When I was youngerer and more stupiderer, I went to a technical college to do the 'O' levels I was too young and stupid to pass at school. One of the friends I made there, back in 1970, had a Triumph 350cc motorbike and sometimes I'd go pillion with him to his house where his brother would play esoteric piano with the air of an undiscovered genius. He was doing music 'A' level.

The experience was an eye-opener for me. My family had no car and I'd spent my life taking buses for granted. Suddenly I found myself shooting like a lightning bolt down roads, looking up at the sun-dappled branches, giddy with the exhilarating fair-ground madness of biking freedom.

A door had opened into a world wherein time and distance were no longer obstacles to social relations. Hitherto, every friend I'd ever had lived on the same block as me. Suddenly I could see how I could, like a long haired Doctor Who, Tardis myself about the streets and districts of Birmingham and beyond. I had to have one.

My father bought me a Bantam D14/4 two-stroke, 175cc, blue and silver bike. It was delivered and I got on and started it up. In seconds I was plunging toward the bottom of our road out of control like a bronco rider trying not to be thrown off a spooked horse. A wild and lucky lurch took me round the corner to the left and on I went, completely at the mercy of the power and will of the machine. Left again with another desperate lunge and I was round the block, going uphill. Luckily, the hill and the lack of throttle combined to stop me half way up with a sickening jerk as I stalled.

Half an hour later I was out near Elmdon Airport just outside Birmingham, racing along at 60mph, the complete master of riding techniques, and having the time of my life. One week later I hit a lorry at about 40mph and spent the subsequent six weeks in hospital. Much of my left shin was mashed and, thirty-four years later, still isn't very normal. It looks like a man and a jelly got into a matter-transporter beam and got mixed up.

When I came out of hospital on crutches the first thing I did was to get the bike out of the shed, assess the repairs my father had had done, and then start it up and ride along the path. I was enthralled by the smell of the two-stroke, the shine of the chrome in the contours of the tank, the pattern of the tread in the front tyre. I'd never had sex but if I had, and if someone passing by had asked for a comparative evaluation, this, I would have said, was better.

For two years I had friends in other parts of Birmingham and could visit, leave late, and arrive home without inconvenience. Sometimes, I'd listen to Radio Luxembourg until it closed down at about 3.30 in the morning, and then set out sedately on an 80-mile night ride to Chester to visit my sister.

When the Bantam became a rattling heap I sold it and moved on to a Honda CB250 Superdream. It had chrome everywhere, a shapely and larger red tank, a tachometer so you could see why the engine was doing impressions of an hysterical bee, and a big useful box on the back.

I was coming home from Wales once, out of my head, and knocked a hedge down. It was dark and there was a storm. I think the hedge pulled out in front of me without looking. I also nuked a posh bloke's Rover with it. One of the carburettors had jammed open because I'd ridden into a sand dune in Wales, causing the machine to keep going forward, despite changing down the gears, and despite applying the brakes and screaming, 'Noooooooooooo!'

I hit the Rover at an island. I stood up. My bass player, Dyl, on the back stood up. A vertical dent appeared through the number plate on the Rover. I pulled back the bike and the engine, fed fuel by the jammed carb, roared. Surprised, I let go of the throttle and we shot forward and hit the Rover again in the same spot. Glass from its number plate tinkled onto the floor. I stood up. My mate Dyl stood up. They we sat down. I figured the engine was jamming on so I reached down to the key to turn it off. That meant I had to let go of the throttle. The bike jerked forward a third time. Smack. The bent boot of the Rover opened. My mate Dyl (we'd just been to Virgin to buy a Door's LP which was in the box on the back), said, 'Oh no, man. My album!'

I turned the bike off. The posh man with the V shaped Rover said he'd had bikes himself so he knew that I'd done it on purpose. A policeman turned up. An old woman straight out of a Dickensian novel, stood waving an umbrella and wafting her crinolines, declaring, 'It was 'im! It was 'im in the black leather wot done it!'

Then someone I vaguely knew called Dave who was always on acid arrived and thought it would be cool to be a witness. His contradictions of everything said by the Miss Havisham figure appeared to convince the policeman who - to be fair - based his assessment more on the fact that when you turned the Honda on the engine note rose unassisted to a high pitched shriek.

The Honda was eventually replaced by a Triumph 350cc that only ran for one day. It might be some kind of record. I certainly never had the opportunity to crash on it.

After that I had a series of MZs. They all had different tanks but otherwise looked like aluminium rectangles with fins. The first had a long square-profiled tank with a square headlight. The bars went through and moved independently so that at night the light and your direction of travel bore only a passing relationship to one another. I'd whiz off to chat up students at a distant teachers' training college on it so I have many fond memories of that bike. Sadly, after a disastrous relationship, I hit the side of some old drunk's Austin Cambridge car so hard that I went over the roof, hit a wall upside down, and spent four months in hospital. My friends were impressed that the front wheel had ended up next to the back one, side to side.

I had one MZ with a huge red petrol tank. That one stopped running and my solution to get away from the mooing of cows at the side of a very cold A38 one rainy night was to use the silver foil from my cigarette packet to replace the fuse. I got home fine but the bike caught fire the next day as a result and the wiring turned into something resembling my left shin. See paragraph five.

I had a few other MZs because they seemed reliable. They had a distant kinship to the earliest bike I'd had, the two stroke Bantam D14/4, and they were cheap. But the best bike I ever had was a BMW R45. It had the weight and some of the credibility of a big bike, and where all my previous ones had been squawkers, this one had a deep, macho, unrelenting roar. It didn't have infinite power but compared to all that had preceded it, it seemed to. The excellent braking and handling somehow kept me out of serious trouble with one very amusing exception it would be foolish for me to mention here. No, don't even go there, girlfriends! (…Wagging of finger) Hmm, mmm. It wasn't me - as Dave is my witness.

The most memorable journey I had on the BMW was to the Lake District in a force 9 gale with a girlfriend. We tried to camp on a mountain but the tent blew away and we ended up doing a round trip of 400 miles so wet that when we both went into the Lady's loo in a motorway service area, putting our gloves over the blow driers caused them to blow big bubbles.

In the end, I sold the BMW and have since had a sequence of cars so awful that I've never sold one. They have to be thrown away. I've slowed down and have found cars much better for carrying building rubble than bikes. Also, if you're ever teaching Italians at the seaside, and you want to have a romantic liaison with a young lady at midnight in heavy rain, I can tell you this: there aren't any motorbikes of any description, no matter how many cylinders - not even if the thing was made by the most excellent Tuttles - that can compete with an old Vauxhall Viva.

Other readiing:

My friend's views on biking: http://www.ciao.co.uk/Everything_that_starts_with_B__Review_5506378

More about crashing bikes: http://www.ciao.co.uk/Everything_that_starts_with_B__Review_5475083