A Triumph

On Saturday I went to Triumph Live with my dad.  Now I am no motorbike enthusiast, in fact, I’m not even really a motorbike lukewarmist, I can tell one end of a motorbike apart from the other, mainly because it would be a very brave design choice to put the handle bars on the back, but that is about as far as it goes.  I am a big fan of standing around people as they look at engines and nodding sagely when they talk knowledgeably about sprockets and cam shafts and the occasional carburettor but I couldn’t tell you anything about those things, I wouldn’t know what they looked like never mind what they actually did.  I can be part of a conversation like that whilst not actually following a word of what was being said.  I can point out the windscreen washer fluid inlet funnel, because it has the cool picture on it, and I know where the oil goes because I feel I should, but more than that and I am not the man to help you.  So I was mildly interested to go and see some motorbikes, but i didn’t actually expect to really understand what was going on, especially as part of the day was to go round the Triumph factory, a place that I was expecting to confuse me from the moment I stepped in.  In my head, as I prepared myself to go in I knew that this was going to be a trip in which my ego was going to take a bit of a beating.

It was brilliant.  It was so brilliant that I ended up taking almost a hundred photos which for me is like a normal person taking about a thousand.  This really was something quite wonderful.  There were explanatory plaques and stands, some incredibly intricate machinery and one wonderfully excited father.  The fact that I really hadn’t got a clue what was going on was more than made up for by my dad who was charging around like a small child who doesn’t know which present to open first.  It was like taking my daughter round, I kept having to stop myself from reminding him that he couldn’t touch anything.

Anyway, there were a few things that I really wanted to show you, so I shall now proceed to bombard you with photographic evidence.