It’s one of those days where I’ve had too much coffee and my heart feels like it’s resting rate is 10bpm faster than it should be. It has been a productive morning. I handed in my first large coursework of the semester, 30% of a course that is itself 40% of the semester, and so a hand in that’s worth 4% of my overall degree. Either way it went smoothly despite the absence of my partner this morning. I’m ahead in most of the coursework for the semester, with half either handed in or 95% of the way there. It feels like a comfortable space to be in.

In other very exciting news I’ve agreed to buy a motorbike from a local seller. It’s an old Kawasaki ER-5, initially built in 1997 and registered in 1999. Despite being only a year younger than me, it’s in pretty good shape. The guy I’m buying it from put a lot of money into the bike, new exhaust, new rear shocks, new fork seals, new sprocket and chain. Overall it’s a very fair deal and a good runner. My Mod 2 isn’t for a little while yet but it’s very exciting to have this ready for when I am road legal.

A photo of my soon to be new bike, a red Kawasaki ER-5

I had my dad with me when I went to look at the bike, he used to ride himself, and as an electrical engineer/kit car builder in the past it was extremely handy having his opinion. I’m just as grateful for the conversations something like a bike can set off. We get to talk about the purpose of mechanical objects, how he’d rather I didn’t ride one, but can’t hold it against me since he has in the past. We talked about how you obviously don’t want your loved ones to take on unnecessary risk, but you do want them to live and enjoy their lives.

My sister’s very adventurous, far more so than I am. A great pursuer of Type II Fun. One of my favourite stories of hers is from Alpine crevasse training. With three of them roped up together on the glacier (one instructor, two learners), they found a good looking crevasse, and took turns walking off the edge into thin air. It would be the responsibility of the two at the top to arrest the fall, set up an effective ice axe pulley system, and pull the third from the crevasse. Of course practicing this with an instructor around, when you’re expecting it to happen, all of that is to set you up for the situations when you don’t know it’s coming, when one of you suddenly steps off the edge.

There’s not much more point to that story but I love the images in it. Maybe the point is that nobody in my family can blame me for doing something statistically risky in the pursuit of a little fun and freedom. I’ve been reading Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive recently, still very early on, but I’m very much enjoying it so far. It’s in the same vein as his book The Case for Working with Your Hands, partly a cry against a purposeless modernism that seems to crush meaning for the individual, and partly a worship of how clever the things we’ve made are, how they can help us engage with the world. Please take that with a pinch of salt, it’s a crude summary. I like his writing and his thinking, only getting to engage with this side of it now I am becoming a driver, what he calls homo moto. For a while too I’ve tried to get on my way to Hannah Arendt’s homo faber, the fundamental part of us that just wants to make things. With an old bike I’ll have plenty to practice on.

Reading list