Old School – Should I ride or drive?

I sat in the shed and weighed up my options.

The 2001 Triumph Bonneville I’d converted into a street tracker a few years back was the obvious choice. I’d ridden it there twice before on a mixture of dirt and tarmac. It was a magical, relaxed ride. But closer inspection revealed it urgently needed new sprockets and chain.

As I’d just spent $1200 getting my ’91 Toyota Hilux Grinner ute’s cooling system sorted with new water pump, radiator and welsh plugs (about the same as a ‘major service’ for a current ute), money was a bit tight.

Then I looked at my 50,000km 2006 Ducati 1000DS retro. I’ve done thousands of kilometres on these models around New Zealand visiting the Shaky Isles each summer. No problem.

But recently I’d suffered a puncture on both the Triumph and the Ducati. I was a bit spooked. As they run inner tubes, you can’t just plug the tyre on the side of the road. Then I started thinking about what else could go wrong with the Ducati. For starters, that model is renowned for regulators overheating and failing.

A sudden sense of anxiousness enveloped me. Maybe I should just book an airline ticket and hire a car. Or not go at all.

Stop being a Nervous Nellie, I told myself.

Former 70s longhairs are familiar with such expressions. Most males were brought up to be ‘a real man’. Remember the huskily whispered female command “Be quiet, big boys don’t cry” in 10CC’s seventies hit I’m Not In Love?

In our younger days we didn’t analyse things much. If we wanted to go interstate at Easter on our bikes we tied a sleeping bag on the back and just did it. No pre-booked accommodation. No emergency breakdown insurance policy.

It’s hard to describe to today’s youngsters how simple our lives were back then.

We’d grown up in houses that, no matter their size, had one toilet and one bathroom. Social connection to the outside world was through a phone on the wall attached by a cord.

Communication was simple. If you phoned someone and said you’d meet them at the highway servo at 7am that Friday for the big Easter ride to Bathurst, that was what happened.None of this current Google calendar jive, gobs of texts and missed calls trying to alter things because they don’t quite suit on the day.

Likewise, at work the boss gave us instructions once only. If we didn’t get it the first time we risked being called a ‘spaz’. None of this current workplace negotiation, human resources tiptoeing around lazy employees, and staff reviews where workers are encouraged to assess their superiors’ performances as well as their own. Good grief.

We were hardwired to follow through on a decision. But as we get older many of us get anxious about even making a decision at all.

Researchers say this is due to older people having experienced or seen the consequences of youthful recklessness. We become more measured, but that can erode the spontaneity that made our youth so fulfilling.

Until fairly recently, mental experts believed that anxiety issues declined with age. Now they say that possibly one in five older people exhibit symptoms that require treatment.

They also say it’s hard to uncover these cases because older people are more likely to talk about physical complaints than emotional issues.

So how did my Nervous Nellie moment end?

A day later I was driving across a one-lane bridge in rural Victoria with the window down and a CD blaring out music from such great 60s Westerns as The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. Life was good.

When I got to Broadford, an old friend looked at the empty ute and asked: “You drove over in the ute, why didn’t you bring a bike in the back?”

The answer: I would have felt a fraud trailering a bike I could have ridden. 

By Hamish Cooper