So big, I couldn't stop smiling

I went to collect the bike from the hire shop; which was more of a boutique actually, Harley Davidson branded clothes and other things, everything nice and clean.

I tried a couple of leather jackets before settling on a traditional looking number with the zip across my chest at an angle. I asked about helmets. The selection consisted of several of the type sported by Dick Dastardly’s friend, Klunk. None fit comfortably but I took one anyway. The bike was a Sportster, the smallest, at 900cc but still noisy even on the very wide main road that runs through the centre of Sedona.

Between me and Prescott, 50 or so miles west, there was mainly desert and a range of quite pointy hills. I had left the edge of town and experimented with speed a little before I decided that the helmet was cramping more than just my style. I strapped it to the grab handle and set off again, a little tentatively at first as it seemed very easy to imagine my head meeting the tarmac and splitting open like a melon.

After maybe an hour, having stopped off at the little ex-mining town of Jerome, I had reached an altitude where there was snow on the edges of the road. Only a few minutes more and I was winding down the other side of the range. The view was very, very big; miles of desert with a pencilled in road, squiggling into the haze.

The music kept us going

Monday evening, listening to Tank by the Stranglers courtesy of my excellent Sennheiser cordless headphones and I am right back there in that gold Ford Granada, my father having taken his two early teenage sons for a fortnight drive-about in the borders. I think that you would call that a low point. Everyone would rather have been somewhere else.

I can’t remember a great deal about that holiday. The damp smell of the bungalow we had rented or, egged on by my brother and me, my dad’s abandoned overtaking manoeuvre on a country road. When confronted by a tractor coming the other way there was a seemingly interminable, noisy and dramatic locking up of breaks. Next, an odd moment of irony as our tyre smoke wafted gently past us, leaving the three of us behind us to quietly reflect.

Apart from listening to the Stranglers, Magazine and Kraftwerk, one other thing comes to mind. Working from the back seat as we drove along, vigorously rubbing my dad’s head and utilising the volume enhancing properties of static electricity, I succeeded in getting his comb-over to become a kind of jaunty Mohican.