Men and the art of motorcycle masculinity

You can get that motor running and get out on the highway, but while one man’s way of riding a motorbike can be enviably cool, another’s can leave you cold

I WAS SITTING in the sun with a neighbour during the hot weather when her husband emerged from the kitchen wearing a helmet and a leather biker’s suit.

“I’m going for a ride,” he said, cool and understated. He’s well over six feet tall, and in real life he’s an airline pilot, so I suppose floating around Leitrim on a 1,100cc bike is not that big an issue for him.

He was gone 40 minutes when I heard the muffled sound of the exhaust in the distance and then he floated back over the hill and up the gravel avenue like a samurai emerging from a movie screen. He said he had circled Lough Allen a few times. There was something utterly masculine about him, in a mythic sort of way, which I envied as I nattered with his wife about how Galway is great craic during the summer, and how well my cat is assimilating into Leitrim society.

There are two cats in our house: Ronnie and Roxie. But my wife and I refer to them as “your cat” and “my cat”. She says, “Your cat left the head of a mouse on the carpet last night.” I say, “Your cat is so stupid it can’t figure out how to get through the cat flap.” She says, “Your cat stinks of the Tom she was with all night.” I say, “Your cat has worms.”

And on it goes. Playing out our marital tensions in the surrogate narrative of feline adventures. I was even thinking of writing a book called Cat Play – Therapy for Disturbed Couples. A book to help couples with marital difficulties. Instead of using the children as punchbags, conflicts could be acted out through dialogue related to the cats.

I mentioned the idea to the Medical Wallah in Galway last week, when I met him for lunch in a tapas bar near Woodquay.

He was looking well in the sunshine: long grey hair to his shoulders and three rings on various fingers. He was wearing a faded denim jacket. He always looks cool in an old-guy sort of way. And he had a saffron scarf around his neck that no doubt some young lady had left behind in his apartment.

“What are you doing in Galway?” I said.

“Film Fleadh,” he said.

“That’s not until next month,” I said.

“I know,” he said, “but there’s networking to be done: business.” I said, “I didn’t know you were interested in the movies.” “By the way,” he said, “did you ever hear that windmills can cause draughts?” I said, “Our house is well insulated.” He said, “I don’t mean the house. I mean outside. Did you ever notice that the windmills don’t just move with the wind? They create wind.”

I said, “That’s impossible. They generate electricity from the wind. They’re not generating the wind itself. That wouldn’t be economical.” “But how do you know?” he said. “The fact is they move even on days when there is no wind. And ask yourself: why is the Government subsidising them?”

I said, “That’s amazing.” He said, “There’s more.” “More?” “Yes,” he said, “I was talking to a documentary maker the other night who is doing a film about it. Apparently there’s a possibility that the Government intends storing gas in them, which will be released at night and the windmills will act as fans to spread the gas across vast layers of mountain bog.” “Why?” I wondered.

“Pesticides,” he explained. “It’s all about preserving the bogs. Like what the EU does with the lettuce. That’s why the turf cutting has been banned. They’re going to use windmills to spread chemical weedkiller, so therefore they have to get people off the bogs. If you’re living close to those windmills in Leitrim you won’t know what’s coming out of them at night.”

I tried to focus on the Spanish soup. It was full of little bits of everything and tasted spicy and delicious.

The Wallah was in a hurry so I agreed to cover the bill and he dashed off because, he said, he had left the motorbike in the car park without a ticket. From the window I watched him mount the old, battered Honda. There was a sticker on the back mudguard – “Stop the Propellers!” He looked like a pull-through for a shotgun with his long scraggy hair blowing in the wind as he drove away. There was something masculine about him which I was glad I didn’t share.