I was checking my hard drive for archiving prior to a PC upgrade and came across this little collection of pictures which my Mother still keeps. I suppose just in case she forgets who I am.

The first is me aged four. The second (Bottom left) at twenty three in 1980 with my recently home built Honda motorcycle, and just to show some things never change; pictured leaving a friends house in Brussels in 2003 (Bottom right) with Angie, my wife, on my old Triumph 900 ST.

Three weeks and three thousand miles during a long hot European Summer tour down the Rhine Valley, across Switzerland into Italy and back up through France and Belgium. Magical.

I’ve got a whole heap of notes from that trip, but the one thing that brings it all flooding back is the smell of fresh Basil. Funny how memory cascades off a single trigger. The smell of hectares of Basil growing along the road from Florence to Genoa, Italy. It floods the mind and snatches me away to a happy vacation. Possibly the best of my life. Slumped in the paltry shade of Gas Stations signs on mercilessly baking days when it was too hot even to ride. Peeling out of sweat caked leathers in the wonderful cool of air conditioned hotel rooms to exhausted cries of “Aircon! Aircon!”. Must do another trip like it this side of the water.