Recent letter writers to The Irish Times reminiscing fondly about the Honda 50s of their younger days reminded me of my experience as a young reporter learning not just how to construct a news report but also to fill in an expenses claim.
At the end of my postgraduate journalism course in what was then the National Institute for Higher Education, Dublin, now Dublin City University, I bought a Honda 50 from one of my fellow students and took it with me for my placement with the Nationalist and Leinster Times in Carlow.
I have a strong memory of travelling from Dublin on a bright, early summer’s day, staying close to the hard shoulder of what may have been the N81, cars whizzing past me and the engine of the Honda making a sound like the mating call of a mosquito. Nnnneeeee ...
It was a wonderful machine that never let me down, mechanically speaking, though the engine did have something wrong with it that was a cause of frequent embarrassment. When stopped and in neutral, the revs would start to race towards the heavens for some reason, drawing the attention of everyone in a 100-yard radius, including the drivers of cars pulled up beside me at traffic lights. The mosquito would sound like it was having a meltdown. NnnneEEEEE!!!!
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Closing over the choke (I think), or some lever at the side of the engine, calmed the engine down, so I grew adept at pulling up at traffic lights while leaning over the side of the bike to cut off the air, then opening the lever again when the time came to resume movement, and all the time thinking that the drivers in adjacent cars must be having a good laugh.
After my placement ended, I spent a few months filling in for a colleague on maternity leave, so that, overall, I spent about nine months working with The Nationalist and on full pay for the final six months. I also got paid expenses.
If memory serves, my Honda 50 did about 90 miles to the gallon, so the mileage I got paid for work trips was highly profitable. Not only that, but the first time I was filling in an expenses claim, one of the senior reporters took me aside and checked the distances I was using for my calculations.
It turned out the Ordnance Survey Ireland had made a pig’s ear of it when mapping distances in the counties covered by the Nationalist. Carlow, Laois and Kildare were much greater in size than any map would have you believe.
Not many people know that.
As a result, my investment in my Honda 50 secured a much greater rate of return than have the pension contributions I’ve been making in the decades since. That said, the Honda would probably be viewed by pension experts as a high-risk investment – and the truth is it didn’t survive my return to Dublin.
Indeed, its demise and my return to Dublin are intimately related events, but I don’t intend to tell that story here for reasons of personal standing. Suffice to say I was left with an enduring understanding of just how nuts young men can be.
As an undergraduate I did, for a time, have the use of a Yamaha 180, another machine, like the Honda 50, that was so reliable and was so uncool it almost was cool. I have very happy memories of nipping around early 1980s Dublin, my girlfriend on the back, her arms around my waist, a scenario that came to a sudden end when I gave her a lift home one evening only to have her father, wisely, take her aside and tell her that she was never ever to get on the back of that motorbike, or any motorbike, again.
Her filial obedience was never put to the test as a short time afterwards her sister’s boyfriend asked for a go, only to return a short time afterwards, on foot and clutching his elbow, to explain how, while avoiding a right-turning car in Monkstown, he’d ended up crashing my motorbike (actually my older brother’s motorbike) into a lamp-post.
Many years later, when interviewing a neurologist about teenager development, I learned how adolescence ends with the final maturation of the brain, about 10 years after puberty, which starts later for boys that it does for girls. So male adolescence, for many males, ends in their early 20s, which chimes with when I hung up my motorcycle helmet for good. Being young and on a motorbike is one of life’s great pleasures. But maybe you need to be nuts.
