The Cooper family is proud and excited to announce the arrival of a new baby girl, Kathryn (Katie for short), who was delivered on Friday afternoon.

She is very, very red, but very, very pretty – a sister for three-year-old Lara. Mum and baby are doing well; dad’s wallet . . . not so much.

Oh, the weight? 8 07lbs.

No, not 8lbs 7oz, eight hundred and seven pounds, wet weight.

Yes, you read that right. This is not your average bundle of joy: she sleeps through the night, never cries or complains and only needs feeding every 220 miles or so.

Ladies and gentlemen, please say hello to the Triumph Rocket III Roadster, the largest-engined production motorcycle in the world . . .

Who’s a pretty girl, then?

In case you were wondering, Lara is also a Triumph – a Speed Triple 1050 in matt black, for those days when one needs a little more hooligan in one’s motorcycling.

Two weeks.

Two weeks after chopping in the bikes against a nice, sensible car* and my husband was getting twitchy.

By March, the days were getting longer, the sun was coming out… you can tell where this is going.  He wanted another bike.  The “garage vacuum” was pulling *hard*.

So he’s bought a BMW F800GS.  Not the big Ewan-and-Charley one, but its baby brother.  Tall, aggressively-beaked, looks from the front like Sir Patrick “The Sky at Night” Moore with his monocle:

See?  That’s a 2008 model, but whatever.  It’s the right colour.

Two weeks.  I thought he was made of sterner stuff than that.

* He originally wanted a 4-door Jeep Wrangler but when I tried climbing into one in the showroom and found the ascent required oxygen and a team of Sherpas, and the descent required my beloved’s assistance lest I measure my length on the floor, that idea was quickly canned.

Alas, the time has come.

My balance problems have got to the point where Rob is terrified to take me pillion on the bike, and I am so leery about getting on and off that I have decided, with great reluctance, to hang up my lid.

I’ve always loved bikes, ever since I saw a picture of the JPS Norton and thought “Ooh, shiny…”  Meeting Rob and his beloved Exup made the bug bite hard.  I wanted a bike of my own, had it all picked out, and decided I’d take my bike test.

Rob, naturally, was extremely worried but incredibly supportive, and took me pillion a few times on the Exup to get used to the idea.  I started giggling dementedly at the first swoopy bend and didn’t stop for the remainder of the journey.  I loved it.  I wanted to spread out my arms Titanic-style and whoop with delight.  It’s true – only bikers understand why dogs love to stick their heads out of car windows.

Lid, gloves, boots and jacket followed.  The Exup was not an ideal pillion machine, so I bought us a brand new Yamaha XJR1300.  In black, natch – the right and proper colour for a motorcycle.  Especially a big old air-cooled musclebike like the XJR.  And I loved that too, even if I couldn’t get it off the stand by myself.  We went to Holy Island on it, and up to Melrose, and made plans to maybe go down to the MotoGP at Donington, or visit my brother.

Those plans quickly got derailed.  Whenever we had the time to go out, the weather was foul.  Whenever I had the inclination to book a CBT, there were other things to spend the money on, or I was ill.  Before we knew it 18 months had passed and we found ourselves with a bike with only a thousand miles on it, that hadn’t turned a wheel in over a year.

Uh-oh.  This was not a good sign.  With heavy hearts, we part-exed the bikes in against a nice sensible car.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lovely car and plenty fun to drive, but I miss gearing up for a ride.  I miss earplugs and helmet hair and baked flies on my visor, the feel of the bike’s back end squatting under acceleration and the wind tugging at my jacket.  It was the closest thing to flying I have ever experienced.

/me sobs.

We’ve all had these bright ideas from time to time. You know, the kind of thing that seems like a perfectly reasonable proposition at the outset, but four hours later, when you’re bruised, sweaty and covered in dust and the FZR 1000 EXUP is firmly wedged in the living room doorway, well, you start to wish you hadn’t bothered getting out of bed.

It’s all our next door neighbour Darren’s fault, really. He takes his bike out of the garage and leaves it to warm up whilst he fetches his lid and gloves. My other half, Rob, hears it purring away outside and starts to scowl.

“He does that deliberately, the scumbag,” Rob mutters. “He knows I haven’t got my bike – he’s torturing me.”

After several days of this, a decision was reached. On Saturday morning, we would drive to Rob’s work, borrow the Big White Van, and fetch the bike from the shed at his mum’s flat. Darren’s Fireblade was going to have some company.

Things we learned on Saturday:

1. When parking a car in front of the shed doors to make a patent anti-bike-theft device, *don’t* leave the handbrake on for two years.  This makes the patent anti-bike-theft device difficult to remove later.

2. Always use the right tools for the job.  When attempting to remove rusty, rounded-off screws from the side panel of an old shed, an electric drill fitted with a screwdriver head will only make things worse.  A big claw hammer is your friend.

3. When building a shed in a sloping yard, try to ensure that the drop from the shed floor to the yard does not exceed the maximum ground clearance of the bike being stored. This can lead to an alarming moment when your makeshift exit ramp collapses and leaves the bike see-sawing on its belly on the shed frame.

4. Eleven year old sportsbikes *are* narrower than the average domestic door frame – by about 3/16ths of an inch.

5. Motorcycles do not steer well on carpet. This is particularly true when the motorcycle’s rear tyre has a slow puncture.

6. Motorcycles are heavy and have lots of inconvenient sticky-out bits, that are capable of doing significant damage to woodwork, wallpaper, and on occasion, humans.

7. Don’t call the motorcycle a contrary old cow and expect her rider to take you pillion afterwards.

8. Don’t threaten the motorcycle’s exhaust system with an angle grinder and expect her to co-operate. In a confined space, she *will* exact her revenge (see 6 above).

9. It *is* possible to get an EXUP through a Tyneside flat from back yard to front door in under five hours – just. It takes considerably longer to redecorate the hallway afterwards (see 6 above).

10. Finally, when a newly re-biked other half announces that he’s “just going to have a wander round the bike shops, dear,” remove his wallet into protective custody *immediately*.