The Murky Past

I admire anyone who owns up to their mistakes - baring your inadequacy to the world is never easy on the ego. It doesn`t matter if the offending errors are the result of momentary lapses in judgment or just plain ignorance, no one likes to be wrong. People will say that owning up is cathartic and stress relieving, that saying sorry can do wonders for the soul, or that you learn from your mistakes (which is perfectly true, of course). And, they will tell you, there`s the undeniable fact that it`s best to just own up and move on rather than risk the ignominy of discovery later.   All great advice until you remember that it is you they are talking about.  Ultimately, There`s only one remedy - apart from the impossible prospect of always being right - and that is time. Time allows us to move forward, and the mind to organize the past.

Given time, most of our mistakes disappear into the distant smoke of our subconscious.  A few, though, glow in this murky cloud, becoming the essential rites of passage that those set on a particular vocation have to go through.  Excused in the way only time can give, they turn into the inevitable slip-ups of a person travelling the long road to knowledge, a different person to the one now looking back.  The mistakes of our distant past demonstrate our active pursuit of knowledge and furnish us with essential experience, creating time honoured old-sweats bestowed with skill and expertise. Wisdom gained by success and failure; a career of significant triumphs augmented by the hiccups of youth. And the murkier and funnier the recollection of these mishaps the better - a comical anecdote turns a grave blunder into the slapstick of a clanger.  Exaggerated silliness does wonders to mask the merciless reality of stupidity.     

In 1973 I was a 17 year-old aspiring lorry mechanic with an aging Yamaha 250 motorcycle – it was all I could afford – that had a very noisy exhaust and an engine that spluttered a lot.  An older, time served mechanic in the workshop suggested I pack the system with wire wool; which, with the assistance of a long rod, I did. The exhaust note was perfect, a showroom ting-ting, and for the first half mile of a test ride it was a different bike.  But then things changed; the exhaust got louder, the bike faltered a bit.  I looked in the mirror – not something I did too often; I was practising looking ahead, for the day of my test when a man wearing a trilby hat and carrying a clipboard would leap out in front of me from behind a parked van. What I saw was a different world – a scene from Midway (a WWII film about a battle between the Japanese and American carrier fleets). Through the smoke, all I could make out were the weaving headlights of cars trying to dodge the balls of flaming wire wool being fired from my exhausts.

I passed my test and sold the bike to buy an old Norton `cafe racer` – again, it was all I could afford.  I hadn`t realized that the exhaust pipe retaining threads in the head were stripped and the down pipes were held in place with repair gum. After about half a mile, riding the bike home, the exhaust note changed, there was an awful clang and the sound of scraping metal, I looked back and... .