ground, dickhead!’ Queensland Police Force

And finally, what is manifestly the most important book ever written.

This time I involved my beautiful wife.

SH!T MY WIFE SAYS began as a bit of a laugh on my social feeds, but soon attracted a huge audience clamouring for “More Lynette!” and demanding a book be written, which would properly immortalise her wisdom.

I told Lynette about this.

She told me to stop being an idiot, and write instead about what I knew – which was being a fool on motorcycles. Surely no-one would be interested in listening in on our marital exchanges.

But I wrote the book anyway. I understand it’s always better to beg forgiveness than to seek permission.

What happens next is entirely up to you.

Hopefully, you’ll buy the book, enjoy it, and tell your friends. And maybe they’ll buy a copy, and so on.

Things is, if enough people buy a copy, then I will only be encouraged to write another one, and nothing good can possibly ever come of that, as you’d know if you’ve read any of my other stuff.

Please note, SH!T MY WIFE SAYS is not a marriage guidance manual. So don’t buy it thinking it will fix shit. If anything, it may make everything much worse.

And do not let your missus read it. Ever.

No, seriously, don’t.

YOU CAN BUY ANY OR ALL OF THEM HERE

https://www.shocknawe.com.au/

And I apologise in advance for the cost of postage from Australia to anywhere else on earth. You seen where we are? For fuck’s sake, we’re lucky planes even fly here. Australia Post is very good (usually) and it does deliver. It just charges like it means business. So, sorry about that. Happily, all prices are in Australian dollars, and our currency is largely garbage, so you may see this as a bargain.

When was the last time you sat in front of a fire?

I don’t mean that fire you might have in your house, all nicely contained in a steel box or surmounted by a mantlepiece. I mean a proper fire. Out in the bush somewhere.

I’ll make an educated guess and say a disturbing amount of you will reply: “I can’t remember.” And an even more disturbing amount of you will say: “Never”.

Tsk, tsk, tsk. Sucks to be fucken you, then.

You are depriving yourself of what is the greatest and simultaneously the simplest thing anyone can ever experience. And it is such a simple thing. A fire, with wood you have gathered, burning somewhere which is an appreciable distance from civilisation.

“What’s the big deal?” say the ones who have never done it. “Bloody fires. Smoke, flames, sparks, coals. You have to go and get the wood, for fuck’s sake! Fuck that for a game of soldiers. Why bother? If you’re cold just turn on the air-con.”

It’s not about being cold, though nothing warms you like a fire.

It’s about the fire. And you sitting in front of it and staring into the flames. It’s about tending it. It’s about walking away from its indescribable pull and getting more wood. And then coming back to its indecipherable comfort and blessing.

Fire is something forever ingrained in our genetic memory. Obviously for all the reasons you already know. Back in the day, it warmed us. It kept predators away. It allowed us to cook our food. And maybe, most crucially, it allowed us to relax a little from the stresses of surviving in a world that spent all of its time trying to murder us. So our brains got bigger.

I know, I know. Those days are long gone. We now have electricity. And I’m a fan. Love that shit. We have western civilisation – the best civilisation we are told – and it’s been quite some time since we had to fight a bear in the mouth of the family cave with nothing but a sharp stick. It’s also been a while since your neighbour could come and take your wife, kids, berries, and dried meat for himself, make a necklace out of your teeth and eat your heart.

And that is a good thing. No argument.

But just because the world is not like that anymore does not mean fire has lost its magic. That magic cannot ever be lost. It is too deeply ingrained in every one of us. We have just forgotten about it. Not all of us, of course, but far too many of us.

Our lives no longer depend on fire, so what purpose does it serve?

The night is no longer dark and full of terrors like George RR Martin felt it was when he sent the Red Woman to rub her boobs all over Stanis Baratheon’s face and talk him into burning his daughter to death to please the Lord of Light in Game of Thrones.

But yet it is.

Calm down. I know Game of Thrones is a work of fiction. Things is, humans have been worshipping fire ever since we worked out how to make it.

Because back then, the fucking night was fucking dark and full of very real fucking terrors.

And it was only our ability to make fire that unfucked all of this.

Fire has been at the centre of almost every pre-Christian religion (and still remains part of Christian tradition), and part of every society on earth. From the Stone Age until we got this electricity business sorted out between 1920 and 1960.

For the preceding million-odd years we just had fire. There is evidence we used fire that long ago, and there is more evidence we were able to actually make fire some 700,000 years ago. That is how long it has been an indivisible part of us being human, growing bigger brains, and conquering the planet.

Fire is the single most important human technological breakthrough. Full stop.

And to sit in front of a fire, somewhere in a dark forest, a lonely hilltop, or a trackless wasteland, and stare into the flames is the one single most wonderful, satisfying, and uplifting thing a human can ever do.

Go do it. It’s not that hard.

I could be wrong, which does happen, and there may well be a rider somewhere who is still more glorious than this bloke. But I somehow doubt it. This bloke is…well, he’s elemental in his pure, unhinged motorcycleness.

You all understand how YouTube works, right? You watch something, the algorithm then makes suggestions you also might like to watch. Which is how I found Mad Max, the Road Warrior.

He is from Russia, and lives in town called Bogorodsk. I think he was about 20 when he made the series of videos four years ago that so captivated me. Those videos have had millions of views, and he has close to 40,000 subscribers on his channel, Road Warrior.

I hope you will shortly understand why that is so. I sure do.

So, Max inherited a bike from his father. But not just any bike. He inherited an IZh Planeta. And it is entirely possible that if you don’t live in Russia, you’d not have heard of this marque.

Even pronouncing it is difficult for western tongues. Let me attempt to walk you through it. In Cyrillic it is written thus: “ИЖ”. The backward N is an I, and the thing that looks like a beetle is the ZH sound. The closest English equivalent is if you try to pronounce the word “shit” but swap the s for a z.

The Soviet Union created the IZh in 1929. And by the time it had ceased production in 2008, more than 10 million bikes had come out of the Izhevsk Machine-Building Plant – which is now known by a name you will recognise, Kalashnikov.

The bike Max inherited from his father was a 1996 model. It was the Planeta (planet), and it was 350cc of single-cylinder two-stroke Soviet nightmare to motorcyclists here in the west who, by 1996, were already riding Honda Fireblades.

The Russian Federation, which inherited the ruins of the Soviet Union, was an economic and social basket case in the Nineties. The reasons for this are well-known to people who follow geo-politics, and not within the scope of this piece.

But things were still getting made in the Russian Federation, because things must always get made in countries who have understood that manufacturing is crucial to their existence. But that is also beyond the scope of this piece.

Just know that despite the crazed oligarchs, gangsters who made the Italian Mafia look like mincing love-pooves, rampant alcoholism, and a society that understands and accepts “sacrifice” on a level I hope no-one in the west ever has to, shit was getting made.

Shit like the IZh.

And I very much want to tell you about Max and his IZh. And their utterly astounding journey. And to understand this fully, you first need to know what an IZh is.

To put it kindly, it’s a bucket of shit. No western rider would consider a Soviet-made 350cc two-stroke, making (on a good day) 28bhp, a thing they’d want to ride anywhere, let alone where Max did.

Among Soviet riders, the IZh Planeta had a reputation for poor performance and questionable reliability, and that’s when viewed through stoic, bear-anything Soviet eyes.

The IZh is many things, and it is Max’s world and he loves it, but it is not what you would term a touring motorcycle. Its maximum speed is a shade under 80km/h – if and when you manage to kickstart it. It vibrates like only a single-cylinder two-stroke could, and you couldn’t call it comfortable and be thought sane.

But it is, most importantly, simple, and relatively robust, like a Soviet tractor. Max actually pours two-stroke oil directly into the petrol tank after he fills up…and then usually wheels it off to a corner of the petrol station to either fix it, or pass out after trying to fix it for five hours.

Max himself, from what I have been able to gather, is (or was) a typical Russian teenager living in a big town called Bogorodsk, some 40-odd km from the city of Nizhny Novgorod. Still lost? Nizhny Novgorod is 400-odd km due east of Moscow. I am only telling you this so you will grasp the sheer scope of Max’s journey.

At this point, I’d like you to try and appreciate how vast the Russia Federation is. Here in Australia, we also ride bikes huge distances. We are a continent, after all. But Russia is more than 2.2 times the size of Australia. It has eleven time zones. The Soviet Union was even bigger. The people living there comprehend distance in a different way to Australians, and certainly very differently to how an Englishman or a Frenchman would.

I trust I have set the stage for you.

One day, Max decided he wanted to go on a road-trip on his IZh. He told his parents this, and they tentatively agreed, making him promise he wouldn’t ride too far or take too many risks. He was young, and relatively inexperienced as a motorcyclist. Most of his riding had been on a moped and a small Chinese dirt bike, which he’d bounced along some pleasant tracks near his home.

Max assured his parents he wouldn’t go far, but that he would be gone for a fortnight or so. He didn’t have a lot of money, so how much shit could he possibly get into? His parents were concerned, but 20-year-old boys are gonna do what 20-year-old boys do – and that is to measure themselves against the world. There was no stopping him.

Max, unbeknownst to his parents, had decided he was going to ride to Lake Baikal. Why Lake Baikal? Well, it is the deepest and oldest freshwater lake on earth, holding some 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water – more than all the North American Great Lakes combined. This 30-million-year-old marvel is sacred to the native Buryat people, and locals still implicitly believe Christ himself visited this part of Asia.

It’s worth a ride to see that, for sure.

And Russians all seem to want to visit the lake as some kind of pilgrimage during their lives. Max was no different. He was going to Lake Baikal. On his IZh. In Autumn.

To get there, he would ride more than 5000km. Across the Ural Mountains. Into Western Siberia. Then into Eastern Siberia. On a 350cc two-stroke made by grim-eyed communists fueled by vodka made from potato peelings and hatred of the bourgeoisie.

Remember that Max has fuck-all money. Max has fuck-all mechanical knowledge. Max has fuck-all motorcycle-riding experience. But Max is going to ride 5000km to Lake Baikal on his IZh Planeta. And then back. A trip of more than 10,000km. Fuck, yes! Sound the trumpets!

Max so very much reminds me of myself at that age. Fearless and brainless in equal measure. Like Max, I was cos-playing at being a “biker”. I too had virtually no mechanical knowledge, scant riding skill, and fuck-all money. And I too lied to my sainted mother about what I was planning to do on a motorcycle she was convinced would kill me sooner rather than later.

The fundamental difference between Max and myself is I was not cursed with an IZh. My first bike was an immensely reliable and lovely to ride Yamaha 650. Oh, and I was a committed atheist, whereas Max declares himself an Odinist. He has even scrawled “DIE IN BATTLE OR ON THE ROAD AND GO TO VALHALLA” on his petrol tank and wears a Mjolnir amulet around his neck on a chain as a talisman.

In terms of camera gear, Max has a Chinese Smartphone, and a small Chinese pretend-GoPro affixed to the chin-piece of his helmet. His gear is some no-name leather jacket, a pair of textile pants, some motocross armour, and that’s about it. No microphones, no drones. Nothing a professional motorcycle travel-blogger would normally carry to make his videos. He has a knife, some food, some spare parts, some tools, a blanket, a mat, and a few bits and pieces he might need on his journey. He had thought about what he was going to do, and prepared as best he could, I guess.

In terms of the filming, this was no-budget, bare-arse, amateur stuff. And such shit is normally unwatchable. What makes Max’s work so utterly engaging for me, is his brutal honesty. He exposes his soft and very naïve underbelly throughout the videos. His exclamations, his often-irritating cackles, and his home-spun philosophies are confronting, sometimes banal, sometimes funny, sometimes very informative, sometimes annoying, but always searingly real and honest. And ever so Russian.

He is the ingenue supreme.

At first, as I watched him head east along endless Russian roads (all of which looked very good, especially the major highways he was using), I thought: “Fucken dickhead. He’s gonna crash and die.” He was riding at half the speed everything else on the road was doing. Trucks buzzed him scant centimetres from his handlebars. He was meat-jam, for sure, I thought.

But the countryside via his rider’s POV intrigued me. This was Russia unvarnished and honest.

Still, I felt I would get bored pretty quickly and find something else to watch. I mean, how many times can you watch Max getting passed by everything else on the road? I felt that would get old unless a truck hit him. Shit had to happen to him. It just had to. I kept watching.

Then he broke down. It was some kind of carby issue. He managed to fix it, but not properly. He continued. He broke down again and again. And then some more. Somehow, he always managed to limp onwards to Lake Baikal. His lights failed, his clutch started slipping, his speed was down to 40km/h. The ambient air-temperature dropped to minus-12 at night as he crossed the Ural Mountains.

He did not even realise he was in the mountains because it was the middle of the night. He just knew he was utterly cold – and he told his viewers just that as he held his camera at arm’s length and talked to it on the side of the road. But there was nowhere to stop for the night and rest. He carried on.

And he did big, long hours on the IZh. He had to. Otherwise it would have taken him months to get to Lake Baikal. He would ride 18, 19, 20 hours a day. There were days when he would ride for more than 24.

Sometimes he would sleep in tree-lines some 100-metres off the road, his beloved IZh camouflaged with birch-tree branches, clutching his knife to his chest, and hoping he would not be robbed and killed. One morning he woke up to see a man running towards him. He said it scared him and he prepared to die in battle. The man wanted to know if Max had a knife he could borrow. The man had crashed his truck on the road. The truck had sheep in it. He needed a knife to put some of them out of their misery. Max hesitantly gave him the knife he was openly clutching. The man returned it clean a few minutes later.

He would stop to get petrol and warm himself when he got the opportunity, which was not often. It rained for much of the way. Once, he bought cheap petrol off some bloke in the middle of the night. His IZh and that petrol did not get on. He managed to limp to the next petrol station at walking pace and dumped whatever potato-juice he’d bought on the cheap, replacing it with proper petrol. The IZh limped on, with only parking lights.

I was astonished. How was he carrying on? It was 2am. He was wet. He was beyond cold. He could not ride much over 60km/h. Trucks were missing him by centimetres. He would have to stop every 30 or 40km and fiddle with his clutch or his carby. He had no phone reception.

But he had resolve. He was going to Lake Baikal.

I feel the Road Gods took pity on him. They must have. Because Max, shaking with cold, met a bloke in a petrol station one evening around midnight. An older bike-rider, who looked at Max like people look at people who eat dirt and play with their penises in public.

He asked where Max was from. Max told him. “That’s 2000km away…” the man said. Then he asked Max where he was going. Max said he was off to Lake Baikal. “That’s 3000km in that direction,” the man said. Max agreed that it was.

“Look,” the bloke said. “There’s a Bike Post in the next town. Why don’t you follow me there and rest up? They can help you fix your bike, and they will feed you.”

Max, like me, had no idea such things as Bike Posts existed in Russia. And what a magnificent thing they are in a country as vast and harsh as that.

Bike Posts are places run by local bike clubs, and there are a lot of bike clubs in Russia. These are not outlaw clubs – though there are those in Russia too. These are just groups of local riders who form loose-knit clubs and if they can, open a Bike Post. It’s usually an old, abandoned building, which is tidied up, and offers hospitality to passing motorcyclists. For free. Free food, free drink, and free lodging. It’s not flash, but when it’s 2am, minus-12, and your lightless IZh is limping along at 20km/h past the village of Yurgamysh, it is pure salvation.

At one of these Bike Posts, Max lucked onto a bloke who was a mechanic who restored old Soviet bikes. This bloke fixed Max’s carby (temporarily), got him some new clutch plates and rebuilt his clutch, fitted a new LED headlight to it from a Lada, and fitted a screen and hand-guards to the IZh. This took two days and the bloke hosted Max in his house the whole time and refused money Max offered to pay him for the parts and work.

“One day,” the man said, “I may be broken down somewhere and I will need someone to help me. I believe in Karma. Have a great trip. Go with God.”

These Bike Posts, and the kindness of strangers and fellow bike riders is what ultimately carried Max through to Lake Baikal.

And he did get there – mad-eyed and fey. But then he struggled to leave.

Local legend has it you must throw a coin into Father Baikal. Otherwise, he will not permit you to leave. Max did not throw a coin into the icy waters, because Max was not aware of this tradition. So Max did not leave Lake Baikal.

He got himself stranded about 20km out of Irkutsk, the city that sits on the Angara River that flows into the lake. It was two am, it was insanely cold, and his IZh had ceased to proceed. This was the first time he actually looked concerned. I don’t blame him. It was a tough spot he was in. So he contacted his girlfriend. As you do when you’re that age. You seek some long-distance comfort. You want to share with her your whole road-warrior against-the-odds bullshit you’ve been telling yourself for 5000km.

She dumps him. On the phone. Via text.

Max loses his shit. He has a frozen, bike-dead, total-darkness meltdown. It’s searing in its naked honesty.

Somehow, the following day, Max limp-rides back to the shores of Lake Baikal and chucks a bunch of coins into the water. He understands the lake will now permit him to leave.

So he does. His adventures continue for another 5000km, but they are coloured and flavoured by his girlfriend dumping him. He rides on, long, rain and wind-blasted hours astride the biggest bastard motorcycle there is. Long-term IZh owners say the bikes are actually sentient creatures. They don’t speak, but they make their intentions clear when they decide you need to know shit.

He makes it home. Of course he does. His IZh manages.

I found Max’s vlog captivating. You may not. It’s hard…well, tedious at times to watch because it’s not glossy or well-produced and the auto-translate YouTube provides can be hit and miss. You will get the idea, but you will certainly miss out on the “Russian-ness” of Max’s emotional journey.

And that is a thing. Russians…well, Slavs in general are just like everyone else. Only more so. And that’s what makes them different, if you get my meaning. It’s hard to explain. My fellow Slavs will understand. The rest of you might well not. That’s fine. I’m just letting you know our inner frequencies are not yours.

I saw much of myself in Max. I think that’s what hooked me on his videos. I have changed much and much over the decades and millions of kilometres. We all do. As will Max. The Road Gods make damn sure of that.

May they watch over Max – and all of us on our travels.

ADDENDUM

Max made a few more videos after his Baikal trip. His most intriguing one was his trip from Bogorodsk to Crimea, via the Donbas. In 2024. During the war. Dressed in military camo and a tactical vest with a big knife in the chest-scabbard of the vest. His cos-playing had obviously reached new heights and I started to think he might be on some autism spectrum.

How did that trip go for him? Well, you’d have to ask him, and the Russian army. But yes, his evil IZh once again made it there and back. And I’m a fan.

This is a legitimate question.

I shall rephrase it for the lame of mind.

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Where the bastard fuck are all the tits that once were everywhere, but have now disappeared into some vacuum-sealed shit-funnel of Femo-Jesus puritanism?

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, girls were quite enthusiastic about taking off their tops and letting their boobs shine in the sun.

Our beaches were full of boobs. Our parties were boob-a-paloozas. Every girlfriend I had, and every girlfriend my mates had, would take off her top at every opportunity, and the world continued to revolve upon its axis as if nothing all that much had happened.

I think this is because nothing all that much HAD happened. A girl took her top off. Her boobs were out. It was common. It was normal. No-one lost their mind. No-one confected outrage about it. And even the bra-burning Feminists were on-board with the whole boobs-out paradigm.

It was no big deal. But then it became a big deal. Magazines which celebrated the naked female form were pilloried for promoting rape culture and objectifying women.

And Australia became a strange and worrisome place.

So let me try and unpack this strange and worrisome place.

In this place, outrage rules, everyone feels they are entitled to an opinion no matter how inane and uninformed that opinion is, and what was once viewed as perfectly normal, is now something that will have you charged, fingerprinted, and arraigned before a judge.

Now I get all this “objectifying of women” thing everyone is championing in this new place. I agree with it. I do not think women should be viewed or judged solely as sex-objects, and I’m woke enough to understand that a person’s looks (male or female) are not an indication of their worth as a human being.

And I know this because a large part of my professional working life was concerned with finding objectively stunning women who were happy to take their clothes off for money, and putting the one I felt was the most attractive, on the cover of a magazine.

The girls were all very keen to do this. They were all invariably proud of their appearance, worked hard at maintaining it, and felt the money they were being paid was reasonable. They were very comfortable in their skins, as it were. And yes, they knew full well that their images titillated men.

The whole thing actually empowered them. Does that surprise you?

Guess you’ve never been to a strip show, huh?

Who do you think is the most empowered at a strip-show? Is it the gorgeous young lady dancing on the stage while blokes throw money at her? Or is it the sad male yutz who has volunteered to be part of the show, is placed on a chair, and treated to a lap-dance which ends with him being smeared with shaving cream, while he searches for his pants which the stripper took off him and threw into the audience?

Who is in charge in that scenario?

Strippers are some of the most empowered women you will ever meet. They are not prostitutes or sluts. They are strippers. You can’t pay them for sex. You pay them to dance naked.

And there were lots of them in the 80s and 90s. There were also lots of girls who were not strippers, but made a great living as glamour models. There were also a lot of girls who felt they had what it took to do a photo-shoot for a magazine. Some did it once. Some did it lots of times and made lots of money.

There was never any shortage of girls who would contact the magazine and ask to be a centrefold.

This magazine, interestingly, was the biggest-selling men’s weekly magazine in the country at the time. Some 100,000 copies per week. It had shrunk from its best-ever figure of 270,000 per week, but when I sat down in the editor’s chair, I managed to keep it limping at 100,000 for a few issues. But the sales decline was irresistible.

This decline was entirely due to the advent of the Internet. It had nothing to do with changing social mores. Men just figured it was cheaper, easier, and less hassle to look at pictures of naked girls on their phones than it was to go and buy a magazine.

Sure, there was the ever-present screeching from the Christian Right and an assortment of feminist ideologues about how naked girls, and the male viewing of them, is the downfall of society, but that has always been there.

And it has always been rightfully ignored as the lamentations of idiots.

In societies far more advanced than ours, naked girls are not pilloried and reviled, nor are the men who look at their images. In societies less advanced than ours, homosexuals are thrown off buildings, and unveiled women are considered as “meat”. Australia, as it happens, is somewhere between these two places.

And in that in-between place, I was labelled a pornographer and a promoter of rape culture. The creatures doing the labeling would never have been considered for a cover or a centrefold, but they felt they were doing their bit for the Sisterhood by defaming me, and people like me. Their outraged ignorance guided them in this endeavour. But they were indeed ignorant.

Nothing I ever published could be defined by any objective measure as “pornography”. Pictures of naked girls are not pornography per se.

As to how such images promoted rape culture is premised upon the view that rape culture actually exists. But what is it?

Well, it’s defined as this:

“Rape Culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture.”

So the view here is that rape is widespread and normal in Australian society, and the Australian media is very cool with the beating and raping Australian women – most especially media which shows pictures of pretty girls with their clothes off.

I struggle to understand the logic that was used to arrive at this view. I think that’s because no logic was used at all.

But that ship has sailed. And despite the fact that now, anyone, including children, who has access to a mobile phone, can easily view images and videos which even my old sparring partner, the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), would refuse to classify because it involves goats and screaming – and there are no more magazines with pictures of naked girls in them.

But there is all that and much more on the Internet.

There are, however, no more boobs being displayed in public.

And, like I said, no-one seemed to give all that much of a shit when that did happen.

Europe, the cradle of Western Civilisation, still lives in this boobular paradigm. The Europeans are not weird about naked boobs – even the puritanical Catholic ones. Only we’re weird about naked boobs – well, we have BECOME weird about naked boobs. The Yanks have always been weird about naked boobs, but since they’re like a Christian Taliban when it comes to puritanical morality, it stands to reason.

So what the Hell happened to us?

Certainly, the rise of the Christian Right has a lot to do with it. Ironically, it is aided and abetted by militant feminism, whose members don’t seem to understand their Christian allies want nothing more for them than pregnancy and potato-peeling in a nice kitchen somewhere.

Australia has become weirder and weirder about displays of female nudity. Creepier and creepier. There seems to be this view that women who display their boobs are sluts, or are being forced to do so by the patriarchy, or are crying out for help, or all of the above.

And the men who look at these boobs, either in pictures or in real life, are rapists, misogynists, perverts, or all of the above.

All of that is utter bullshit.

Surely you can understand why it is bullshit?

It cannot be anything else.

But this bullshit seems to sit comfortably within the new Australian psyche.

And this new psyche is very disturbing.

Much more so than a pair of boobs.

A real, honest-to-hellness, smash my inside goop and smear me like red-meat porridge while I scream, fun-park ride.

How is such a thing even possible, you ask?

Hell, pilgrim. It’s more than possible. All you have to do is buy yourself a 2026 Harley-Davidson Street Glide Three, and there you have it. Your very own, rock-my-kiddie-memories-like-a-hurricane fun-park ride.

Just climb on, press the starter button, and head for your favourite corners. No standing in line. No tickets to buy. No dirty carny putting his hands on you and stinking of whiskey. You don’t even have to share the experience with anyone. The Street Glide Three is your personal fun-park ride.

What a time to be alive, huh?

And guess what? It just gets better. You don’t even have to know how to ride a motorcycle. Because the Street Glide Three is not a motorcycle. It is a trike. No motorcycle-riding knowledge is required.

You don’t have to balance it, or put your feet down when you stop, or worry about losing the front-end, or ponder the magnificent physics of counter-steering and the lateral grip your tyres generate when you arc into a corner.

You wanna go left? Just lever the handlebars left. And vice-versa.

But if you’re a newcomer to this, just prepare yourself for when you do that, OK? In all likelihood, the first time you steer hard into a corner, you will be flung off the bike and the vehicle behind you will run over you. This is not a good thing.

However, it will only happen if you are not prepared for the physics that will assail you when you turn hard into a corner. As you steer into the corner, your body will feel as if it’s being pushed away from the corner. And the harder (and obviously faster) you steer into that bend, the harder that push will be.

Here’s the added bonus. Pushing a trike hard through corners is a complete upper body work out. It is way more physical than riding a bike where you’re counter-steering into corners. On a trike, after a long series of corners taken with a will, you will feel like you’ve wrestled a bear.

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And if you’re a motorcycle rider, and you’re new to trikes, then those corners will feel awkward and you may well become terrified. And because you cannot think clearly when you are terrified, you will become irrational.

And your irrationality will be fed by your awkwardness. Stay at it. There is a reward. Cornering a trike is not at all like cornering a bike. You are not “one” with the machine. You are on a carnival ride, but no smelly carny has slammed a safety harness across you. You’re just hanging on with your arms.

One of those ams will be completely bent and that one will be holding the end of the handlebar just in front of your shoulder. Your other arm will be fully extended and death-gripping that end of the handlebar. This will make clutch, brake, and throttle operation very exciting and new if you’re a bike rider. So, best you get all that brake/throttle/clutch done before you steer into the corner.

Trust me. You will work it out. You have to. Or you will die. I am fairly sure you can kinda high-side the Street Glide. Which would be such a spectacular event, they’d build a memorial plaque where it happened, and someone would write a country song about it.

But you will die knowing Charles Darwin was right, so that’s a good thing. Adapt. Adjust. Do not for even split-second forget you’re not on a motorcycle, and you will work it out.

And when you do, you will know that the Street Glide Three is the greatest fun-park ride you’ll ever take.

Arguably the best infotainment system and dash on the market.[/caption]

I was one of those kids who loved fun-park rides. Of course, I did not like them when I first saw them. They terrified me. People were screaming. Clearly the happy lights and bright colours were just a trap to get stupid fools to board these spinning, whirling, swooshing horrors.

It was not until I actually took a ride that I understood. And then I was hooked.

One of my parents, probably my father because it would have been unlikely my sainted mum would have been involved, bought me a ticket and put me on a ride called the Octopus.

The Octopus was one of those rides where you sit in a steel tub which lives on the end of a long steel arm. There are eight of these steel arms with eight steel buckets. It’s like a giant spoked wheel. And like a wheel, it all spins around a central axis. Unlike a wheel, the arms also go up and down. And the tubs at the end of the steel arms also spin, randomly.

The people in the tubs are merely sacrifices to the laws of physics governing centrifugal force.

I was a child. I knew nothing of any forces save my father’s calloused right hand. And I was terrified when I climbed into the steel tub. My terror increased as the Octopus picked up speed and then the tub started going up and down at the end of the steel arm and spinning as well. Centrifugal force wedged my podgy kid-jelly hard against the hard edge of the tub. My vision was blurred. Other kids were screaming and gripping the safety rail preventing us all being flung into the watching crowd. I was not screaming. And I was not hanging on. I was suddenly far too delighted with what the laws of physics were inflicting upon me. This was the most awesome thing ever!

The ride ended far too soon, and I begged my father to let me go again. He agreed. I went three more times and would have gone more, but my father was now concerned I had become mentally damaged and took me home.

I have loved that kind of action ever since. Which is why I actually love trikes. I don’t love them like I love bikes, because they aren’t bikes. I love them because they are carnival rides. And that makes them magnificent fun.

Last year, before Harley fixed the suspension, its trike range was also fun to ride. But in a different way. A more frightening, spine-powdering, why-are-you-doing-that? kind of way. The suspension had very little travel, and any encounters with bumps, especially mid-corner, would provide excitement you had not signed up for.

Neat little storage bin, and crucially, highway pegs.[/caption]

This year, the trike range has had a complete re-vamp of its rear suspension, and the ride has been transformed. The old dual shocks were binned, and Harley opted for a centrally-mounted single shock with about 3.0 to 3.5 inches (76-90 mm) more travel. The swingarm geometry has been revised, and there is a new linkage system that has improved damping. You can also electronically adjust the pre-load.

And the cherry on this cake is Harley’s decision to use a de Dion-type rear-end set-up. This is the real game-changer. The rear wheels are now connected by a rigid beam, and the differential is mounted directly to the frame rather than the axle as on previous trikes. This has reduced the unsprung weight enormously, some 17kg, and you suddenly have a trike where the rear wheels don’t kick under heavy braking and thus provide a far more stable contact patch with the road. The suspension is now absorbing bumps instead of shooting them into your spine.

So, what was once a pretty harsh ride, that tended to skip sideways in bumpy corners, bludgeon yours and your passenger’s spine and kidneys, and remind you what terror and despair really are, is now gone.

The Street Glide Three rather wafts along. It is significantly smoother and way easier to ride than previous Harley trikes. And it is pro-level luxurious.

The seats are heated. The handlebars are heated. You have a Rockford Fosgate sound system with 50W per channel and four 6.5-inch speakers for yourself, while your passenger gets her own two speakers mounted on the Tour-Pack – and it all runs through Harley’s class-leading Skyline OS infotainment system.

There is also 2.3 cubic-feet (65 lt) of luggage capacity available in the Super Glide Three’s Tour Pak and the boot/trunk. And that is more space than any two-wheeler Harley makes has.

Obviously, a trike will weigh more than a bike. Just as obviously, the weight isn’t as big a deal on a trike as it is on a bike. The Street Glide Three sits fully fuelled at 1,255 lb (569 kg). Interestingly, the Milwaukee Eight 117-cubic-inch engine hauls this along quite willingly, and it gets off the lights with quite startling verve. I was surprised. It’s far more lively than you would imagine.

And thanks to the new suspension, this makes the whole package a sheer joy to ride. The Street Glide Three easily sits on 120-140 km/h, and there’s enough torque, 126 ft-lb (171 Nm), to make passing slow things a breeze.

I am not sure what its top-speed is, but I am sure it’s not important. I got it to a shade over 170 km/h, but neither of us were having a stress-free time of it. The Street Glide Three is just not designed for that kinda crazy – which in no way should stop you putting a 131-cube crate engine into it. Just sayin’.

What it is designed to do is tour, one-up or two-up, luxuriously, comfortably, and once you get the hang of it in corners, elegantly. My wife loved it. She had to hang on in a different way – and there are two passenger handles for just that purpose. Once again, the new suspension made all the difference. She did not at all enjoy her time on last year’s Tri Glide and stink-eyed me for weeks afterwards.

Trikes also come with foot-actuated handbrakes. On the Street Glide Three, this is a lever next to the left-hand footboard. You push it down to activate it. You push it down again to de-activate it. Or you just leave the trike in gear.

What I did struggle with was the reverse gear. This was probably my fault because I am dumb and do not listen to instructions or watch demonstrations. There’s a button you press and hold that engages Reverse, a notification appears on the screen, and then you just keep pressing it and the trike goes backwards. Except when I did it, the trike just sat there, then suddenly lurched backward like a spooked horse. I was certainly doing something wrong.

If I was going to buy one of these, I would torment the sales guy until we were both happy I had reversing down pat. You will need reverse gear at some stage. She is a heavy girl to push backwards up a hill if you’ve parked awkwardly.

On general principles, the Super Glide Three has massive road presence. It is almost regal in its bearing. But most importantly, it is just a stupid amount of fun to operate. It will thrill and delight you in ways a motorcycle will not and cannot. It is indeed a fun-park ride by any objective measure.

And what kid did not want his very own fun-park ride?

I feel it’s well past the time this was written. And I know there will be some brow-furrowing. The mouth-breathers will immediately start to drool their outrage, and you know what?

I do not give the smallest of fucks. The field where such things might be grown is utterly fallow. I salted it a long time ago. Nothing grows there. How fallow, you ask? Imagine a uterus hanging on a branch and drying the sun.

Nonetheless, some people simply need to be told. If their brains explode and their tiddly little feelings are hurt, then that is a matter for them, is it not? You pieces of shit have been polluting my beloved motorcycling for too long without consequences. And that is my fault. I have told you before, but I have clearly not told you often enough. See? I am not blameless in this. My shame in this regard is real, and it’s my personal shame I give a fuck about, not you. You? I don’t give a fuck about you at all. And these are your consequences, which is what you get for being a clueless fuck.

So, there are three types of motorcycle riders in this paradigm.

There are the ones who know how to ride. I have nothing for you kings. It would be presumptuous of me to tell you what you already know. Still, because you are decent person, you may wish to share the wisdom I will shortly offer with the other two types of motorcyclists. Or you may decide “Fuck them. Let them bleed and die, for they deserve nothing better.” I am good with it either way.

Then there are the motorcyclists who genuinely do not know how to ride. I make the assumption they wish to learn, and that is a fair assumption to make. Like, why would you go and buy a fucken motorcycle and NOT wish to know how to ride it?

There are two sub-sets in this group. The young and ignorant, and the old and ignorant. The old ones will tend to absorb the wisdom I wish to impart better than the young ones because their age provides them with a perspective the young ones do not yet have. The old ones will acknowledge they may actually NOT know how to ride a bike, but they want to very badly, and will make concrete steps in that direction. They wish to be less ignorant, and that is admirable.

This does not apply to the young ones. They take pride in their ignorance. They are of the firm view old people can get righteously fucked, primarily because they are old and are unable to relate to the struggles of youth. They also feel they are entitled to a bunch of shit – like respect, an opinion, emotional and spiritual fulfillment, and an assortment of hokey bullfuckery they picked up in school.

And they were likely raised by women in an environment that catered to their feelings, awarded them prizes for simply existing, and fostered in them, via their addiction to the echo chamber of social media, the belief they can safely do whatever they please.

They think this because they have been raised eagerly slurping the Mighty Cock of Safety while another Mighty Cock of Safety is jackhammering their anuses unto lung-depth. So, they are filled with Safety Cock, they know everything and nothing can go wrong, and shut-up, old man.

And then there’s the third group of motorcyclists. This is the worst group in the whole world. I would poison the fuckers. They’re unworthy of an honourable death. And I would hope, as their organs melt and they writhe in splendid agony, some last-minute clarity would find its way into their liquefying brains. I’m all about, hope, me.

So, this group THINKS they know how to ride. It actually believes this as an article of faith. They have ridden a lot, or what they imagine is a lot, they have not really had an oopsie – or if they did have an oopsie, it wasn’t a bad one. These are the shit-gibbons who think their passive safety gear will protect them – which is just another article of their faith. And we all know faith is just a belief not based on any proof. Yes, just exactly like the whole Jesus thing.

So armed with that faith, and nothing but that faith, these shit-gibbons venture onto our roads astride motorcycles they think they can ride. They speak loud and often about “safety” and so enjoy the taste of the previously mentioned Mighty Cock of Safety, and they demand everyone else puts at least one in their mouth as well. Yes, these are the very fuckers that tell other motorcyclists to “Ride safe!”

They have all the gear. They have all the faith. But what they do not have is skill. And the former two do not at all make up for the latter.

Now that we have established who is who in this zoo, we come to the part where some very basic wisdom needs to be rammed, entirely unlubed and spiky, into the very holes where the Mighty Cocks of Safety have abided for too long.

So how is a motorcycle to be ridden?

There is only one way a motorcycle should be ridden, and that is well. It is to be ridden well. It must be ridden well, or it should not be fucken ridden at all. You are never safer on a bike than when you are riding it well. You are never having a better time on a bike than when you are riding well.

You must ride well all the time or you will die. If you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, you get to be maimed. And when you’re asking yourself why you now have to shit in a bag, paint with your mouth, or just lay on a bed staring emptily at a ceiling until a relative takes pity on you and puts a pillow over your expressionless idiot face, you will know the answer to that is: “I did not ride well…”

It was not the car, or the road, or the corner, you fucken dumb mutt. It was you not riding well. If you’re nervous, or frightened, or hesitant, or stupid, or a combination of any of those things when you’re riding a bike, you need to fuck off, or you need to deal with those issues.

“But how does one ride well?” you ask. Good question. The fact you’ve asked it demonstrates a desire to learn and to know, and to grow as a motorcyclist. I get it. Being a clueless piece of shit is tiresome. I know this because I was once just that. But I made it my business, because I loved riding motorcycles more than anything, to accumulate all the clues I could get. I am still acquiring them. It is an ongoing thing.

One rides well by burning with the desire to ride. To the exclusion of all else. You will never ride well if all riding is for you is a hobby, or something you do now and again. Yes, there is a science to it, and you should do all the courses that can be done. And you should do them even if you’ve already done them. Done road courses? Go do some dirt courses.

Ride, ride, and fucken ride some more. Ride in all weathers and on all kinds of surfaces. Ride by yourself, ride with others, just fucken ride, and when you ride, push yourself to ride better. Do not be a bitch and stop thinking about the Mighty Cock of Safety, and how it tastes and feels. And how used to it you are.

Motorcycling is dangerous. It is meant to be dangerous. Who the fuck does it because it’s safe? Who took it up because it was safe? Did your mother’s anguished tears mean nothing to you?

Dangerous shit has consequences when you fuck it up. Bad ones. But if you’re doing dangerous shit well (because you love doing dangerous shit and you take pride in doing it well), then dangerous shit is the greatest shit you can ever be doing. That is its nature.

And that is the nature of motorcycling – and that is how motorcycles should and must be ridden. Stop doing it wrong.

Images by Nick Edards/Half Light Photographic

Brough Superior is a legendary marque. People speak of it in hushed and reverent tones. It was, after all, the first bike to do 160km/h. Born of one man’s passionate obsession, it is now in the hands of the French.

You’ve heard about Brough Superiors, right?

You might recall Colonel TE Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) lost his life riding one of his Brough Superiors – an SS100 he’d named Boanerges (Son of Rage), which was number seven of the eight he owned.

The Brough Superior has been called the “most romantic motorcycle in the world”, the “Rolls-Royce of motorcycles”, and the “world’s finest machine” – all of which may have once been somewhat accurate.

But that “once” was between 1919 and 1940, when George Brough built just 3048 of them, and sold them to the wealthy and self-indulgent. The selling point was the craftsmanship, performance, and the fact that George would tailor the finished bike to the rider.

The company ceased making bikes in 1940 and turned its attention to making cranks for the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. England was at war, and needed Spitfires far more than it needed rich people belting around country lanes at 100-miles-per-hour on bikes that cost a year’s wage and frightening the villagers. When the war ended, the company was unable to source parts of a suitable quality, folded and passed into legend.

In 2008, the brand was bought by Mark Upham. Mark kinda sat on his hands for a while, wondering what he was to do with this now almost mythical brand.

Then in 2013, he approached Thierry Henriette, CEO of the French design company, Boxer Design, and asked Thierry to create a new Brough Superior.

Three months later, an SS100 prototype was unveiled at EICMA in Milan – which, by any measure, is a staggering achievement given the time-frame.

Serial production began in 2016, and Thierry is now the owner of Bough Superior, persisting in the marque’s original ethos of innovation, design excellence, and the use of superb materials in construction.

And here was I in 2023, at Pie In The Sky on the Old Pacific Highway at nine in the morning, watching a new Brough Superior Lawrence being unloaded from the back of a van for me to ride.

It felt like quite the occasion, and as it was rolled backwards out of the van, I will admit to being rather awestruck by its…well, alienness.

This is a bike that would cost you some $115,000 to buy. There is no “press fleet”. Brough Superior does not feel the need to hand its bikes out to be reviewed by the largely inane and utterly worthless members of the Australian motorcycle media. And I do not blame it. No one would care what a chimp thought while it was drinking a Remy Martin Louis XIII brandy.

The bike being wheeled out of the van really was a sight to behold. It’s not so much a bike as it is a statement. It cannot be compared to any other bike, since it is unlike any other bike.

And this was the Brough Superior Lawrence, created to pay homage to one of the world’s most fascinating historical characters. The otherworldly shape of the bike was inspired by a dagger called the “jambiya”.

Lawrence was gifted this Bedouin dagger after his amazing victory at Aqaba on the 6^th of July, 1917.

Sherif Nasir and Auda abu Tayir, and their small force, under the guidance of Lawrence, defeated the Ottoman Turks at this important Red Sea port.

If you’ve seen the film, Lawrence of Arabia, with Peter O’Toole in the starring role, you would have seen a condensed and romanticised version of the fight. They skipped over the bit where Lawrence accidentally shot his camel in the head and was nearly killed in the action. But he was awarded the ceremonial jambiya for his efforts.

That certainly explains why the bike looked so different to other Broughs and other motorcycles.

It was also far smaller…well, more compact than I’d imagined, though it does have a lengthy 1540mm wheelbase. The front-end is a Fior concept, which is kinda like a Hossack, and Boxer designs has worked closely with the brilliant racing-engineer, Claude Fior, almost since its inception.

Claude tested a similar front-end in the 90s which underwent MotoGP testing with the Yamaha Factory Team. This front-end is on all the Brough Superior models, and the factory states it is enamoured of the handling benefits it offers – no dive under brakes and stability at speed and in corners – and as a design element, the factory preferred it over state-of-the-art telescopic forks. It is certainly a point of difference, and the craftsmanship is very evident.

I threw a leg over it, and was immediately struck by how light it felt. This is another Brough element. It’s freakishly light. All its bikes are. The entire 88-degree V-twin engine weighs a mere 70kg. The wet weight of the whole bike is 198kg. And the seat height is quite low.

But you do sit on top of the bike rather than in it. Everything is underneath you rather than in front of you. And the angle of the handlebars is tiller-like. I figured this might also be a design throwback to the past, when tiller ’bars were on every two-wheeled contraption made (including bicycles), as if the designers were taking their cue from ploughs.

Everywhere I looked was stunning carbon-fibre, and high-end aluminium machined with a watchmaker’s precision. You could honestly spend hours looking at the details, angles, and CNC-kissed alloy, and still not see it all. It is as much an engineering artwork as it is a motorcycle – and probably more so.

But it was not all jaw-dropping. The switchblocks were rather underwhelming. They were simple aluminium jobbies – a few small buttons, ie. kill-switch, blinkers a la Harley (left on the left ’bar, right on the right ’bar) and high beam. There are no engine maps needing buttons, so it’s all minimalism. But the switchblocks looked like afterthoughts rather than integral parts of a hyper-expensive motorcycle. The same can be said of the mirrors. I expected special mirrors, machined and designed and clad with space-age blue-tinted NASA-sourced glass. I got very basic mirrors instead. I also noticed the lacquer on the enamel that coated the alloy handlebars was showing slight signs of degradation – or maybe it was just a one-off thing with this particular bike.

And then there was the dash. A largish round analogue dial with very small numbers, that sat fairly flat, forward of the handlebars and stared at the sky. It could be adjusted, but any effort to do that caused it to flop forward or back. Which was altogether displeasing.

All that aside, I was very keen to ride it, as you can imagine. I had been allotted a few hours, since Brough does not hand its bikes out for weeks at a time for reviewing, and I needed to get some kind of idea of what was what here.

I must re-iterate that this is so NOT the kind of bike you strap a bag to, and set off to Wilcannia. Actually, it would very much be the kind of bike I would do that with, but I am so not the target demographic the Brough is aimed at.

I couldn’t help thinking this is not the kind of bike a motorcyclist like me would by. But of course I would buy it if I had the money – and ride it to Wilcannia, and lots of other places too.

But I could not also think of a motorcyclist I knew (and I know a lot of them), who would buy it. Though I do know a few wealthy collectors of exotic bikes that certainly would. And I guess that’s the mindset one has to adopt when assessing it.

But when it started, all I could think of was how desperately strangled and muffled it sounded at idle. It gives the impression that when it fires up, thunder would boom, avalanches would ensue, and women would give birth prematurely. But ADRs are ADRs, right? And I have no doubt the factory would make sure you did not leave the showroom without a set of proper pipes in the boot of your Aston Martin.

And then off I went.

The lack of weight was immediately obvious, which is great, because the specifications of the engine are not jaw-dropping. That gorgeous-looking sculpture of a twin makes 102 horses and 87Nm of torque. But, and this is a big but – there is a version called the AMB 001 Pro, that makes 225 horses and 160Nm, thanks to the turbocharger attached to it.

The factory states these base specs will send the Lawrence to a top-speed of 225km/h. I got it to 170, and didn’t feel there was much more there. It pulled reasonably well when I jammed the throttle open, and it’s fueled perfectly, but it did not take my breath away.

Of course, I would have tried some more, but remember where I am. Making top-speed runs across the Brooklyn Bridge or down the freeway on a $115,000 bike is not something the Highway Patrol is programmed to appreciate.

If I am ever afforded the opportunity to ride another Brough for more than a few hours, then rest assured we shall certainly explore the factory’s claims.

The front-end is superb. One of the very best I have ever experienced. It soaked up bumps at a level Öhlins would be proud of. The rear-suspension, by comparison, was harsh, but then it is adjustable and I am sure the factory would have it set for you if you bought one. As I rode it, the suspension seemed at odds with itself.

It dealt with the Old Road twisties well, though I felt it’s long wheelbase and fat rear-tyre was compromising it a little – which made it feel a little understeery when you applied yourself to the corner. It’s gloriously light and should be very agile, but it’s fighting that wheelbase and fat tyre.

But to be honest, I was not pushing all that hard. The point was not to see if I could grind bits of it off. No-one would have been impressed by that. And any potential owners would certainly not ride it as hard as I did that day.

I just wanted to get a real sense of the bike as a complete package, and answer a few questions that had been niggling at me when I was first offered a ride.

Was it a viable motorcycle?

Yes, it was. It was certainly more about design, craftsmanship, build-quality, and sheer exotic appeal, than it was about performance and high-speed anything. But surely a potential owner would understand that.

Like I said, it’s not the kind of bike you strap some bags to and head off for a week on the road. People who buy these bikes do not do that. So why build them a bike that would be happy in that sphere?

People who buy these bikes want the wow factor they offer. They want to park it inside their mansion and have their mates come over and admire it. And talk about it and the marque. And Lawrence of Arabia, whose name and reputation is irrevocably attached to the Brough Superior brand. And these are marvelous conversations by people who breathe a rarer air than I do. You doubt that? Consider the top-of-the-line Brough Superiors, the AMB 001 and the AMB 001 Pro, will need you to bring in excess of $250,000 with you if you aspire to ownership.

I will never ride these. No-one I know will ever ride one either.

But I am seriously overjoyed that such bikes even exist. They must exist for motorcycling to have any meaning. Motorcycling is not a rational or reasonable thing to do. There’s a reason it’s populated by fearsome madmen, crazed zealots, and red-eyed fanatics.

This is Brough Superior’s entire raison d’être. And it’s not flawless and it’s not perfect, and it’s not about high-speed and awesome cornering. I get that.

But it is nonetheless utterly and completely magnificent.

You should check out the website, it’s almost porn-like…

www.broughsuperioraustralia.com.au/

Jim Steinman

In 1977, Meatloaf rage-seeded my teenage brain with one of the most evocative songs ever created.

When The Meat thundered out Steinman’s cheese-packed lyrics, I had just turned 16 – the perfect age for life-long rock’n’roll programming. I was hardly alone.

The album, Bat Out Of Hell, became a global phenomenon. And its cultural impact cannot be overstated. Bat Out Of Hell sold more than 46-million copies world-wide. It went platinum 14 times in the USA, and a staggering record-setting 26 times in Australia, which made it the biggest-selling album of all time Downunder.

The combination of Steinmans’ teen-opera lyrics, Meatloaf’s nuclear vocals, and Todd Rundgren’s epic production, seared the whole album, and especially the title track, into western society’s forever playlist.

And if you were 16 at the time, like I was, it spoke to your hormone-ruled teenage brain like the veritable Word of God. Who, in this case, was a long-haired fat bastard who needed to suck oxygen between songs to avoid cardiac arrest.

I was already well down the track of motorcycle perdition at that age. There were posters of Harleys on my bedroom walls. I was jigging school to steal rides on my older mate’s horribly ratshit Honda XL250 through the back alleys of inner-Sydney.

Hitting the highway like a battering ram on a silver-black phantom bike became my lodestar. It was the hill I was gonna die on. And yes, I am aware the song does indicate there was some dying at the bottom of a cliff in the burning sun, but 16-year-olds do not consider such things as tragedies. We viewed such an outcome as utterly impossible, but if it somehow happened, then what an epic way to go!

Such magical things, teenage hormones.

Anyway, the whole silver-black phantom bike imagery stuck with me. Which partially explains why nearly every bike I have ever owned or customised has been black. The other obvious reason is every bike looks better in black. It is what it is. Black and chrome is my Kryptonite.

Which brings me, somewhat inelegantly, to Harley-Davidson’s totally deranged 131-cubic-inch (2146cc) Breakout – my… Hell, THE silver-black phantom bike incarnate.

Let me explain what is going here. Let me explain why this is goddamn rock’n’roll. Let me explain why this is the motorcycle equivalent of snorting cocaine, partying with strippers, and heaving a TV out of a hotel window.

Firstly, the Breakout is the archetypal Harley-Davidson. It is what people see in their mind when they think Harley. In the Breakout, Harley has created one of the most aesthetically “right” bikes ever made. It is right up there with Tamburini’s Italian masterpieces (the MV Agusta F4 and the Ducati 916), the iconic original Kawasaki Z900 and Z1000, the Manx Norton, and Hans Muth’s eternal Suzuki Katana.

Look at its profile. It is spot-on. It pleases your brain on a level you’re not even conscious of. Harley has come close to this a few times in the past, but the advent of that insanely fat 300-tyre on the back flowing perfectly to that sassy 21-inch wheel on the raked front…man, you don’t even have to like Harleys to see how it just works.

Sales reflect this. The Breakout has been the largest-selling Harley in Australia for the past five years. It was created in 2012 and publicly launched at Daytona Bike Week in 2013. Sales in the USA were discontinued in 2020. But not in Australia. We loved the bastard so much we kept buying it by the shipload and Milwaukee kept on making it. And in 2023, Harley jammed its 117-cube Milwaukee-Eight engine into the Breakout, and sales kept on climbing.

It’s the one Harley Milwaukee keeps alive because of Australia. And it is my favourite one for the reasons stated and the ones to come.

So, it looks boss. It looks bad-arse. It looks outlaw. These are all powerful selling points. Accountants wanna look like Hells Angels. That motorcycle outlaw glamour has always been a major driver of Harley sales.

But the Breakout, unlike some of Harley’s other offerings, like the Low Rider S and the now amazingly capable Street Glide and Road Glide, requires some…erm, well, compromise from the rider.

There is only one disc brake on the front. The suspension travel is limited – though Harley’s 2026 revamp of its Softail range suspension (replacing the progressive springs with constant rate jobbies), has greatly improved ride quality. That gorgeously fat rear tyre does little to assist any lap-times you may have in mind, and the Breakout’s overall handling – considered objectively – means you won’t be challenging for any podiums.

It’s long, it’s raked, it’s rear-end is fat, and it hasn’t got the brakes it needs (or you want) if you plan on showing off to girls.

Yes, the 117-cube Milwaukee Eight is a great engine. It makes 98 bhp at 4600rpm, and 120 ft-lb (162 Nm) of luscious torque right at the 2500 rpm sweet-spot.

So what you’re getting on a stock Breakout is sinful good looks, a great and very willing motor, and just enough brakes and suspension to keep you grinning. The package makes perfect sense if that’s what you’re after. And you’re an accountant.

But Harley knows there are people like me out there. People who have been inculcated with a divine madness (Thanks Meatloaf). People who are as devoid of sense as a rabid baboon and think the laws of physics are negotiable if you threaten them enough. People who always wanna rock’n’roll.

It is with this knowledge Harley offers rabid-baboon people like me the Screamin’ Eagle Stage IV 131-cubic inch “crate motor”.

What’s a “crate motor”?

Well, a crate motor is what you buy when you’re tired of pissin’ around.

It is called that because such engines did originally arrive in wooden crates – much like you’d ship bazookas and grenades. It’s an old hot-rod term from the days when manhood was tested on lonely country roads as part of the American Dream.

Ford’s dream factory happily sold mid-western US maniacs flathead V8s in dream-boxes, which inspired General Motors to ship its good ol’ boys ready-to-bang 350 small-block V8s in similar dream-boxes.

Today, Harley’s 131-cube ferocity-plant is a kit which will probably arrive in a few boxes, and which the dealer will then offer to install into your Breakout (or Fat Boy, or Low Rider, or whatever). You can say: “Nah, hold ma beer! I’ma doin’ this myself!” and off you go into all sorts of nightmares. Or you can let it happen at the dealer.

I understand, and I have asked, such an exercise will set you back about $10,000. Give or take. If you’re squinting at this, you’re not rock’n’roll. Because there is no price you can put on rock’n’roll, baby.

When the crate engine has been installed into your Breakout, and all the correct sacrifices have been made, and the Road Gods are somewhat appeased, this is what you will have:

Your new, measured-at-the-back-wheel horsepower will be 121. The amount of torque you now have will be 131 ft‑lb (177.6 Nm), also at the rear wheel. Your barrels will now measure 4.31-inches by 4.5 -inches (109.5 mm by 114.3 mm), up from the pop-music-making 4.08-inches by 4.5-inches (103.5 mm by 114.3 mm) in the 117. Your new throttle bodies are a gaping 65 mm, not the choked-up 55 mm trash the 117 has.

But I’m not done licking my lips yet. The four-valve Stage IV heads have come under extreme CNC porting and are fitted with larger valves. And because rock’n’roll, there’s a SE8‑517 high‑lift camshaft, to make the thing feel and sound proper angry.

What this means on the road is some very unholy crazy-arse bullshit. You suddenly have a genuine 200km/h-plus Harley-Davidson. The mid-range has gone from “Good and Christian” to “Hail Satan!” The 117 starts to flatten out a bit after 4500rpm. The 131 kicks in its afterburners. It is an engine designed to run wide-open. It even says that in the brochure. And I thought that was all marketing-speak until I discovered it wasn’t.

My mate, Paul, discovered it too. I met him for lunch at the Bulga Hotel, which is at the start of the legendary Putty Road. Paul rides a KTM 1290 Super Duke. I tossed him the fob of the 131 just as he was about to pull of his helmet.

“Leave that on. Take this thing out to Milbrodale and make sure your estate has the necessary cash if you go to Jesus instead of coming back here.”

He came back in good order. He was panting a touch.

“Wow,” he said. “That thing goes harder than my KTM.”

And then we both laughed. If the pub had a juke box with Bat Out Of Hell on it, I would have played it for us, and we could have sung along like in the old days.

Day-to-day riding is fine. The crate-engined Breakout sounds and feels angrier, but it’s nicely fuelled and does not have any bad manners at low speed. It doesn’t hunt. It doesn’t surge. It just makes angry internal noises. Mine had stock pipes, so it attracted no attention from the Highway Patrol. But I’d be fitting an aftermarket two-into-one exhaust. There is, now and then, just the hint of lag on the throttle, but that’s not a deal-breaker for any righteous baboon. And it may disappear with aftermarket pipes.

Only people who have no idea or don’t care about performance fit individual pipes to Harleys.

I dug around a bit and found three options for us baboons.

A Bassani Road Rage III system is for those who still want to be part of the civilised world. It will increase performance without you doing serious jail-time.

The Sawacki Speed 2-into1 is straight off the King of the Baggers race series. You’ll get huge, psychotic top-end, and the sound will get you decent non-parole period.

Or throw it all to Hell and buy a D&D Billet Cat 2-into-1. Your massive mid-range becomes even more massive. You will get insanely brutal acceleration, and parole will rightly be denied.

Or leave the stock pipes and have yourself a true Sleeper.

Because unless you know what you’re looking at, you won’t see any difference. You need to look closely to see the Screamin’ Eagle badges on the barrels.

The Screamin’ Eagle Stage IV 131-cube Breakout is a stupid motorcycle. There’s no need for such a thing. It still has one front-disc, a fat back-tyre, and when pushed silly-hard in corners behaves like a washing machine with handlebars. No-one needs this. But more than a few of us want this.

Which is exactly why it is magnificent. The world needs more stupid motorcycles. There are more than enough rabid baboons demanding just such a thing. Nothing makes us howl louder than a Harley-bastard-Davidson hate-thundering at the horizon like…yeah, you guessed it, a bat out of Hell.

On those hot summer nights, girls can offer their throats to the wolf with the red roses all they want.

Boys, on the other hand, will always and forever wanna hit the highways like battering rams on silver-black phantom bikes.

Heat that metal, feed that engine. See the light.

PSST! THERE IS ANOTHER LEVEL OF CRAZY…

I discovered, to my profound delight, there is a Screamin’ Eagle 135-cube Stage IV. You know, in case the 131-cube rock’n’roll isn’t, somehow, doing it for you. Or you’re the baboon with rabies.

This is the engine with components directly eviscerated from the King of the Bagger race bikes. I’m just gonna give you the numbers. You can compare them to the numbers from the 131 above. Then you can go and have a good long look at yourself and your stupid life-choices, and why you’d even consider a factory race-engine on a road bike, you vile criminal fiend.

Capacity: 135 cubic inches (2212 cc)

Horsepower – near on 144 at 5500rpm.

Torque – 149 ft-lb

Compression ratio – 11.6:1

Bore and stroke: 4.31-inches by 4.625-inches (109.5 mm by 117.5 mm)

Throttle body: 68 mm (race‑derived)

Fuel injectors: 6.8 g/s high‑capacity

Heads: Extreme CNC‑ported SE heads (race‑team derived)

Camshaft: SE8‑550 high‑lift cam

There’s a saying I like. It goes: There are only two types of days for riding motorcycles. Good ones and great ones. And if it’s minus-three and sheeting rain, it’s just a good day.

I use it whenever some dweeb wobbles over to me when I am standing under a service station awning, soaking wet, my blood frozen to jelly in my veins, and says with a grin on his idiot face: “Not much fun on a bike, aye?”

He naturally expects me to agree with him. He certainly doesn’t expect to discover I am actually deeply in love with what I do. And once, in the bad old days when I was heaps less approachable – but would nonetheless get approached – my reply would have been “Go fuck yourself”, it’s now more usually the Good Day and Great Day thing. Both responses blow their little minds.

But just how great can a ride on a bike really be?

Quite frankly, it can be transcendental. It can be so great it changes you in some fundamental way, which you might not recognise initially because it’s just such a massive sensory overload you need time to process it. Then when you do, it stays with you forever. It becomes part of your DNA.

Runs like that are rare. I’ve ridden several million kilometres in fifty years, and I have had maybe a dozen such rides. Rides so ineffably perfect in every conceivable way, you know their like can never come again. You may get another great one, or even a few, but a run like that one? Nah. It can never be like that again.

And in terms of affirmation, when you truly ‘get’ that this motorcycle business is really all you need to be fulfilled – indeed blessed – as a human being, runs like that cannot be beaten. They must, perforce, be rare. That is precisely what makes them so wondrous.

When this run happened, I had already been riding for about ten years. I was already heavily infected by motorcycling. All I wanted to do was ride bikes and have adventures and shit.

I was the veteran of a many Bathurst Easter Races, a heap of rallies, countless runs with my mates, my work commute was 120-km per day, I did not own a car and had no plans to ever own one, and I was clocking up at least 80-100,000 kms per year.

I was also on my first Harley, and my fifth bike in a series, and well down the road to blood-sworn anti-society, crazy hot bitches, and even crazier mates. My life was an endless succession of massive emotional highs and commensurate lows, and I embraced it and lived it with a passion that has never left me to this day. I drank all the Kool-Aid there was, then made more of it, and drank that too.

My motorcycle mythology was powerful. I had been reading – Hell, “devouring” might be a better word – endless tales of riding in magazines. That was back when magazines employed people who could write, and it was that writing that burned itself into my teenage brain and flavoured the Kool-Aid I’d started to drink. Two Wheels, AMCN, Revs, Easyriders, Iron Horse – I absorbed them all. I would even shoplift them if I lacked the money to buy them. And I guess the one I loved the most was Easyriders. Its stories captivated me. That motorcycle outlaw ethos is a hell of a drug. The brilliantly-written tales, insanely evocative and powerful, simply enchanted me. They were my fucken Creation myth, I guess.

I wanted to live that. I wanted to be that. So, I became that. Never under-estimate what sheer force of will can accomplish. At seventeen, I may not have been the hard, mean-eyed, bearded and tattooed sumbitch howling along the highways that I was reading about, but I worked at it until I was. Even at that age, I somehow knew the world would never stop telling me I was just “not enough”. So I became iron-resolved to make myself more than enough.

Fast-forward a few years, and in my mid-twenties, I was well down the road to this blessed perdition. I had acquired a bunch of mates as insane, or even more insane, than me. We were awash with insanely hot girls – not constantly – but in fairly regular quantities. This fact alone re-enforced the utter righteousness of what we were doing.

Our bikes were kinda shitty because they were being constantly ridden, and ridden hard, and we didn’t have a lot of money, so shit was forever exploding or falling off. But we were literally living the dream – our dream. I had become the fucking myth.

The whole paradigm was so unspeakably great, it took a very special run to make it transcendental. Here I was thinking that this shit was as good as it got, and then I went on this run, and everything before and after it just never tasted the same again.

It was summer, and we were heading north, along the coast of New South Wales. There was a dozen of us, and we had no particular destination and no clear agenda other than to ride the earth and have adventures and shit, like I said earlier. We would stop when we felt like it, or when something fell off someone’s bike, or when the then-rare police car felt we needed to be booked for something or needed to look at our helmet exemptions. Yes, those were the days when you could ride without a helmet if you had the right piece of paper. And if you’ve never done big miles without a helmet, you should shut the fuck up and do them before you start ignorantly braying about “safety” and shit. You don’t know what you’re missing. And if you hadn’t yet guessed, “safety” was not a thing anyone I knew on a bike could even spell.

The weather was stunning. It was early summer, and the roads were not yet packed with families on holiday. We rode in a close pack of thunder; a metallic storm of both utter invincibility and total vulnerability – and that’s a cup so few sip from.

We turned off the highway somewhere near Macksville and headed for Taylors Arm, where the fabled Pub With No Beer was said to be. None of us had ever been, and we could honestly think of no better place to go. Surely it had beer despite what the song declared.

As we crossed the creek that runs next to the pub and started gearing down, what we saw still freaks me out. The pub, if you don’t know, sits in a beautiful green-grassed valley, and back then it had a large open area next to it. That was also covered in green grass, and on this day, it was full of people, and there was a band playing. We had lucked upon some kind of local festival, and I was thinking our arrival would go one of two ways. Either it would be beaut, or the police would arrive and it would be a different kind of beaut.

None of us much cared either way. When you’re wired how we were, we played whatever cards were deal to us, and we always bet big.

As it turned out, the people there, many of who were what would today be called “alternative”, but were really just hinterland hippies, and thus our weird allies in anti-socialism. Unless we actually impaled one of them and wore his skin as a cloak, they were not going to call the cops just because some bikies had arrived. It was quite a different world back then.

We parked the bikes, and as my mates started wandering around, I stood there and took in the scene. Before we had arrived it looked like some bucolic throwback to the Summer of Love. Lots of girls, a teepee, blokes strumming guitars on a small makeshift stage, some other bloke fishing, groups lazing around on spread blankets, smiling, the smell of marijuana flavouring the air…

With the addition of our Harleys, it was a fucken Dave Mann painting. Look him up if you don’t know who he is, or have never looked at an Easyriders magazine. His art was what we all thought we looked like when we’d drank enough beer, snorted enough gak, and our girlfriends were getting their tits out.

In short order we had acquired beer, rolled a few fat numbers, and were most genially disposed to the world at large. None of us perceived any threats, so none of us were feeling prickly or ill-tempered. In my experience, the only time people like us ever started busting shit up was when fools wanted to find out if bikies really were as tough as we looked. And of course they found the fuck out.

But here? It was fucking Pan’s Arcadia with a bunch of Harleys parked in the middle of it.

And it just got better, which you might find hard to believe. Like, so far, it had ticked all my boxes. Then a few of the blokes came out of the pub carrying a polystyrene esky that had been filled with beer and ice. They plonked it down where a few of us were sitting listening to a seriously good cover of Ring of Fire, and one of them said: “You won’t fucken believe what’s in that pub.”

“The Swedish National Girls Beach Volleyball team?” I grinned. For all I knew that may well have been the case, given how utterly wondrous everything else here was.

“Oh, it’s better than that,” my mate said. “The publican, who gave us this esky for the beer we’d bought, has three daughters. They are the barmaids. The eldest one is 23.”

“Don’t lie, fucker,” I said. “Making up shit like that is cruel.”

“Go see for yourself,” he grinned.

So I did. And when I walked into the pub, there were indeed three girls behind the bar, and they were all smiles and welcomes, and quite unreasonably attractive. I’m a sucker for girls in skintight jeans, little crop-tops, and lots of hair – and these three were all of that. My fucken Dave Mann painting just got better.

That afternoon and evening will forever stay with me. We ate trout hauled out of the creek after befriending the fisherman – Dan his name was – by giving him a joint to smoke and a beer to drink. A few of us got up to sing with the band, to wild applause. I remember dancing with one of the publican’s daughters, and I wasn’t the only one. And Lord, could those girls dance, despite being partnered with clumsy tattooed bears. They smelled impossibly good, laughed like tinkling fountains, and threw their arms around our necks at every opportunity.

I walked off at one stage to catch my breath and felt utterly removed from the world as I looked upon that scene. What impossible benison was taking place here? How had we been blessed with this? Surely, none of us could have been worthy of such a thing? Were the cops suddenly going to arrive and start beating us with batons?

I had never seen my mates more well-behaved or indeed happier. It’s like we all understood what was happening was so special, if any of us did something untoward, the spell would be broken. And none of us wanted that.

At one stage the publican himself came down and brought us all some more beer, on the house. We paid him for it anyway. He told us we were welcome to stay the night, and we could camp pretty much wherever we liked. His girls would keep the pub open and keep serving us alcohol until we thought it was bedtime. I asked him if he was really an undercover cop and if this was some kind of elaborate sting operation that would see us all in chains by dawn. He laughed so genuinely, it caught me off-guard. I am by nature a suspicious cuss, but no matter how I considered our situation, I could find nothing amiss.

That night, most of the people who’d been on the grass went home. Dan the fisherman stayed, and a few others with him. They were all locals from the nearby hills, and utterly devoted to a carefree life. The girls there had not worn a bra in years, and were entirely casual about their boobs popping out now and then. They were lots of fun to dance with, as you can imagine.

Now you can probably understand that people like us don’t normally let our guards down to the point where we think it’s OK to dance. Every concert I had ever been to up until then with my mates and our girls, involved the girls dancing like Persian sluts, while we stood around supervising them and maybe now and again nodding with the music for a few beats. We were far too cool and menacing to be doing any dancing.

But on that astonishing afternoon and evening, we danced like no-one was watching. We sang some too. We drank beer, we smoked dope. We took girls for short rides on our bikes. We told stories and listened intently as stories were told to us.

It dawned on me at one stage that I was actually living what I had always wanted to live. A passionate and atavistic existence, informed entirely by the riding of stupid motorcycles to different places, was what I had always aimed for, even while knowing I had romanticised this shit in my head and was only ever gonna get the odd glimpse of anything like that. And then here I was, here we all were, living some kind of sorcerous and fabled ‘other’ existence.

The publican’s daughters were genuinely hot. And way friendlier than any of us could have expected. The other girls there were also cute, in that crazy hippy way that can be cute or hideous, depending on the girl. The blokes were all genuine and honest. They did not appear to be scared of us, but they treated us with a degree of respect we had only ever known once we’d busted a few heads. We didn’t lay a finger on any of them, and we did nothing any of the girls did not encourage or indeed initiate.

What can I tell you? I find it hard to believe myself. But that’s how it was. And that’s why this run is seared into my memory until the day I die. I can close my eyes and relive it when I choose. It still makes me smile. Why would it not? Such times are granted to very few, I would think. Certainly, they are unicorn-rare for people like me.

What bonds people are mutually-shared experiences – good ones and bad ones. We get through the tough times together and we rejoice as one when the times are good. But when good becomes great, and everything falls into place, and if you’d scripted it you’d know people would not believe you…well, then it’s beyond special, isn’t it? It is truly transcendental.

We rode out of there the next day, our heads literally buzzing. I had drunk far too much the night before – and we all had, but none of us seemed to have much of a hangover. It’s like whatever spell had been cast on us was still in effect.

I don’t remember the ride home. I’m sure someone broke down at some stage, and I’m certain we were stopped by the cops at some stage. But nothing sticks in my mind.

Interestingly, my mates and I never talked much about that run. It was almost as if speaking of it would cheapen it, or even pop the bubble we had placed it in. Sure, now and again it would come up and one of us would remember something from that run, and we would all laugh and smile.

We obviously tried to do it again the next year. Of course we did. But the publican had gone, and the new publican told us he’d immediately call the cops if we caused any shit. So, we caused some shit and left before the cops got there.

Since that day, I have had a few more “great” runs. I do a lot of miles, I have never had boring mates, and the odds do occasionally produce some immensely epic experiences.

But nothing like that weekend at Taylors Arm has ever happened again. And that’s probably good. If shit like that happened all the time, I think you’d lose yourself. And you may never find your way back. It’s like you will never ever enjoy cocaine as much as you do the first time you do cocaine. You sure think you will, so you keep doing it until your sinuses collapse and your brain turns into glue. It is a pointless pursuit in that regard.

Just as trying to re-create that weekend was pointless. Can’t be done, won’t be done, and I have made my peace with that. I found my way back. But it’s not like I won’t go looking now and again, is it?

If becoming a regular paid subscriber is a bridge too far, perhaps you’d consider buying me a coffee. HERE.

Faithful readers will know that some years ago, my beloved wife fell ill. Gravely, life-threateningly ill. It was the darkest time of my life. I fell apart in so many ways.

I was entirely unequipped to deal with what was happening. My son had just started high school, and his mother was in hospital with so many tubes running out of her she looked like a de-salination plant.

So, I crumbled. I was as broken as broken gets, I guess. I was actively considering and planning an end to it all. But me being me, there was no way I was leaving without taking all of my many enemies with me. Yes, indeed. All those fuckers who’d done me wrong were going to pay. It was, I felt, my way of slightly improving the wretched world I was soon going to leave.

I was then and remain now, a writer. It’s the only thing I can really do, because I’m pretty crap at everything else. So I am cursed/blessed with an active imagination. And in this instance, this imagination was on fire. It blazed with wondrously imagined possibilities and outcomes.

In my mind, I buried my wife many times. I visualised the funeral. I visualised my traumatised son at the coffin of his mother, a saint his worthless father had failed to preserve. I could smell the fucken flowers people had brought.

I was entirely bereft of any emotion save two – stark terror and white-hot anger. I still worked, though how running a multi-million dollar magazine was a thing I could do in-between twice-daily hospital visits, getting my boy off to school and picking him up afterwards, plus a bit of freelancing, remains a mystery to this day.

But it’s quite amazing what one can do when one has no choice, right? The close friends I thought I’d had had all largely deserted me. It seemed my wife’s illness was just too much for them to bear. One later told me he was having trouble coping with it. But not-so-close friends filled that void. Their endless little kindnesses to me and my son is not something I will ever forget, though I shall never be able to repay them.

This taught me a valuable lesson about the people in my life. It’s like a meme had come to live with me. You will know who your true friends are when the shit hits the fan and starts to spray around the room. So now I knew things I did not know before. Was I hurt? Yes. Deeply. Did I show anyone this wound? Fuck, no.

But what else I knew in those long months of despair – and I knew this deep in the back of my screaming brain – was that I could not continue in this way. I could not be any kind of father or husband in the state I was in. On the outside I looked and acted pretty much how I had always looked and acted, although it would be fair to say I looked very stressed out. People could understand me looking like that. How could I not be stressed out?

But inside was a different thing. How could people understand that? Inside, I was a maelstrom of chaos. Why else would I be actively contemplating suicide and murder? No rational person does that. And of course, I was not rational, was I? I needed help. I certainly knew that.

So, I went to my doctor. He was the very same GP who had diagnosed my wife’s illness…well, had enough concern for her symptoms to send her for the tests that confirmed his suspicions. His name was John Miller. He is the twin brother of George Miller. You’d know George from Mad Max. Small world, huh?

Anyway, Doctor Miller remains the most amazing doctor I have ever had the privilege of knowing. His care and concern for both me and my wife was, quite simply, unbelievable.

Doctor Miller and I had a conversation about me, and he said I should go and speak to a psychologist. I told him to get fucked. He insisted I go. I insisted he get fucked. Could he just prescribe some drugs that would make me less insane? He explained those drugs only and temporarily mask the problem. They solve nothing. Therapy might solve nothing too, but we needed to try it. I told him I could not afford a psychologist. I am the working poor, for fuck’s sake. To this day, I scrabble out an existence that depends entirely on the goodwill of my readers.

Doctor Miller said Medicare would cover the first ten visits, after which we would see what my other options were, but it was imperative, he insisted, that I go and get some help before I became a news item.

There seemed to be enough humanity left in me to do as the good doctor had said. The next day I was in a bland, featureless consulting room for my very first session.

Luck had once again smiled upon me. I had no animosity or suspicion towards my therapist. And for therapy to work, the patient must trust the therapist. I mean, how else are you expected to spill your deepest and darkest bile? The therapist is a stranger. I don’t tell my dearest friends of the screaming inside me, and now I’m expected to bare all to someone I do not know?

But that’s the thing. My friends would judge me. Their judgement would make things worse. The therapist? Well, he might judge me too, but I didn’t know him and so his judgement would be of no consequence. But therapists, good ones, do not judge – or if they do, you would not have an inkling of it. Mainly, they just listen.

And this one had lots to listen to. I said some shit in that room to that therapist that would cause a priest to burn. I confessed all. I told him I spent my days either trembling in monkey-brain terror, or being a breath away from red-eyed violence, which should I give in to, would be entirely catastrophic. So, fear or anger, turn and turn-about.

I went home that day feeling no different. But like the therapist said, it would take a few sessions before we could find something that could be addressed. Mental health is not like setting a broken bone.

It was around the fourth session when we began to discuss my guilt. I’m not even sure how guilt came into our discussion, but I’m thinking I said something about how much of it I felt while I was wallowing in terror or planning destruction.

“You need to understand guilt is the most useless emotion we have,” he said.

“How can any emotion be useless?” I asked.

“Guilt is useless. Anger is not. Fear is not. Anger, like fear, is a motivator. Guilt is us punishing ourselves for something that occurred in the past. And the past is something that cannot be altered. You are beating yourself up for nothing. So, what, specifically, do you feel guilty about?”

I thought about this for a while. Then it poured out of me. I felt guilty that my wife was sick instead of me. I felt guilty about how shit a father I was to my son while his mother’s illness occupied my every thought. I felt guilty for leading a life that might have contributed to her illness in some way. I felt guilty for not earning more money which might have got my wife better treatment. I felt guilty for not being able to fix any of this, heal her, and make things better. I felt guilty for all things I didn’t do and didn’t say, and now it may all be too late, and I was ever so guilty of every fucken thing I listed to him and more.

He wasn’t even looking at me as this poured out. And I wasn’t looking at him. Tears were streaming down my face, but I wasn’t actually crying. There were just tears. Fuck knows why. Anyway, I must have talked for a long time, and then I just stopped, and we sat in silence for a while.

“What’s driving your fear and anger is guilt,” he finally said quietly. He always spoke quietly. “It’s what underpins and feeds those two feelings. It’s how our brains try to heal themselves, and make sense of what we’re dealing with. Our brain understands guilt is a pointless emotion. So, it creates two non-useless and motivating emotions to address the underlying problem. In your case, those emotions are also very destructive. But the foundation upon which they are built is guilt. And feeling guilty cannot be more pointless.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“Can you go back in time and make amends?”

“No.”

“Is there anything you can do to counter whatever past wrongs you imagine you need to pay for with your guilt?”

“No.”

“So, what purpose does your guilt serve then?”

“You’re saying I should stop feeling guilty?”

“If it serves no purpose, why would you do it?”

“To be a better person?”

“You do not need to chew on your guilt or let it chew on you to do that, do you? If you feel you need to be a better person, then just make the conscious decision to be a better person.”

“It’s that easy?”

“I don’t recall using that word.”

I went to a few more session after that, and the therapist offered some suggestions, or “tools” as he called them, to help me on my way. These were just ways of looking at the things that speared into my head. Different perspectives, I guess. And perspective is far better than any kind of wisdom, I think.

I felt…well, better is not the right word. I felt more like I had some control of the demons that screamed at me, rather than just screaming back at them and feeling guilty.

I was still scared of what might happen to my wife. And how I would deal with that if it did. Hell, I live with that every day, so many years later. She is my everything in every way possible. But so is my son, and he certainly doesn’t need me howling at the moon and smearing myself with the blood of my enemies, no matter how much I imagine I do.

I have made major changes in my life. The fearsome anger comes back now and again, but it’s manageable. The unbridled fear also comes back, but I manage that as best I can when it does. And that’s the key. Management, not surrender and helplessness.

I have understood that guilt is pointless and worthless. I cannot change the past. I cannot make amends. I can just choose to do better. So, that’s what I work at.

And it’s a far better outcome than the alternative.

OR, IF SUBSCRIBING IS A BRIDGE TOO FAR, MAYBE JUST BUY ME A COFFEE

WARNING – THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE CONTAINS MANY RUDE WORDS. IF YOU ARE OF A SENSITIVE DISPOSITION AND SUCH WORDS CAUSE YOU ANGST, GO READ SOMETHING ELSE, STROKE YOUR CAT, OR GET A LARGE BLACK DOG UP INSIDE YOURSELF. BUT, SERIOUSLY. IF BAD LANGUAGE OFFENDS YOU, GO ELSEWHERE.

After many years of steel-eyed observation and close personal involvement, I feel I can finally shed light upon one of the greatest mysteries of our time.

It really is the most pressing question Australia is facing.

Why do large amounts of people continue to drive in the overtaking lane? They are clearly not overtaking anything. In the best-case scenario, they are just there, in the right-hand lane, utterly and willfully disregarding the fact they should be in the left-hand lane. And that is where they should be because that is how things must be so we may continue to live in a peaceful and productive society.

In the worst-case scenario, they are driving beside the vehicle they’re meant to be overtaking. And you cannot pass. You can flash your lights until your wiring loom melts, but no passing will happen – not by you and not by the person in the right-hand lane who is in front of you.

How many times have you come upon such a thing and asked: “

Why? Why are you doing that? What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just pull over to the left and let me through?”

The answer has been obvious all along. We just haven’t dared give voice to it, because to do so, would have vast social repercussions. Terrible realisations would have to be…um, well, realised.

But I dare. I dare because I have had enough, and now I want to see the part of world that has these people in it, burn. And I will clap as their flesh bubbles and chars, and as they scream and writhe in fiery agony. And it will please me greatly.

You see, the people who drive in the right-hand lane are not actually people at all. They are cunts. Irredeemable, appalling, scandalous cunts. I’m not even sure they are human cunts. They could well be the cunt of some animal, like a pig, or a rat, or a wildebeest. I have not seen enough beastly genitalia to draw a definite conclusion. And it doesn’t matter. I have dealt with enough hopeless cunts in my time to be sure these cunts are, indeed, cunts.

What the unholy bastard Jesus fuck else could they be?

That’s right. Nothing. They can only be a cunt, because only a cunt would drive or ride upon the roads in such a cuntly fashion.

This goes beyond the normal Cunt Identification Protocol many of us use to identify a cunt by the vehicle it is driving. Those things remain a constant.

Behold…

If you have pushbikes on your roof or bolted behind your car, you’re a cunt.

If you’re towing a caravan, you’re a cunt.

If you have a Magic Happens, an If You Can Read This You’re Too Close, a Cops Are Tops, or a Baby on Board sticker, you’re a cunt.

If you have an RM Willams bull-head decal pasted across your back window, you’re a cunt.

If you have any kind of Ned Kelly bullshit affixed to your rear glass, you’re a cunt.

If you drive a Tesla, you’re a cunt.

If you drive a Nissan Qashqai (what the fuck is that even?), you’re a cunt.

If you have any type of cutsie coloured numberplate on your car, you’re a cunt.

And it goes without saying the cunts driving in the right-hand lane are often the very same cunts already identified by the Cunt Identification Protocol. So, they are Cunts to the Power of Ten. But that doesn’t matter, just as it doesn’t matter what type of beastly cunt they actually are.

Because once Cunt Status has been attained, the level and type of cunt no longer matters. A simple cunt is every bit as shootable in the face as a cunt to the power of ten. They all hit the ground ruined-face-down with the same so-satisfying slap, and then they can be burned and the earth cleansed.

Also, understand the cuntness of the cunt driving in the right-hand lane permeates the entire inside of the vehicle. That is its nature. The entire inside of that vehicle is saturated with invasive eau-de-cunt because the amount of cunt in the driver is too vast for any one living creature to contain it, so it oozes into the bodies of the passengers, thus rendering them cunts as well.

The proof of this is simple to provide. If your passenger was not a cunt like you, he or she would tell you to de-cunt yourself out of the right-hand lane the second he or she detected you doing this.

But no. Most of the time, the male passenger is a cunt because he encourages the driver-cunt in his cuntness. You can see these passenger cunts turning their cunt-heads around to look at you as you loom up behind the car in the right-hand lane. And you can just hear what that passenger cunt is saying to the cunt driving. “Fuck him,” the cunt is saying to the other cunt.

The female cunts are just as bad and probably worse – but like I said, a cunt is a cunt is a cunt. The degree is really immaterial. They either have their hideous moll-feet up on the dash, and their fish-lipped slut-faces buried in their phones, so they are not even aware of what’s happening on the road. But they are attuned to the cunt driving because he’s the cunt that funds this sad bitch-cunt’s botox-and-fake-tits Insta lifestyle. And if the cunt wants to drive like the cunt he is, then the she-cunt beside him is his cheerleader.

It is obvious we are awash with cunts. The country is struggling to breath. Quite frankly, it was always going to come to this. Australia has turned into a nation where a disturbing majority of its people are utter cunts. And it is most demonstrably obvious by the way they drive.

It is not that they are unable to keep to the left. No physical defect prevents them from drifting back into the left lane or maybe depressing the accelerator a touch more, passing the car they are traveling beside, and then returning to the left lane. They are not blind and they understand how the mirrors in their car work. They either make a decision not to use these mirrors – the act of a cunt – or they choose to disregard what they see in them – another cunt-act.

So, it’s not like they’re unable to keep left. It’s that they don’t want to. These cunts have made a conscious decision to be cunts. They are not even acting like cunts. What they’re doing is not an act. They have simply become cunts. It was a conscious decision.

In every state and on every road with more than two lanes, cunts abound. It doesn’t matter if we are given three lanes, or six lanes, or eight lanes to drive in. These cunts could be given fifty lanes to drive in and they would still hog the overtaking lane, just because they are cunts. It’s what they do. It is their nature. They do not wish to be otherwise.

The fascist worm-farm that governs us and the granny-murdering filth it employs to stop us eating them all do nothing. And they do nothing because it suits the fascist worm-farm to rule over cunts. Because it likes cunts, and cunts are easily ruled. Non-cunts, on the other hand, relentlessly buck the goad. They do not submit willingly, and when they do, it is because they have been threatened with government-sanctioned violence. And we all know that violence is what keeps us all in line. The cunts love that. The non-cunts don’t. The cunts submit willingly. They have learned to appreciate and love the goad. It is the way of the cunt.

Why the fuck do you think our fascist worm-farm has invested billions in CCTV surveillance? They will tell you it’s for our collective safety. But it’s not. It is only and was ever only to keep the cunts safe. The worm-farm has only ever cared about them. Because it is only the servile, goad-loving cunts who keep the worm-farm in charge.

The rest of can get fucked, because we’re only standing in the way of the cunts.

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That’s some admission, huh? But it’s true. I have no fucken idea how to holiday because I’m just not wired like other people. I do not think I have even ever had a holiday in the terms most people understand, apart from when I was a child, and my parents took me somewhere and declared we were “on holiday”.

Please understand I do not view trips locally or overseas as holidays. They are trips. You are traveling. You are not relaxing. Spend five hours at Dubai airport on your way to Munich and tell me it’s relaxing.

The word “holiday”, if you didn’t know, is a th

inly disguised variant of “holy day” from the Old English “haligdæg”. It’s a day when you were forced to take a break from struggling to survive in the Dark Ages, to venerate and give thanks to an imaginary deity for not yet pitching you into a vat of fire, slaughtering your family, enslaving your village, and be-fucking your miserable serf-life far more than it was already be-fucked by simply living in the Dark Ages.

Us modern idiots regard a holiday as a break or a rest from work, where one is meant to relax and recharge.

And that, right the fuck there, is the problem I have.

I am a man, and the concept of “relax” is alien to my genetic programming. If a man relaxes, terrifying shit may happen to him, catch him unawares and unprepared, and gang-fuck his life. You drop your guard, you die. Or bad things happen to you and you might as well die because you have failed as a man, and there’s simply no point in going on.

The same can be said for this “recharge” bullshit. I am not a fucking Tesla. I spend two weeks relaxing (whatever the fuck that is), and I am not recharged. I am soft, and dopey, and ripe for slaughter.

I think this state of being has much to do with my innate wogness. You ever seen wog men on holidays? None of them are lying down sunbaking. The fuckers sunbaking on Adriatic beaches are all Poms. Male wogs are always doing something, or in a state of readiness to do something, if and when something needs doing.

I never saw my father lay down on a towel. He would spend his entire “holidays” sitting on a chair or a folding canvas stool, standing, walking, and always, ALWAYS, looking around, always aware, and always…well, “on”, I guess.

I feel that’s where I might have gotten this inability to holiday from. This is exactly the kind of primeval shit that’s passed down the male line – you’re a man and you have no fucken business lollygagging, daydreaming, or lounging around like some fetid, overfed eunuch. Stay on your game, or lose the fucking game.

All of this came as quite a surprise to my beloved wife, Lynette, when she took me on “holidays” to Nambucca Heads the other week.

“How did she not know about my inability to holiday?” you ask. Simple. We have never had such a thing. Seriously. We have gone away, we have gone on trips both bike and car, but in almost four decades of marriage, we have not once had a holiday where we did nothing but lay around and relax.

My wife, however, does know how to relax. She meditates and shit. It’s quite amazing to see. I meditate too. But I meditate about how awesome it would be to cut the face off an enemy with a cruel blade and spit into the wounds, and I meditate on carving superb corners on some wondrous bike. None of my meditations are associated with relaxation.

I do not know what relaxation is.

And then suddenly, here I was in Nambucca Heads, on a beach in a pair of shorts, with a towel over my shoulder, and expectations roiling around me.

My wife buttered herself in sunblock, spread her towel, and lay down upon it. After a few minutes she looked up at me.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Nothing, why?” I replied.

“Why are you standing there? Lay down. Relax.”

“What? Here? On the sand? Are you out of your mind? I’m not laying down here. Or anywhere.”

“Why not?”

“There’s a whole bunch of reasons. Firstly, I do not like lying down in public. If I lie down in public, something may happen, and I’m no longer of an age where I can simply leap to my feet and deal with it. Secondly, I can’t see anything from down there. I can’t see the car and I can’t see an approaching threat.”

“Why do you need to see the car?” she asked. “Will you forget what it looks like?”

“Very funny. What if someone tried to break into it? That shit happens all the time. There are scumbags everywhere. Even here. Just look at the rancid crim graffiti all over the rocks.”

“That’s the V Wall. People have painted their names on the rocks. Some of them are memorials.”

“And most of them are just bogan knob-lords commemorating some piss-fest they’ve had. Fucken place looks like a Crip-tagged LA overpass.”

“So, you’re going to just stand there for three days?”

“No. I will sit. On that rock over there. Now and again, I will swim, because the sea cleanses me and I am a strong and able swimmer, but mostly I will sit on that rock and guard you.”

“Guard me from what?”

“From whatever horrors may decide to assail you. Are you not listening? There are fucken monsters in this world! I am all that stands between them and you.”

“Oh my God, are you listening to yourself?”

“Always. I always listen to myself. And myself is telling me to sit here on this rock and keep watch.”

And that is exactly what I did for three days. As a result, my wife got the chance to relax. It was amazing to see. She very much needed to get away for a bit. She enjoyed our holiday very much.

So did I. I had a great time. I sat on my rock and watched everything. I swam in the sea. A lot. The sea is a wonderful thing. I ate prawns and drank beer. These are also wonderful things, and in concert with the sea, and some rock-sitting, shit becomes transcendental. I laughed. I was convivial, and friendly, and easy to get along with, so my wife was pleased. And I got to catch up with my brother Deano and his wife, Jane, which I really need to do more often.

But I did not relax. Fuck that.

No? Too bad. I’m gonna tell you anyway. My right shin is throbbing like teenage erection, and I need to rest it by sitting in front of my keyboard until the swelling goes down a touch.

I know you’re all thinking: What’s the fucker moaning about now? He gets to ride all the latest bikes, the lucky fuck, and here he is bitching about some scars. Bet you he’s crashed again and is having a whine.

It’s not that. I have not crashed again. I rarely crash. I am not, as such yutzs are called in our industry by the long-suffering motorcycle importers, a “frequent flyer”. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I’ve troweled a test bike in 30 years of doing these reviews.

My scars are for other reasons altogether, and they are both physical and emotional. And no, I do not need a hug. Go fuck yourself.

The scars I bear are all from being unfamiliar with whatever bike I may have in the shed at any given time. Unlike normal people who own a bike or two, ride them a lot, and are familiar with how the mounting, riding, and dismounting happens, I get something new and unfamiliar every few weeks.

And my learning curve is, perforce, steep and cruel. As it should be. I am not, as they say in the think-tanks, here to fuck spiders. Nor am I to be pitied like some limbless street beggar. Hence the scars I bear. So heroically, I might add.

My most recent scarring was thanks to a lovely sissy bar Harley fitted to its 2024 Road Glide. Great things, sissy bars. Bitches love them because they minimise the chances of sliding off the back when you kick it in the guts. The bike, of course, not her. And I love sissy bars because I can strap shit to them, and also because I hate having to go back for the outraged traffic-disrupting bitch, now all scarred up and heaps less hot, and in a foul mood as well.

None of that happened this time. What happened instead was I rammed my shin into the sissy bar as I went to get on the bike. I did this because the last Road Glide I had did not have a sissy bar. And in my brain, this was the one I was getting on. Never mind the last one was orange and black, and this one was white. What mattered was me falling to the ground and keening like a gutted gibbon until my dignity kicked in and I got up to check if any bastard had witnessed this, and if so, how quickly I could kill him or her.

Now my throbbing swollen shin is full of old, stale, pain-blood which will eventually disperse and I will move on with my life, albeit scarred some more.

Harley has certainly given my right leg a battering over the years, hearkening back to when I stupidly fitted a kickstarter to my Shovel. That dumbness did leave actual scars on my leg, as well as givinng me a savage infection because I ignored the gouged flesh and carried on thanks to the excellent Class A drugs I was full of at the time.

In more recent times, Harley’s tendency to fit that bullhorn-shaped air-intake on the right-hand side of its engine has brutalised my right leg quite a bit. This mostly happens when my usual leopard-like grace evades me, and I dunder-clump my leg into it each time I take off from a set of lights. Yes, that’s why I’m not smiling in pictures. No bull-horn-equipped Harley rider is.

But it’s not just Harleys that have taken their toll on my body. Lots of bikes have bitten me, ripped at my flesh, and caused all sorts of bruising and swelling – and all because I was, at the time, unfamiliar with them. Owners of these bike will only damage themselves like this once, or maybe twice if they’re really dumb, and then they remember and don’t smash their ankle into the footpeg trying to access the side-stand. Their brain has built a new synaptic link. But no sooner has my brain created this link, than I am given a new bike which renders those links redundant. And the battering begins anew.

However, the emotional scars I bear are much worse. But I am stronger for them - because the hate they generate is a source of strength. Take the whole luggage concept. On your bike, you have already worked out how to strap shit onto it. You may even have bought bespoke gear that suits your bike and your travels. Good for you, fucker. That is not how it works for me.

Each time I get a new bike to review and I decide I am going away for a few days, I have to work out how to strap my belongings to the bastard. This gets harder and harder each year, as fewer and fewer bikes provide the rider with places to anchor straps.

And I have a lot of straps. Both Andy Strapz and ocky straps, and some strange-looking hooked things I found in the Bunnings bargain trolley a while back. And my skill-level in applying them is, quite frankly, fucking awesome. I am rarely defeated. But those defeats are getting more frequent, and they mount up, and there are nights when I cannot sleep for the shame and hatred that eats at me.

The first bike that ravaged my psyche in this way was MV Agusta’s stunning F4. Yes, I did manage to strap a Gearsack to the back of the cunt, but it didn’t really work and the Gearsack proceeded to relentlessly crush me and my beloved cock-and-balls package into the tank all the way to Phillip Island and back. Anything you strap to your bike needs to not move. And for it not to move, it needs four separate anchor points. The F4, and a whole bunch of bikes after it (Panigale, R1, M1000XR, Aprilia RSVR and Tuono, Moto Guzzi Mandello…and the list goes on), just don’t provide the anchor points.

I have created entire rat’s nests of straps, anchored on the rear-footpeg mounts, looped under the tailpiece (not recommended), and even hooked into spare numberplate holes (yes, I maybe made them with a drill, sorry not sorry), and then, when my efforts didn’t really work, kicked all my shit all over the garage or the side of the road in a childish temper tantrum.

You have no idea how emotionally damaged all that has made me. Which is why I am telling you how emotionally damaged all that has made me. Too bad if you don’t care, you heartless monster. You should.

Put aside the fact my shins and ankles have been Catholic Church-level abused. If they were altar boys, the papist rapists would be paying me damages. My very fucking soul is scarred. My psyche is a gibbering, straitjacketed hate-clown. Money will not change that.

I have found myself having to wear a backpack. A fucking backpack! Like some dumb and broken beast of burden, I am forced to cram whatever shit I might need for a few days away into a rucksack and ride on. I hate the fucken things. I hate that so many riders think they are a good thing. Clearly, these mongs have not crashed with a rucksack on their backs – a rucksack they have stupidly filled with hard things like cameras, water bottles, penis-pumps, and anal hog-dildos for their Sunday arvo ride up their local cock-road.

My evil side actually wishes them harm when it sees them. It wishes them to ponder their backpack-filled-with-hard-things idiocy as they lie in a hospital bed with their powdered spines and now useless arms, legs, and dicks.

You can clearly see how emotionally unstable I am. Very little humanity remains. But that is the price, I guess. And I pay it each time the invoice comes in.

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“I don’t have a soul, so hah!”

Sure, shithead. I probably don’t either. I’m using that word to refer to whatever life-force, me-lizard, or secret-gene-thingo inside all of us which provides that unique human life-spark which makes us feel all ever so special and unique.

But that bit isn’t really important in this piece. What is important, nay crucial, is our surrender. And we all do it. We all give up from time to time.

Life forces surrender upon us all.

At some stage, life will kick the ever-living shit out of you, physically, mentally, spiritually, or all three and some others as well. No-one I know or have ever met is without some scars from those kickings. And I don’t give a fuck about those odious Insta influencers, dead-eyed billionaires, or the manifold bags of scum who virtue-signal on social media and are endlessly posting up images to show the world how utterly perfect their lives are.

I can assure you those lives are not perfect. No-one’s life is. Those fuckers can and do get the fuck kicked out of them by life as well. And they do fall the hardest when that happens. Which is what you get for flying too close to the sun, Former Prince Andrew…oops, I meant Icarus.

Sure, life might be great for a period. But inevitably, it will turn to shit. Then it will be good again. Life, after all, is an ongoing Sine curve. There are peaks and troughs. Good times and bad times and even pure shit times.

And when the bad times come, and the hard rain is falling, we all surrender.

And that’s OK. You can put the heavy burden down when you can no longer carry it. Sink down onto your knees next to the horrid fucker and weep those bitter tears of failure and defeat. It does not matter.

It’s what happens next that matters. And it matters more than anything else in the world. Down there on your knees, battered, defeated, and too fist-fucked to even raise your arms in surrender, you have two choices. And only two. There is no third.

You can stay where you are. Broken. Head bowed. Done, fucked, and given up.

Or you can get up. Get the fuck up, pick up that burden, and march the fuck on.

The Serbs don’t have a word for surrender. They use the word “predaya”. It means betrayal.

Because to them, and to me, when you surrender, you are committing the ultimate act of betrayal. You are betraying yourself. And there is nothing worse that that.

Look around you. Look how many people you know have surrendered. Life has broken them. They have laid down their burden and stayed on their knees.

They have become alcoholics or drug addicts. They have put on weight and have become fat cunts. They have withdrawn from the world, and they live these foul, empty lives, riddled with guilt at their surrender, and covering it all up with booze, or drugs, or food.

Actually, they no longer live. They merely exist.

How many of us are functioning alcoholics? You know exactly what I am talking about. Got to have a few beers or wines after work just to wind down, right? Every day and then double up on the weekend. Just to unwind, because you know, you deserve it. It’s a reward to baste yourself in alcohol, right?

But somehow, in your head, you’re not an alcoholic? Fuck off. You so are.

Fuck off, yes, I am preaching. But I know exactly what I am talking about. I used to do all that and more. My ability to sink piss and snort and smoke drugs is what I told myself defined me as a Man. I looked up to fuckers who could drink a bottle of Jack Daniels in one night, snort three grams of gak, and round off the spiky emotional bits with joint after joint.

The majority of my friends are now and always have been functioning alcoholics. I still love them and they will always be my friends, and they are what they are. Some of them are drug addicts as well. And some of them are wobbling, diabetes-ridden fat cunts, who long ago gave up any hope of ever being anything else.

All of the above have chosen the path of least resistance. It’s just easier to do what has always been done, and live how you have always lived, and…well, you know.

Yeah. I do know. It’s easy to surrender. You just give up and it all stops. All the pain and suffering of carrying that immense burden stops the second you put it down and surrender.

Except it doesn’t.

Your burden is just replaced with another burden. And that burden is the piece of gutless, give-up shit you turned into the second you surrendered and put the original burden down.

Now you have to carry yourself. You have to carry your piss-addled, drug-fucked, sugar-packed, O-Woe-Is-Me self until you die gagging and moaning on some wee-stained hospital bed. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to end up dying in hospital.

Your life is not life. It’s an existence ruled by the cruelest of all masters. You. Because no-one is as cruel to you as you. You know exactly where it hurts the most and you know exactly how to press those buttons and pick at those scabs until they hurt much more.

And so you do. There’s not much else to do down there on your knees. But because it hurts so much, you take the edge off with drinking/drugs/and being a fat cunt.

That is the price you pay when you surrender.

Male or female, it applies to both sexes. We all surrender.

But not all of us get the fuck back up off our knees.

And of course, what those kneelers are very good at, apart from giving up, is making excuses and justifications for why they remain on their knees.

“I was abused! I suffered trauma! I am injured! I have suffered a great loss! The world’s a terrible place! No-one cares anyway, so why should I? It’s just too hard to stop drinking/eating shit/doing drugs and maybe giving enough of a shit about myself to look after myself a bit!”

You are crying one hell of a river down there on your knees, fuckhead. And the only one listening to your shit, is you, you kneeling cunt. The only person that shit makes any sense to, is you. And it only makes sense to you, because it justifies your abject surrender beautifully. You fucken piece of shit.

A cunt just climbed Mt Everest with no fucking legs! In May of 2026, double-amputee, Rustam Nabiev, made history by crawling and pulling himself to the summit of Everest using only his arms. No prosthetics. Not a hint of self-betrayal or surrender in that effort, I’m thinking.

And there is a long list of amazing people who have overcome unimaginable-to-most difficulties, like Rustam did.

But there is a far, far bigger list of fuckers who have just surrendered, stating they are broken by difficulties that are not in the same universe as Rustam’s. Or a Death Camp Survivor’s. Or a parent who has lost his or her children. Or…well, you get the idea.

These are all people just like you and me. They are not special, and they would deny they are special if asked. They just picked up their burden, shouldered it, and marched on. That does not make them special. Making that choice does not make anyone special.

All they did was not surrender. That was the choice they made.

Was it a hard choice? Fuck, yeah. It was the hardest choice anyone can ever make. But nothing worth having is easily got. As if you didn’t know.

Was it the right choice? Double-fuck, yeah!

Go on. Ask me why it was the right choice.

Simple. The easy thing is to stay on your knees. Stay there and exist in abject misery, salving your internal guilty screaming with booze, drugs, food, whatever-the-fuck. You load up enough on that, and the guilty screaming gets really soft and hard to hear.

But it never stops. Guilt is like that. You stay guilty, and you don’t like feeling guilty, and so you never stop assuaging that guilt

Guess what? You will always feel like that and the guilty screaming will not stop until you get the fuck off your fucken knees, pick up your fucken burden and get the fuck on with it.

Make that choice. The silence will be beautiful. I promise.

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This is the first chapter in my fourth book. If you like my work, you may easily acquire my books at the following link

https://www.shocknawe.com.au/

Yes, I ship all over the world. Yes, there are naughty words in the books. Yes, you will be appalled. Hopefully, you’ll also be amused. And I get to eat food. This starving author bullshit is no joke.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN…

Every great love story has a beginning. And this is ours. I offer this up so you’ll have some kind of context to put the rest of this book, SH!T MY WIFE SAYS - THE DIALOGUE OF A MARRIAGE, in.

This story first appeared in my third book, The Wisdom Of The Road Gods, and it was very well-received because I did not end up in gaol. As a consequence, I felt my readers would like me to spin-off a series of short exchanges between my wife and myself which I would post on my social pages for shits and giggles.

I’m not sure how many people got the shits with these brief insights into our relationship, but I felt they got a lot of giggles.

“You should write a book about this stuff!” many of them demanded.

So, I did, and here it is, and off we go…

Our courtship was…well, unusual, in so many ways.

Lynette’s only experience with motorcycles was being doubled once or twice around Mosman on some mad teenager’s RD250 when she was barely legal. When she met me, she was working in a bank and she’d only seen people like me on TV whenever the police called for us to be herded into compounds and shot for posing an unacceptable risk to the social order of Australia.

For my part, I think it was the fact she wore short skirts, smelled like a French fantasy and had eyes that melted my brain, that sealed the deal.

I had firmly resolved to make our first date special. And I succeeded spectacularly…

THE FIRST DATE

It was a glorious summer night in Sydney, and I was King of the World and Master of the Universe. At any moment, my rat-fuck Shovelhead Harley-Davidson could explode, shower me in hot oil and ruin everything, but as far as I could tell that evening, it was just bringing the thunder. The bike was running like a Swiss watch, its lumpy idle almost metronomic in regularity with the odd Shovel burp-miss thrown in now and again – just to make sure I never got too complacent about our relationship.

And since all was currently peachy under my handlebars, I felt I could successfully wrestle a grizzly bear should one appear at a set of lights.

I had just picked up Lynette from her flat in Lane Cove, and we were headed into town so I could give her not so much a taste, but a solid, three-course meal of what this outlaw motorcycle business was all about.

I figured what I was serving was irresistible. A big, criminally loud Shovelhead with 24-inch ape-hangers sitting on six-inch risers, fat, baffle-free shotgun pipes barking harsh staccato explosions at the night, a grim black paint-job with a little chrome here and there to give me something to polish now and again, shitty tyres, good oil (mostly still inside the engine), and a sticker on the battery cover that said: “Touch My Bike And Die”. Oh, and a bitch-pad of exquisite cruelty. Now, I’m pretty sure you can’t call those tiny lumps of sponge-and-vinyl where your pillion sits “bitch-pads” in these enlightened #metoo times. But we called them that back then, and I’m only being authentic to the era.

So the bike was on-message. I could only hope to match it.

But I didn’t want to overdo me in case she thought I was up myself. So I figured some clean jeans, a Harley-Davidson wife-beater, my club colours, a studded belt, all my rings and chains, and the tattoos on my arms and chest should do the trick. In the interests of peace and harmony, I left my hunting knife at home. I’d checked myself out a few times in shop windows on my way to her flat, and figured this was about as irresistible as irresistible got.

I had met Lynette a few weeks previously when one of the prospects brought her and her girlfriend along to the El Rancho Hotel in North Ryde.

Her girlfriend was known to some of the blokes from various card-games, and as such, was of no interest to me.

Lynette, on the other hand, captivated me.

In a world where all the girls wore jeans and boots, she was in a tiny, super-tight skirt and killer heels. She was perfectly made-up, her smile radiant, her hair devastatingly blonde, and when she shook my hand, I felt like kissing hers. Instead, I told her she could go and buy me a drink if she wanted to sit at my table. Her eyes flashed brief fire, then she smiled and went to the bar.

“I love her,” I said to Marcus as we both watched her slink away. “I will kill people in her name.”

Marcus nodded. “She sure can walk in heels,” he said.

“Stop looking, cunt. You’ll be the first to die.”

A few drinks later, after I returned her shout because I was not a totally uncultured swine, Lynette felt like dancing.

Now I dance like a thousand motherfuckers. I really do.

But when you’re in an outlaw club, dancing does not happen in public. When outlaws dance, they dance in the privacy of their clubhouses and it’s usually with their wives or girlfriends, or maybe a stripper, and it’s not really a spectator sport. Sometimes, we would kind-of-dance with our brothers. We’d throw our arms on each other’s shoulders and join Bon, or Barnsey, or George Thorogood, for a full-throated verse or two while stomping our feet like Bronze Age tribesmen after a good hunt.

So while I very much wanted to dance with Lynette, it was just not going to happen in the pub. I would remain, grim, staunch, menacing, and panty-droppingly cool, leaning on the tall table at the edge of the dance-floor, and she could dance.

And great shuddering Mother of Jesus could she dance.

It was mesmerising.

“Stop looking, cunts,” I muttered to Marcus and two or three other members who had gathered to watch her.

“Sorry,” said Marcus. “It’s just…”

“I know, I know.”

“Fucken hell…” Vinnie muttered.

“Go check the bikes,” I said. “All of you.”

“I might stay,” Marcus said, as a large bloke in a footy jumper bopped up to Lynette and started dancing with her.

She turned her back on him and flashed me a smile. He boogied his way in front of her.

“Want I should fix this?” Marcus asked.

“Oh fuck no,” I said, putting down my beer. “This is all mine to fix.”

So I went over to where Lynette and her unwanted dance partner were doing their respective things, tapped him on the shoulder, and punched him in the throat.

He fell down, some glasses broke, some people made some shocked noises, but the music didn’t stop, and when the footy jumper levered himself to his feet, I punched him again.

“Leave her alone,” I grunted, smiled at Lynette who was quite frankly looking a little horrified, and went back to my drink.

She kept on dancing, and I only had to belt two more disco kings before the blokes in the pub came to understand that this girl was to dance by herself.

About midnight, she gave me her phone number, pecked me on the cheek, and caught a cab home. I stood staring after the cab with her perfume frying my brain.

The next day I asked her out to dinner. I had every intention of taking her to flash restaurant and being treated like trash by the waiters because I didn’t know what wine went with what food, and that cheese is not ordered before a meal.

“Can’t we go for a ride instead?” she asked.

“That would be my favourite thing to do,” I replied. “I prefer riding to eating. But no dancing, OK?”

“I thought you liked the way I dance?”

She had me there.

And on the way into town, with her legs wrapped around me and her perfume once again Kryptoniting my senses at every set of lights, she had me there too.

As we sat at the lights on George Street, waiting to turn left and head up to Kings Cross, another thunderous Harley pulled up next to us.

“I thought that was fucken you!” Skinhead, a member of the Mobshitters MC, yelled over the artillery barrage of our exhausts. He too had a girl on the back – all legs and heels and hair, just like mine.

And now there were two Kings of the World and Masters of the Universe sharing the same set of traffic lights. People stared, but since we were the very avatars of insouciant outlaw cool and it was expected of them. Our girls were hot, our bikes were loud, our mien was haughty, and our intentions were entirely unpredictable. Except the drag-racing bit.

That was entirely predictable.

I told Lynette to hang on, felt her grip me tighter with her thighs and arms, her face nuzzled into my back, and as soon as the lights went green and Skinhead and I had eased around the corner onto Park Street, we opened all the taps.

Now I gotta be honest. Harleys don’t go all that fast compared to Japanese and Italian weapons. But they sure sound like they do.

And it’s all relative. When you’re flat-stick racing through traffic on a thundering, ill-handling, poorly-braked Shovelhead with your arms stretched out before you at head-height, wearing only a leather vest, and your new girlfriend is all bare-legs, bra-top, and a paper-thin but very sexy jacket, shit doesn’t get much more exciting.

These days, Harleys are viewed as old men’s motorcycles. They are mainly ridden by aged blokes with fat wives who like to dress up like they think outlaws dress. Some kind of existential crisis drives them to play pretend in this way.

I have always held the view the time to buy a Harley is when you’re young, strong, a little unhinged, and your girlfriend is hot enough to set fireworks off. That’s what sells Harleys, and that’s what sold me.

And that night, as Skinhead and I hammered our way down William Street towards the Cross, threading the needle through lines of cars, dodging death by swerving and aiming and anticipating, and screaming in our heads, the girls hunched behind us like petrified koalas, my life was incandescent with righteousness.

Innumerable nails were hammered into the coffin of that most vile chimera – motorcycling respectability – as Skinhead and I weaved our bikes down William Street and hauled up at a set of lights just before the Boulevarde Hotel.

He lane-split to the front of the traffic in the far-right lane, and I lane-split to the front in the middle lane. We exchanged meaningful looks. No-one had won our impromptu race yet. The uphill part of William Street remained and if the Road Gods smiled and turned all the lights green we would be able to hit close to one-hundred-and-sixty kilometres per hour in our run up to the famous Coca-Cola sign. We both revved our bikes in anticipation and stared at the lights, waiting for them to go green.

I sensed more than saw the car a little behind and to my left idle up beside me. But I turned my head when his window went down and the driver said: “Hey, dickhead.”

My first thought was it’s a cop in an unmarked car. But then I saw the girl in a sparkly cocktail dress laughing in the seat beside him. This was no cop.

“How tough are you?” he said.

Well, that’s what I thought he said. It’s hard to hear people speaking to you when your bike sounds like the bombing of Stalingrad and you’re preparing to drag-race your mate. But I heard very clearly what he said next because he’d stuck his head out the window to make sure I did.

“You fucken cunts are soft as shit without all your mates,” he informed me. “Fucken fags.”

This was a problem. Or several problems, actually.

If I’d heard him, then Lynette had also heard him.

I was about to have a drag-race, so Skinhead did not hear him, but he wasn’t paying attention anyway since he was staring at the lights waiting for them to change so he could dump the clutch on his Super Glide and beat me up the hill.

I was holding my clutch in, so my left hand could not be deployed as a stinging back-hander. And getting my Shovelhead into neutral after I had just been lashing it like a Turkish prisoner was not on the cards.

“Have a go, ya cunt!” he then barked, smashing his fist on the side of his car, a very nice and new Commodore, from memory.

As much as I wanted to have a go, I couldn’t. My bike would have lurched gracelessly and stalled, and then there was the whole process of putting the side-stand down, getting off, making sure Lynette got off, and so on.

So instead of having a go, I throated up a rich chunk of gelatinous phlegm and spat in his face.

And then a lot of terrible things happened very quickly.

As my warm boogery spit made its way down his face, his expression went from smirking sass to appalled disgust. To my horror, he started to turn his steering wheel quickly to the right.

He’s going to drive into me, I thought, and flicked my eyes at the lights, which that second flashed amber, which meant the lights facing me would flash green very shortly. I heard Skinhead twist his throttle, raising revs in preparation for dumping the clutch, so I dumped mine first and shot through the still-red lights which went green as I was halfway through the intersection. Behind me I could vaguely hear Skinhead feeding his bike all the petrol it could swallow and I remember thinking he must have been cussing me out for a cheating, light-jumping bastard.

I rocketed across the intersection and immediately pulled the bike in nose-first in front of a parked car, hopped the kerb, and stopped.

“What’s wrong?” Lynette asked, looking quite alarmed. Her beautiful big eyes were quite a deal bigger when she took her sunnies off.

I took off my helmet and handed it to her.

“Get off and go and stand over there,” I said pointing behind her where a line of people waited to get into the Boulevarde Hotel’s top-floor disco.

I didn’t see she if she complied, because I was watching the bloke in the car lock his brakes and come screaming to a sideways stop on William Street. Behind him cars were beeping their horns, but he didn’t care. He came bouncing out of the car followed by his sparkly girlfriend.

He was wearing one of those long duster coats the singer, Johnny Farnham, had made fashionable as he clawed his way back to the top of the Australian charts, and it swirled magnificently as he stepped onto the footpath. The sleeves on the coat were pre-rolled and he certainly looked like he meant business. He was about my size, so not small, and I remember thinking he might have a knife or a gun hidden under that nouveau-country swag. He’d have to, surely? His actions made no sense otherwise. Here I was, in full outlaw battle-rattle – which is like having a big sign over your head flashing “FUCK OFF, IDIOT!” – and yet this bloke seemed intent on disregarding this. To my mind he was either a bona fide martial arts hunter-killer, or he was armed for bear.

Damn good thing I’d been prepped and happy to fight a slavering grizzly that evening, huh? We were clearly a match made in heaven.

He stopped two metres away, a smirk plastered on his face and his hands balled into fists. Yeah, this was so going down.

“You got a knife?” he asked, somewhat bizarrely. Was this to be a knife-fight if I said yes?

I just shook my head. It is best to be truthful in these situations, lest your bluff is called.

His smirk got smirkier. He closed the distance between us and then hugged me, like I imagine he imagined a fighting bear would do.

And then he shook me gently from side to side. It was actually more of a rocking motion.

It also didn’t make any sense to me. I was expecting a whirlwind of fury and violence. Instead, it kinda felt like he wanted to dance and maybe cup my buttocks a bit.

I furrowed my brow and braced my legs apart in case his rather gentle rocking was a prelude to some kind of judo bullshit which would see me suplexed onto the footpath. But he just kept on rocking. And he wasn’t hugging me all that hard, and that was when it all went down the toilet for him.

I reached forward, grabbed the sides of his Farnham coat and pulled hard upwards. This broke his hug and sat his arms above his head in a knot of sleeves. Then I head-butted him in the face. I reckon my thick Serb forehead got him just where the bottom of his nose joined his upper lip. I felt the crack of cartilage joining Jesus in Heaven, so I did it again. And then I let go of him and he crumpled to the ground in a flap of coat and quite a deal of blood.

“Blarghlguk,” he said, his eyes rolling wildly in his split face, which looked a bit like a watermelon that had been dropped on the floor.

I could hear girls screaming and horns tooting, but they seemed far away.

And then something went click in my head, and I dropped down on top of the flapping-coat man whose arms were still trapped above his head, put a knee either side of his torso, and everyone’s night immediately got exponentially more colourful.

I’m not sure how many times I punched him, but it was quite a few. There was a brief pause to the proceedings when his girlfriend jumped on my back and tried clawing at my eyes, but I just shrugged her off onto the footpath where she resumed screaming and weeping. Weirdly, I remember her smelling nice, but not as nice as Lynette.

I couldn’t see where Lynette was, but I wasn’t really looking. My entire focus was on punching the bloke who’d tried to drive his car into us. I was furious, which is not the best frame of mind to be fighting in. But then I wasn’t fighting. I was administering punishment.

“Mate, mate, please. He’s had enough,” came a voice from behind me. The switch in my head went the other way and I stopped pounding.

Two big bouncers had come around to the front of where I was kneeling astride the dancing bear in the Farnham coat. Their hands were raised, palms outward, in the universal sign of non-aggression.

“Mate, please, mate,” one of them stammered. “He’s done.”

I stood up. My hands were wet. My face felt damp. I was puffing like a train, my chest heaving as I sucked in Sydney’s warm night air. I looked down at what had happened, and the bouncer was right. Old mate was certainly done. It was a good thing the bouncers intervened. A few more punches and he would have been quite over-done, which would not have been a good outcome.

Behind the bouncers I saw Lynette. She was clutching her tiny shoulder bag and my helmet, her eyes like saucers, and she was trembling.

“Get the fuck out of my way,” I growled.

The two bouncers immediately stepped back, their hands still up.

I took four steps towards Lynette, while behind me the bouncers and the screeching girlfriend immediately dropped to the ground around the bloke I’d just uglied up.

“You OK?” I asked her.

She nodded, still trembling.

“Are…are you?” she stammered.

I stared at my hands. It looked like I’d been washing them in buckets of blood. I could see small flecks of flesh caught in the rings I was wearing, and my arms were red most of the way to my elbows.

“I’m fine,” I grated. “Get on the bike. We have to go. Now.”

Five seconds later, I was flying up William Street to the Coca-Cola sign. Skinhead was long gone. Caught in the imperative of our race, he’d probably powered on, thinking he was winning because you can’t see shit out of a hard-revving Harley’s mirrors.

I turned left onto the main street of the Cross and rode as fast as I could through the crawling, gawking traffic.

The road kinked left at the fountain and the traffic eased and a few short minutes later I pulled into the Shell servo at Woolloomooloo.

“You need petrol?” Lynette asked.

“No,” I grinned, holding up my war-arms. “I need a tap.”

“Make sure you do your face too,” she said. “I’m not kissing you goodnight otherwise.”

A little scrubbing and rubbing later and I was ready to be kissed goodnight.

Lynette was ready for a drink. She was still very shaken up, and asked if I could buy her a double Scotch.

“I can’t stop shaking,” she told me.

In the distance, I could hear sirens. We were not all that far from William Street, and I was in no doubt who those sirens were screaming for. I did briefly think they might have been chasing Skinhead, who was maybe still racing me somewhere near Vaucluse by now, but figured it was probably me.

I rode to the nearby Tilbury Hotel, parked the bike, and we went inside. I ordered two double Johnnie Walker Reds – nothing but the best for my new girlfriend – and we sat at a small table near the door.

Lynette knocked hers back in one hit and asked for another. I fell further in love with her. But just as I was about to go to the bar, a massive brawl broke out in the pub. A bunch of beefy Islanders were going at it, tables, chairs, and fists the size of hams were flying, glasses were breaking, and the publican was calling someone on the phone.

“Are you some kind of shit-magnet?” Lynette demanded as I shepherded her protectively out the door.

“Me?” I blinked.

“Yes, you.”

“Fuck no,” I lied, as the faint sounds of enthusiastic battle raged in the pub behind us. “This is a very unusual evening for both of us.”

Our wonderful little moment was interrupted by the sound of approaching sirens.

“We should go,” Lynette said, putting on her helmet.

“You’re really getting the hang of this outlaw stuff, huh?”

The smile she gave me was heart-stopping.

And it still works on me to this day.

So that’s how we met and what happened on our first date. The following years have seen us reach a point in our lives that seems to approximate the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine practice by the USA and the Soviet Union. Except our is entirely based on a love so utterly incandescent it hurts me to think about it, or how I could possibly exist without her.

I have told her time and again that without her I would be living a cardboard box under a freeway overpass. She would certainly be better off without me, though she shrugs that off whenever I tell her. But it’s true.

As you shall see…

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I have to tell you what an irredeemable piece of motorcycling shit I am. It is truly disgraceful how easily and eagerly I debase myself at the rubbery feet of a motorcycle at every opportunity.

I have to tell you what an irredeemable piece of motorcycling shit I am. It is truly disgraceful how easily and eagerly I debase myself at the rubbery feet of a motorcycle at every opportunity. I’ve always known it. Even from the start.

But it really became obvious a few years ago on the side of an empty country road in the middle of a warm summer night – which is where all the very best revelations always come to a man.

That afternoon, I was down in my work car-park with my jaw on the floor. I was actively considering sending my pants down there to join it, and immediately then proceeding upon some indescribable act of metal-on-flesh carnality and the security cameras be damned.

The late Ken Wootton, the then editor of Australian Motorcycle News, had got his hands on an MV Agusta Senna and had parked it, like a rabid cockteasing whore, right where I would see it when I came down to get my bike and go home.

Back then, and for a brief and incandescent moment in the arc of motorcycling awesomeness, the matte black MV Agusta Senna, was the fastest 750cc bike on the planet. But it was also the most divinely beautiful bike I had ever seen – and pretty much still is. I hope the designer, Massimo Tamburini, is being fellated like a Turkish sultan in whatever part of Motorcycle Heaven he is now residing in for creating such a masterpiece.

(QUICK FACT: The F4 750 Senna was released in 2002. Built purely to raise money for the Instituto Ayrton Senna, a charity founded by Ayrton Senna to aid the children and young people of Brazil, the Senna was a limited production run of 300 bikes. The Senna shared the 101 kW engine of the Evo 02 but with a higher redline of 13900rpm, and top speed estimated at 282 km/h . The Senna also had some suspension upgrades and some carbon-fibre bodywork.)

So I gawped at this dark Italian vision like a retard. I stroked its velvet-black paint with adoration and I must have looked at it from a thousand different angles – each one more visually striking to me than the one before.

“Fuck me…fuck me…” I kept muttering to myself as I inched around it. Not because I wanted it to fuck me, but because that was the appropriate thing to say at that point in time.

Then I went back upstairs and fronted Ken.
“Give me the keys to that Senna or I will kill you like a dog,” I said.

Ken grinned. He was as irredeemable a piece of motorcycling shit as I was. And he knew what was going on.
“You can only have it for tonight. It’s the only one in the country, and I have to shoot it tomorrow and then get it back to Feeney.” (Paul Feeney was the importer of MV Agusta back then.)

“You’re wasting time talking when you could be handing over the keys,” I hissed at him.

He handed me the keys and I didn’t even bother taking the lift. I flew down the fire stairs, jammed the key into the ignition and hit the starter button.

It cranked for a second then fired and filled the garage with a rasping, muted proto-howl. It sounded like barely sealed damnation demanding release, and it was completely unlike any idle I had ever heard this side of a racetrack.

I blinked at it. Then I saw the Arrows logo on the pipes peering out from under the rear cowl.

“It’s got an Arrows race system on it,” said Ken’s voice behind my shoulder. He had caught the lift and had joined me in the garage.

“Shut up,” I hissed. “I’m listening to God.”

Then I road home through Peak Hour traffic while Tamburini’s midnight masterwork hunted and growled and rasped and burned my leg and cramped my back like a demon’s claw.

I rang Brother Silverback.
“I’ll meet you at the bridge at 11pm,” I said.
“What do I need to bring?”
“Nothing. I have everything we need.”

Dinner was a rushed affair that evening. I had chores that needed doing, but I really couldn’t focus on anything but the slice of utter dark waiting for me in the garage. My wife was well aware of my irredeemable shittery.
“I have to go out for a bit,” I told her at 10pm.
“I know,” she said.

I grabbed three fat joints, a hip-flask of good whiskey and was on my way to the Colo River Bridge on the Putty Road before her kiss had dried on my cheek.
Brother Silverback was waiting.

“Fuck me…” he said when I turned the ignition off. And no, it was not an invitation. It’s just what one irredeemable piece of motorcycling shit says to another piece of irredeemable motorcycling shit when beholding something divine.

So we then stood around it. And we walked around it. And we squatted on our haunches like cavemen contemplating a hunt and looked at it. We smoked a joint. We drank some whiskey. We swore a bit. We pointed at things on the Senna we were seeing for the first time or admiring for the thousandth time.
Then we took turns riding it.

The night was warm, the moon was waxing and the sips of whiskey and puffs of hooch had combined their benisons in a most appropriate way.

That hour or so Brother Silverback and I shared with the Senna are branded into my soul. I would sit on the Armco as he came down the hill through the gears, listening to the otherworldly yowl being spat out the Arrows system, the volume increasing as he came past me through the gears and along the straight, then fading off as he climbed out of the river valley off to my left.

Then it would be my turn. I’d fire it back up the hill and through the sharp right-hand hairpin, forcing the redline in second and snicking into third just as I tipped into the left-hander at the top, then I’d pin it in third, get halfway through fourth, then button off, do a U-turn and descend back into the cliff-ringed river valley like the wrath of some screaming stone-age god. I’d lean down behind the fairing on the straight and red-line the bike through third past Brother Silverback, and once again as far as I dared into fourth as the road started to wind up out of the valley and through some of the smoothest and most delightful ascending corners ever laid upon this earth.

We saw no cars. We had no bad moments. We just rode and listened to the howl of the Senna and smoked and sipped and rode again. And we smiled and back-slapped each other like teenage hooligans after a shop-lifting spree each time we swapped over.
Because we too had stolen something.

And it was very precious.

Regular readers will know I have no great love for flying. The whole concept, process, and experience fills me with dread and junkyard-dog meanness.

I try to avoid it whenever I can, but that is simply not always possible given what I do. And most times it all passes without much fuss. But now and again, flying plumbs depths of shit both new and vile.

Like this last time.

Aprilia had been kind enough to invite me to Melbourne to ride its new SRGT scooter. And so I did, and I will report my findings in due course. And then, press launch over, I was deposited at the airport some three hours before my scheduled flight to Newcastle was meant to leave.

All of this is perfectly normal and no cause at all for concern or complaint.

Please understand I was a little weary. It’d been a cold day, and I had expended a goodly amount of energy not crashing the scooter on the damp go-kart track and keeping myself warm. Also, my boots were new, and I was wearing them in, so they were not the most comfortable things for long marches through vast terminals.

But hey, if the shit-eater driving the cab dumps me 800m from the QANTAS terminal because he eats shit, his life is shit, and he wishes me to share in this shit, who am I to complain?

That’s right. No-one.

So I did not complain. I got out and started walking, the boots chewing a painful hole in my left heel. I nonetheless walked stoically and showed no sign of discomfort, for I am stoic, and to display signs of weakness invites attacks from predators.

I could not wait to sit down, have a beer, and relax a touch before my flight. I went through security, found the bar, and did just that. Then I observed the gate number for my flight. It was 28. I got up and marched to Gate 28 – stoically, and with great dignity, despite the cankerous blister now weeping into my left boot.

I sat down, pulled out my book and started to read, hoping this would distract me from the pain I was in.

An hour later, still an hour before the flight was to leave, my phone pinged. My QANTAS app advised me the flight had been delayed ten minutes. I made a face. I went back to my book. Ten minutes later, my phone pinged again and told me the flight had been delayed a further half-an-hour. I made another face. I called my wife.

“These useless plane cunts have delayed this stupid fucking flight for another half-an-hour. They have made no explanation for this bullshit, and their apologies are hollow and false.”

“Go get something to eat.”

“I do not want anything to eat. I ate most of a Sardinian goat with polenta for lunch and a tiramisu the size of a helmet. I want to get on a plane and come home. My feet hurt.”

“Remain calm,” she advised. “I beg you.”

Then my phone pinged again. QANTAS had decided my flight would not depart from Gate 28. It would instead depart from Gate 12.

I closed my eyes. I saw myself slaying innocent people with my carry-on luggage. I saw myself tearing off someone’s arm and beating an airport employee into Hell with it.

The vision passed, and I walked stoically and expressionlessly to Gate 12 as my boot gnawed its way right through to my heel-bone.

I sat down again. I was hatred incarnate. I loathed the world and everyone in it. I despised the airport, its staff, and the airline. I wanted to scream and run through the terminals like a meth-filled rhino, but my left foot was crippled, and I was just going to sit here quietly, and stoically, until my flight boarded.

My flight was meant to be boarding. But it was not boarding. The Departures board said ‘Proceed To Gate’. I had done so and was at the gate. So I had complied. I now wanted it to say ‘Boarding’ so that I could comply with that, but it stayed stubbornly at ‘Proceed To Gate’.

Clearly, QANTAS did not give a damn about my compliance. In our world, compliance is rewarded. That is how we are trained. You obey, submit, and comply, then you get a nice biscuit and a pat on the head. I had duly complied. Where the fuck was my biscuit and pat?

My phone pinged again. The flight was once again delayed for another 20 minutes. I was already meant to be in the air. Instead, I was in a departure lounge, slowly becoming a rhinocerous.

Then an announcement came over the PA. QANTASexpressed its regrets. Then it explained there was to be another gate change and a further delay while the aircraft was cleaned, fueled, and re-packed with odious airline food. The new gate was Gate 27.

I got up and marched back to Gate 27. It was right next to Gate 28, where I had been half-an-hour ago. The sheer cosmic shitfuckery of this seemed to be lost on everyone except me. My rage had become fury. Soon, it might turn into actual wrath as my inner rhino manifested. Then we would see some fucken boarding, let me tell you.

But my fury remained well-buried.

And there is nothing worse than burying your fury. It causes all sorts of problems. But you can’t take it out on the QANTAS staff. They are not to blame. And they won’t tell you who is to blame, because they know you’ll take it out on whoever that is. People in airports have been known to be unreasonable and unpredictable. I am only the former.

I noticed people standing up and loosely crowding around the departure gate. The herd mind felt that if enough of the herd stood mutely at the gate, things would happen quicker. I knew if I went and stood there as well, the police would come and beat me like an animal and take me to gaol. Such would be the intensity of my wordless glaring at the QANTAS staff, whom I did not blame at all for the shitfuckery of their airline. But you have to glare at someone, right? Glaring at a gate is pointless.

Ten minutes after our promised boarding time, we boarded the plane and I sat down in an aisle seat, closed my eyes, and resigned myself to dying with dignity, courage, and a mutilated foot should the plane fall from the sky at some stage. I always do this. It’s nothing new.

The flight was full, but the window-seat next to mine remained empty. I was full of hope it would remain so. I do not get on planes to make friends. It’s bad enough we have to sit as close as we do. Let’s do it in silence.

The captain announced that since we were in a hurry to meet the 10pm curfew at Newcastle airport, QANTAS would not be serving any meals, because that would mean a further delay on the runway, and we really needed to be up and on our way right sharpish.

Then the Instgram Influencer Model made her way down the aisle. I had seen her in the terminal. Everyone had. A tall, willowy, neon-blonde girl about 20-years-old, with perfect features, clutching three bags, four jumpers, and a bright pink puffer jacket. You could have seen the bitch from space.

“Oh yeah, hi, excuse me,” she breathed at me, hoisting two of her bags and a jumper in the direction of the window seat, “I need to get in there.”

“No problem,” I said, getting up and letting her in. I stood painfully in the aisle while she made a nest for herself. I even helped by putting one of her bags into the overhead locker.

Then I sat down. She smelled of bulimia and hair product. It was a smell I had encountered many times before.

“OHMYGOD!” she suddenly screeched, whipping around like she’d been zapped with a Taser. “Where’s my phone?! Have you seen my phone?”

“No,” I said. “I have not seen your phone.”

“Is it over there on that seat?” she eeked, pointing across the aisle where a woman was breast-feeding her baby.

“I can’t see,” I said. “There’s some baby stuff going on over there.”

“Excuse me!” the Model yelped at the breastfeeding lady. “Is my phone on your seat?”

The lady looked blankly at her, obviously wondering how such a thing could happen, then somehow struggled into a strange half-upright position holding her suckling child, and tried to look at her seat.

“I can’t see it,” she said, and sat back down.

“OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD!” the model yammered, getting up and wanting me to get the fuck out of her way while she clambered over me and went in search of her phone. I did that, while briefly considering how funny it would be if her face crashed into my knee.

She stalked up the aisle where people were still putting their bags into the overhead lockers, found a hostess, and told the hostie she may have dropped her phone on the tarmac and could the hostie go and have a look. Then she came back, squeezed past me, folded her two-metre-long legs into the window-seat space, and continued freaking out and rifling through her manifold jumpers and bags.

The hostess returned and advised her there was no phone on the tarmac.

“What am I going to do?!” the Model demanded to know.

The hostess blanked her and went about the business of securing the cabin for take-off.

“Can you please call my phone?!” she said to me.

“Sure,” I said. “What’s your number?”

It was not lost on me that many, many, many men had asked her that same question, and been told to go fuck themselves, or been given a haughty brush-off, or a contemptuous laugh.

She gave me her number. I called it. Silence reigned all around us. Nothing was ringing, except maybe the bells in her head.

“Call it again!” she squeaked.

Once again, I called and we listened intently. Nothing.

“What should I do?” she demanded of me.

“Calm the fuck down would be a start,” I said quietly. “Then buy another phone when you get a chance.”

She stared at me blankly. I have seen that look many times. Really hot girls adopt that expression when they are met with a situation their good looks cannot resolve.

I have worked with models almost my entire career. They are some of the most beautiful creatures placed upon this earth. And as such, they are fully aware of what power their looks afford them. Men, simple one-celled creatures that we are, will do anything for a really beautiful woman. Anything.

But familiarity, friends and relatives, does indeed breed contempt. That devil-sex-vagina magik these bitches wield with such flagrancy is useless on me. I am immune to it. And that doesn’t compute in their minds.

“But I don’t have my phone!” she oinked.

“You said that. Most of the plane is aware of the crisis.”

She gave me a look she imagined was filled with daggers, then went back to rifling through her jackets and bags. And then she found it. It had been in the pocket of the jacket she was wearing.

“OHMYGOD!” she squealed. “Here it is!”

Then she stared at it with a frown. “But why didn’t it ring when you called it?”

“Do you have it on silent?” I asked.

“Oh…um…yes! HAHA!”

“There you go then,” I said, and went back to my book as the plane taxied for what seemed to be the best part of an hour, which made me think maybe the pilot was planning on driving to Newcastle, before it finally took off.

The model, my usefulness at an end, her world restored upon its axis, busied herself with her phone. I couldn’t help myself. I did snatch a few looks at what she was looking at, and was entirely unsurprised.

She was looking at herself. The whole time. Of course, she was. Self-validation is a wondrous thing.

The entire hour-and-a-bit of the flight, she scrolled through endless images of herself, pausing only to switch to the camera so she could examine her living self on the screen, turn her head this way and that, then go back to scrolling though more photos of herself.

She paused briefly to summon the hostess and demand some gluten-free food, but was told there was only water.

“What kind of water?” she wanted to know.

“Bottled water,” the hostie replied in that wonderful tone hosties use when dealing with human trash. “It’s gluten free.”

The Model said she would have one of those, then rummaged in her bag and produced some potato chips and consumed them like a vacuum cleaner, then pulled out an emery board and started doing her nails, which meant her nail dust was floating onto me.

I resolved to kill her. No-one would care. My fellow passengers might well applaud the move. There were lots of other pretty girls in the world. One less would have no impact.

Who would miss her? Her boyfriend would probably send me a fruit basket in gratitude. Her girlfriends would all rejoice she was gone and no longer a threat to their boyfriends or their self-esteem. Her parents? Yeah, they might miss her a bit. But weighed against the general benefit to mankind, their grief would be bearable.

The only real question was how.

Repeatedly elbowing her in the face would be satisfying, but it would not be quick. Twisting her head until her neck snapped might give me a cramp because of the way I would have to turn my body, but it would be quick, and there wouldn’t be any blood. Choking her would be messy because the chokee tends to kick and struggle violently just towards the end. If I had a pen, I could drive it into her eye…but I did not have a pen.

I figured I could put up with a cramp.

“Cabin crew, please prepare the cabin for landing.”

Damn it. My timing has never been very good with women.

I feel I have found the most glorious motorcycle rider on earth.

I could be wrong, which does happen, and there may well be a rider somewhere who is still more glorious than this bloke. But I somehow doubt it. This bloke is…well, he’s elemental in his pure, unhinged motorcycleness.

You all understand how YouTube works, right? You watch something, the algorithm then makes suggestions you also might like to watch. Which is how I found Mad Max, the Road Warrior.

He is from Russia, and lives in town called Bogorodsk. I think he was about 20 when he made the series of videos four years ago that so captivated me. Those videos have had millions of views, and he has close to 40,000 subscribers on his channel, Road Warrior.

I hope you will shortly understand why that is so. I sure do.

So, Max inherited a bike from his father. But not just any bike. He inherited an IZh Planeta. And it is entirely possible that if you don’t live in Russia, you’d not have heard of this marque.

Even pronouncing it is difficult for western tongues. Let me attempt to walk you through it. In Cyrillic it is written thus: “ИЖ”. The backward N is an I, and the thing that looks like a beetle is the ZH sound. The closest English equivalent is if you try to pronounce the word “shit” but swap the s for a z.

The Soviet Union created the IZh in 1929. And by the time it had ceased production in 2008, more than 10 million bikes had come out of the Izhevsk Machine-Building Plant – which is now known by a name you will recognise, Kalashnikov.

The bike Max inherited from his father was a 1996 model. It was the Planeta (planet), and it was 350cc of single-cylinder two-stroke Soviet nightmare to motorcyclists here in the west who, by 1996, were already riding Honda Fireblades.

The Russian Federation, which inherited the ruins of the Soviet Union, was an economic and social basket case in the Nineties. The reasons for this are well-known to people who follow geo-politics, and not within the scope of this piece.

But things were still getting made in the Russian Federation, because things must always get made in countries who have understood that manufacturing is crucial to their existence. But that is also beyond the scope of this piece.

Just know that despite the crazed oligarchs, gangsters who made the Italian Mafia look like mincing love-pooves, rampant alcoholism, and a society that understands and accepts “sacrifice” on a level I hope no-one in the west ever has to, shit was getting made.

Shit like the IZh.

And I very much want to tell you about Max and his IZh. And their utterly astounding journey. And to understand this fully, you first need to know what an IZh is.

To put it kindly, it’s a bucket of shit. No western rider would consider a Soviet-made 350cc two-stroke, making (on a good day) 28bhp, a thing they’d want to ride anywhere, let alone where Max did.

Among Soviet riders, the IZh Planeta had a reputation for poor performance and questionable reliability, and that’s when viewed through stoic, bear-anything Soviet eyes.

The IZh is many things, and it is Max’s world and he loves it, but it is not what you would term a touring motorcycle. Its maximum speed is a shade under 80km/h – if and when you manage to kickstart it. It vibrates like only a single-cylinder two-stroke could, and you couldn’t call it comfortable and be thought sane.

But it is, most importantly, simple, and relatively robust, like a Soviet tractor. Max actually pours two-stroke oil directly into the petrol tank after he fills up…and then usually wheels it off to a corner of the petrol station to either fix it, or pass out after trying to fix it for five hours.

Max himself, from what I have been able to gather, is (or was) a typical Russian teenager living in a big town called Bogorodsk, some 40-odd km from the city of Nizhny Novgorod. Still lost? Nizhny Novgorod is 400-odd km due east of Moscow. I am only telling you this so you will grasp the sheer scope of Max’s journey.

At this point, I’d like you to try and appreciate how vast the Russia Federation is. Here in Australia, we also ride bikes huge distances. We are a continent, after all. But Russia is more than 2.2 times the size of Australia. It has eleven time zones. The Soviet Union was even bigger. The people living there comprehend distance in a different way to Australians, and certainly very differently to how an Englishman or a Frenchman would.

I trust I have set the stage for you.

One day, Max decided he wanted to go on a road-trip on his IZh. He told his parents this, and they tentatively agreed, making him promise he wouldn’t ride too far or take too many risks. He was young, and relatively inexperienced as a motorcyclist. Most of his riding had been on a moped and a small Chinese dirt bike, which he’d bounced along some pleasant tracks near his home.

Max assured his parents he wouldn’t go far, but that he would be gone for a fortnight or so. He didn’t have a lot of money, so how much shit could he possibly get into? His parents were concerned, but 20-year-old boys are gonna do what 20-year-old boys do – and that is to measure themselves against the world. There was no stopping him.

Max, unbeknownst to his parents, had decided he was going to ride to Lake Baikal. Why Lake Baikal? Well, it is the deepest and oldest freshwater lake on earth, holding some 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water – more than all the North American Great Lakes combined. This 30-million-year-old marvel is sacred to the native Buryat people, and locals still implicitly believe Christ himself visited this part of Asia.

It’s worth a ride to see that, for sure.

And Russians all seem to want to visit the lake as some kind of pilgrimage during their lives. Max was no different. He was going to Lake Baikal. On his IZh. In Autumn.

To get there, he would ride more than 5000km. Across the Ural Mountains. Into Western Siberia. Then into Eastern Siberia. On a 350cc two-stroke made by grim-eyed communists fuelled by vodka made from potato peelings and hatred of the bourgeoisie.

Remember that Max has fuck-all money. Max has fuck-all mechanical knowledge. Max has fuck-all motorcycle-riding experience. But Max is going to ride 5000km to Lake Baikal on his IZh Planeta. And then back. A trip of more than 10,000km. Fuck, yes! Sound the trumpets!

Max so very much reminds me of myself at that age. Fearless and brainless in equal measure. Like Max, I was cos-playing at being a “biker”. I too had virtually no mechanical knowledge, scant riding skill, and fuck-all money. And I too lied to my sainted mother about what I was planning to do on a motorcycle she was convinced would kill me sooner rather than later.

The fundamental difference between Max and myself is I was not cursed with an IZh. My first bike was an immensely reliable and lovely to ride Yamaha 650. Oh, and I was a committed atheist, whereas Max declares himself an Odinist. He has even scrawled “DIE IN BATTLE OR ON THE ROAD AND GO TO VALHALLA” on his petrol tank and wears a Mjolnir amulet around his neck on a chain as a talisman.

In terms of camera gear, Max has a Chinese Smartphone, and a small Chinese pretend-GoPro affixed to the chin-piece of his helmet. His gear is some no-name leather jacket, a pair of textile pants, some motocross armour, and that’s about it. No microphones, no drones. Nothing a professional motorcycle travel-blogger would normally carry to make his videos. He has a knife, some food, some spare parts, some tools, a blanket, a mat, and a few bits and pieces he might need on his journey. He had thought about what he was going to do, and prepared as best he could, I guess.

In terms of the filming, this was no-budget, bare-arse, amateur stuff. And such shit is normally unwatchable. What makes Max’s work so utterly engaging for me, is his brutal honesty. He exposes his soft and very naïve underbelly throughout the videos. His exclamations, his often-irritating cackles, and his home-spun philosophies are confronting, sometimes banal, sometimes funny, sometimes very informative, sometimes annoying, but always searingly real and honest. And ever so Russian.

He is the ingenue supreme.

At first, as I watched him head east along endless Russian roads (all of which looked very good, especially the major highways he was using), I thought: “Fucken dickhead. He’s gonna crash and die.” He was riding at half the speed everything else on the road was doing. Trucks buzzed him scant centimetres from his handlebars. He was meat-jam, for sure, I thought.

But the countryside via his rider’s POV intrigued me. This was Russia unvarnished and honest.

Still, I felt I would get bored pretty quickly and find something else to watch. I mean, how many times can you watch Max getting passed by everything else on the road? I felt that would get old unless a truck hit him. Shit had to happen to him. It just had to. I kept watching.

Then he broke down. It was some kind of carby issue. He managed to fix it, but not properly. He continued. He broke down again and again. And then some more. Somehow, he always managed to limp onwards to Lake Baikal. His lights failed, his clutch started slipping, his speed was down to 40km/h. The ambient air-temperature dropped to minus-12 at night as he crossed the Ural Mountains.

He did not even realise he was in the mountains because it was the middle of the night. He just knew he was utterly cold – and he told his viewers just that as he held his camera at arm’s length and talked to it on the side of the road. But there was nowhere to stop for the night and rest. He carried on.

And he did big, long hours on the IZh. He had to. Otherwise it would have taken him months to get to Lake Baikal. He would ride 18, 19, 20 hours a day. There were days when he would ride for more than 24.

Sometimes he would sleep in tree-lines some 100-metres off the road, his beloved IZh camouflaged with birch-tree branches, clutching his knife to his chest, and hoping he would not be robbed and killed. One morning he woke up to see a man running towards him. He said it scared him and he prepared to die in battle. The man wanted to know if Max had a knife he could borrow. The man had crashed his truck on the road. The truck had sheep in it. He needed a knife to put some of them out of their misery. Max hesitantly gave him the knife he was openly clutching. The man returned it clean a few minutes later.

He would stop to get petrol and warm himself when he got the opportunity, which was not often. It rained for much of the way. Once, he bought cheap petrol off some bloke in the middle of the night. His IZh and that petrol did not get on. He managed to limp to the next petrol station at walking pace and dumped whatever potato-juice he’d bought on the cheap, replacing it with proper petrol. The IZh limped on, with only parking lights.

I was astonished. How was he carrying on? It was 2am. He was wet. He was beyond cold. He could not ride much over 60km/h. Trucks were missing him by centimetres. He would have to stop every 30 or 40km and fiddle with his clutch or his carby. He had no phone reception.

But he had resolve. He was going to Lake Baikal.

I feel the Road Gods took pity on him. They must have. Because Max, shaking with cold, met a bloke in a petrol station one evening around midnight. An older bike-rider, who looked at Max like people look at people who eat dirt and play with their penises in public.

He asked where Max was from. Max told him. “That’s 2000km away…” the man said. Then he asked Max where he was going. Max said he was off to Lake Baikal. “That’s 3000km in that direction,” the man said. Max agreed that it was.

“Look,” the bloke said. “There’s a Bike Post in the next town. Why don’t you follow me there and rest up? They can help you fix your bike, and they will feed you.”

Max, like me, had no idea such things as Bike Posts existed in Russia. And what a magnificent thing they are in a country as vast and harsh as that.

Bike Posts are places run by local bike clubs, and there are a lot of bike clubs in Russia. These are not outlaw clubs – though there are those in Russia too. These are just groups of local riders who form loose-knit clubs and if they can, open a Bike Post. It’s usually an old, abandoned building, which is tidied up, and offers hospitality to passing motorcyclists. For free. Free food, free drink, and free lodging. It’s not flash, but when it’s 2am, minus-12, and your lightless IZh is limping along at 20km/h past the village of Yurgamysh, it is pure salvation.

At one of these Bike Posts, Max lucked onto a bloke who was a mechanic who restored old Soviet bikes. This bloke fixed Max’s carby (temporarily), got him some new clutch plates and rebuilt his clutch, fitted a new LED headlight to it from a Lada, and fitted a screen and hand-guards to the IZh. This took two days and the bloke hosted Max in his house the whole time and refused money Max offered to pay him for the parts and work.

“One day,” the man said, “I may be broken down somewhere and I will need someone to help me. I believe in Karma. Have a great trip. Go with God.”

These Bike Posts, and the kindness of strangers and fellow bike riders is what ultimately carried Max through to Lake Baikal.

And he did get there – mad-eyed and fey. But then he struggled to leave.

Local legend has it you must throw a coin into Father Baikal. Otherwise, he will not permit you to leave. Max did not throw a coin into the icy waters, because Max was not aware of this tradition. So Max did not leave Lake Baikal.

He got himself stranded about 20km out of Irkutsk, the city that sits on the Angara River that flows into the lake. It was two am, it was insanely cold, and his IZh had ceased to proceed. This was the first time he actually looked concerned. I don’t blame him. It was a tough spot he was in. So he contacted his girlfriend. As you do when you’re that age. You seek some long-distance comfort. You want to share with her your whole road-warrior against-the-odds bullshit you’ve been telling yourself for 5000km.

She dumps him. On the phone. Via text.

Max loses his shit. He has a frozen, bike-dead, total-darkness meltdown. It’s searing in its naked honesty.

Somehow, the following day, Max limp-rides back to the shores of Lake Baikal and chucks a bunch of coins into the water. He understands the lake will now permit him to depart.

So he does. His adventures continue for another 5000km, but they are coloured and flavoured by his girlfriend dumping him. He rides on, long, rain and wind-blasted hours astride the biggest bastard motorcycle there is. Long-term IZh owners say the bikes are actually sentient creatures. They don’t speak, but they make their intentions clear when they decide you need to know shit.

He makes it home. Of course he does. His IZh manages.

I found Max’s vlog captivating. You may not. It’s hard…well, tedious at times to watch because it’s not glossy or well-produced and the auto-translate YouTube provides can be hit and miss. You will get the idea, but you will certainly miss out on the “Russian-ness” of Max’s emotional journey.

And that is a thing. Russians…well, Slavs in general are just like everyone else. Only more so. And that’s what makes them different, if you get my meaning. It’s hard to explain. My fellow Slavs will understand. The rest of you might well not. That’s fine. I’m just letting you know our inner frequencies are not yours.

I saw much of myself in Max. I think that’s what hooked me on his videos. I have changed much and much over the decades and millions of kilometres. We all do. As will Max. The Road Gods make damn sure of that.

May they watch over Max – and all of us on our travels.

ADDENDUM

Max made a few more videos after his Baikal trip. His most intriguing one was his trip from Bogorodsk to Crimea, via the Donbas. In 2024. During the war. Dressed in military camo and a tactical vest with a big knife in the chest-scabbard of the vest. His cos-playing had obviously reached new heights and I started to think he might be on some autism spectrum.

How did that trip go for him? Well, you’d have to ask him, and the Russian army. But yes, his evil IZh once again made it there and back. And I’m a fan.

“I think you should try and make that stuffed capsicum thing your mum used to make. That was amazing.”

“Punjena paprika?”

“Yes. I loved that.”

“I am not the steam off the steam off my mum’s pee when it comes to cooking. And she, bless her, was not even in the same steamy piss universe as her mum…”

“How hard can it be? It’s stuffed fucken capsicum. There is no polenta involved. My mum used to make it too. But she used a pressure cooker.”

“She’s Slovenian and she fucken cheated! The Serbs could not afford such high-tech luxuries! I shall find a traditional recipe and make it the right way.”

This was my first problem. There are maybe 50 different recipes for this traditional dish on the Internet. There’s a Croatian version with added Catholicism. There’s a Slovenian version with lashings of mountain Catholicism. There’s a Macedonian version with overtures of Greece and Bulgaria interfering with its purity. And there’s a Bosnian version which excludes pork because of Allah. Then there are like five different Serbian versions, and about 30 versions in English on various cooking sites, none of which can be credible because none of them mention Vegeta – the holy and sacred Balkan spice first discovered a hundred years before King Lazar was killing Ottomans on Kosovo’s Field of Blackbirds in 1389.

I read them all. It made my head hurt. And my mind was a jumble of methods and recipes as I wandered around the supermarket buying the ingredients.

Then I commenced, with Lynette acting as my sous chef, a critical role she’d adopted since the beginning of our relationship 748 years ago, when she saw what a cataclysm I create in the kitchen when I cook.

To this day, she refuses to acknowledge my instructions with a hearty “Yes, chef!” but we make it work.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Wash the capsicums and get out the ingredients.”

“I have already cooked the rice.”

“It doesn’t say to use cooked rice.”

“Every recipe I looked at said to use cooked rice.”

“Only some of the ones I looked at said that. And what are you doing looking at recipes? I’m the chef. I look at recipes. This is not a fucken recipe-looking democracy.”

“Shut the fuck up, you mad cunt. You have no idea what you’re doing. You’re not even following the recipe you have there.”

“That’s just for general guidance. I’m doing this from a genetic base. Punjena Paprika is in my DNA.”

“What are you doing with these tomatoes?”

“I’m gonna use them to plug the tops of the capsicums when I fill them with the rice and meat.”

“Your mother never used tomatoes. Why are you turning the oven on?”

“I think I need to put them in the oven after I cook them on the stove for a while.”

“Your mother never put them in the oven. You have no fucken idea, do you?”

“Give me the sweet paprika. No, the sweet paprika. That is not the sweet paprika.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Oh my God! The difference is vast! Smoked paprika is wrong. Hot paprika is wrong. Normal fucken paprika is even wronger.”

“Where did you read that?”

“On one of the Serbian sites. We know paprika. We went to war over paprika with someone once.”

“You’re like mad bears. You go to war with everyone over everything.”

“I don’t think I can fit all seven of the capsicums in this pot.”

“Shut up and squash the cunt in there. We don’t have another pot. You have to make this one work. For the love of God, how much fucking Vegeta are you putting in there?”

“What it says on here.”

“Do not lie, bastard. This recipe doesn’t even have Vegeta in it. You’ve gone totally rogue. I can’t even imagine what this is going to taste like.”

“It will be fine. It’s stuffed fucken capsicum. It’s impossible to fuck up, unless you’re not Serbian, in which case you’ll certainly fuck it up.”

“What is that? What are you pouring into the pot now?”

“The sauce.”

“That’s not sauce. It’s vegetable stock and some watery tomato stuff.”

“It will become sauce in the process. Much like Jesus becomes a wafer when it suits your filthy Pope.”

“Can you not make this about the fucken Great Schism of 1054?”

“Oh you know about that?”

“Yes, you’ve lectured at length about it, usually after the fifth whiskey. And it’s my fault because I was a Catholic.”

“Do you know how many people died in Constantinople because of your vile treachery?”

“Stop before I hit you with the pot lid.”

If you enjoy my work, you might be interested in acquiring one or all of the books I have written. Including what is clearly the most important book ever written, SH!T MY WIFE SAYS - The Dialogue of a Marriage.

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