Coming soon to The Thruxtonian

At the moment, The Thruxtonian's offices are a hive of activity. We will shortly be bringing you our first ever road test, with a report on the Triumph Tiger 800 including an onboard video (which means getting to grips with Apple's "iMovie" editing software); we will also have product reviews of Belstaff's iconic Trialmaster jacket and GoPro's Hero HD onboard video camera.

Working overtime at The Thruxtonian...

Looking further ahead, we will be bringing you road tests of the Harley Davidson Nightster and the Ducati Diavel, amongst other things.

Of course, since all of this work is done after day jobs and other such professional obligations have been seen to, this does take quite some time. But we guarantee that everything will be well worth the wait. So don't touch that dial, as they used to say!

I couldn't say it any better myself...

This wonderful little text came to my attention yesterday. I have no idea who the author is, apart from the fact that he (or perhaps she, who knows?) is American (the spelling of some words points that way). I have therefore decided to leave the text practically untouched (see the footnote), American spelling and all. If you know who might have written these words, please tell me by leaving a comment. That way I will be able to duly credit the author. Now, over to the "unknown motorcyclist".


There is cold, and there is cold on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with cold hammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind's big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don't even feel like water. They feel like shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that's just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds.

Despite this, it's hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you're changed forever. The letters "MC" are stamped on your driver's license right next to your sex and weight as if "motorcycle" was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition. But when warm weather finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in full because a summer is worth any price.

A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life.

Spain slows down

Just days after the new regional government of Catalonia announced that it was scrapping the previous administration's "variable speed" measure, which effectively limited speed on motorways in a 20 km radius around Barcelona to 80 kph (but could bring it down to as low as 20 kph if deemed necessary...), at the end of last week the central Spanish government announced that it was going to impose a blanket speed limit of 110 kph on all motorways and dual carriageways as of 7th March.

This sign now belongs to the past...

The reasons given by the government are the bid to carry out large-scale fuel savings and concerns about fuel supply in view of the political and social unrest in the Arab world. On examination both reasons seem rather laughable. First of all, modern cars (and motorbikes, for that matter) don't burn that much fuel when they're cruising along at 120 kph in top gear, which means that the supposed fuel savings obtained by dropping the speed to 110 kph (68 mph) are so slight that they won't make much difference in the medium term, which is how most government plans work.