Well it’s amazing how in the space of 36 hours how one’s plans for the remainder of the remaining New-Year vacation can get turned upside down; and yet it started so well…

From the perspective of the typical British lad-about-town with nothing else to be doing, nor anyone else to be seeing, the Christmas holiday breaks down into three fairly well-defined parts:

1. Christmas Eve, when people sometimes still work, and the pubs are open.
2. Christmas Day, when the pubs are shut.
3. Boxing Day, when the pubs are open again.

…however this was a prospect that (being of a fairly abstinential turn of mind this year) did not really attract me, until I thought of a way to make it better. Much better.

For many, many years I have had a tradition of going for a walk on Christmas Eve to be alone with my thoughts, ponder the significance of life, and how trivial are most of the matters that comprise it. Usually this entails half an hour of frosty, starlit quietude, in the rural areas in which I have tended to live. Some years, it gets missed for varyingly good and bad reasons, but the tradition is most often honoured in the observance, rather than the breach.

This year I decided to take a new tack: be sociable, see as many people as possible, and go around in the spirit of Christmas – so I held-off posting cards in the hope that the weather would be fine, instead firing-up the BMW R1200GS for a Christmas Eve’s circuit of the heart – or possibly belly – of England, delivering greetings cards as I went.

The route:

• Fleet
• Bracknell
• Welwyn Garden City
• Cambridge (twice)
• Birmingham
• Aylesbury
• Reading
• Home

The distance: 406 miles.

The time elapsed: 0930h..2130h; approximately 12 hours.

The conditions: prettymuch everything from fine sunshine, to fog, to rain, to hail; with open roads and 12+ miles of tailbacks to filter/lanesplit.

The other benefit of this idea was that it afforded the perfect opportunity to try out my newly purchased, 60-day-no-quibble-warranty, Airhawk Seat which I got from my local bike accessory shop [www.bykebitz.co.uk] which also happens to be the national importer for Airhawk.

Anyway…

My printer is temporarily dead – I need to set-up a BOOTP server at home – so instead I printed out a page of directions on the office printer over the network, and rode-in to skim e-mail and pick them up. Seven miles warmed the engine up enough to check the oil properly and adjust the bootlace with which I secured the Airhawk to the bike; then I was off.

A quick blast up the M3 put me on the link-road into Bracknell – cinematic home of Harry Potter – for the first card-drop Chez Rillie at around 1000h.

Then another short blast: M4/M25/Hatfield/WGC to drop in on Ian, Paula and George – and Ian was actually around! We chatted for a few minutes (apparently Paula was slightly ill, “get well soon”) before I torqued-off again for the long run to Cambridge.

The A414 to Hertford and the A10 to Royston and Cambridge were lovely, quiet roads, quite unexpectedly so. Bits of dual-carriageway, long Romanesque straights that beg for a squirt of throttle, blue sky and chill, fresh air. This led me to the next couple of card deliveries, and a quick breather to buy Trebor Extra Strong Mints (the poor man’s Kendal Mint Cake) before setting off for Birmingham.

Oops.

I’ve never-before experienced the delights of the A14/A428/M11 interchange north of Cambridge, and I hope I never have to again. It’s horrible. To stay on the same road which bears right, you have to exit left into a filter lane and then take the second exit off that; I missed it on my first attempt, overshot, U-turned at the next roundabout, and was annoyed to find no entrance at all on the Eastbound carriageway.

Another U-turn, another attempt, and this time it worked – straight into the back of a traffic jam that continued on/off all the way to Birmingham’s M42; someone had gone through the central barrier and it was being replaced.

I gather that lane-splitting by motorcycles is illegal in some parts of the USA? It even seems to have an air of civil disobedience about it, reinforced by the indignation of car drivers.

Over here, it’s a way of life (legal, admittedly, on an “on your head be it, don’t take the piss or we’ll book you” basis) the lack of which would defeat a lot of the point of having a vehicle that is less than 1 meter wide. I can see rationale but no solid justification as to why should bikers have to and stand in line, wasting fuel, polluting the air, getting tired and bored and frustrated, just because car drivers are boxed in. Nothing stops most of them from getting bikes, too.

Anyway – so, while the parked people a dozen miles behind me were still watching the pretty piledriver banging up-and-down, I got into Birmingham and discovered yet another Quantum Location: Cadbury’s Chocolate World.

I have a theory that some places exist merely so that misleading and ambiguous signage can point to them from all directions, making them useless as a map-reading referent. Another is Sèlestat on France, which trapped me like a black hole for several hours earlier this year. Rhyader, likewise, emanates such a field of confusion, but with fewer road in mid-Wales, its effects are fewer, but more concentrated.

In Birmingham, there was a lot more to play with, like: try to get to Harbourne, stop in Moseley, get to Selly Oak, head for Harbourne, stop in Moseley, what the hell’s going on, find Harbourne, drop card at my Aunt’s house, exit, wind-up in Selly-Oak, stop just before I get to Moseley.

All because I was trying to use Cadbury’s as a stepping-stone to get out of Birmingham.

Eventually I managed it, thence M42/M40 to Prince’s Risborough to Aylesbury, to see Karin and Roland and Alex; as ever they were doing the social thing with vast quantities of family, Karin up to her armpits in food, beating shortcrust into submission for an Apple Pie, Ro with his wizzy new flatscreen monitor, and Alex only now starting to be significantly taller than Shadow, their Great Dane.

Having found it at a local food market recently, Karin and her father explained cooking Cassava to me (briefly: don’t bother) and I regrettably declined the invitation to dinner in light of the darkness… so to speak. The sun was well-past setting, the thermometer was taking a dive, so it was back to the bike, the cold, the heated grips and the empty roads, M40/A404/M4 and Reading, for the final delivery of the day.

Alison and Rhûn invited me in – prepping a curry; it was nice to catch up, their cat is quite ill with cancer alas, and is on chemotherapy, but still has a high quality of life and is much-loved. I left them to their dinner, thanked them for tea, rode the 10 miles home, parked the bike, stripped the panniers, and checked the mileage.

It was then I realised I’d done 400+ miles and yet felt like I’d done less than 100. I think I can firmly chalk that success up to the Airhawk pad.

I took quite some time adjusting it to the recommendations on their website, and in agreement with the advice from the guy at Bykebitz – blow it up, and then deflate it until almost nothing is left in it; I put the GS on the centrestand and sat on it and the half-inflated pad, playing with more and less air until I was satisfied.

The final, correct configuration makes the Airhawk feel like a soggy pizza – most of the cells are empty and floppy – but when sitting on it the slack is taken-up and it fills every gap between me and the bike.

You literally ride on a cushion of air, about 1cm thick at its thinnest point – ie: directly under your spine. The bike seat suddenly feels much wider, as parts of your bum which were not formerly supported are now so. Leaning from side-to-side there is an odd, almost mechanical sensation as the cells on one side inflate to match the deflation of the others. This does lead to a loss of feedback through the seat in cornering, but I can get used to that for long-haul riding.

Apparently some people return the seats having expected miracles (it won’t cure arthritis) or complaining that they are too high off the bike seat (possibly suffering from overinflation) – but it sure as hell worked for me.