Genesis

Admittedly Greg had a good reason for not getting round to fixing the little Kawasaki. Apart from a limited mechanical knowledge (which is not enough to hinder most tinkerers) he was also off to Australia for a year and was in the process of disposing of all his worldly goods. He had hired a van and I spent the weekend helping him transport stuff to the dump in return he gave me the ZXR and a lawnmower. The lawnmower was in good working order... the bike was in about 100 pieces, so before it could be removed from his garage, I had the unenviable task of piecing it all together.

Actually I enjoyed it. It was like a jigsaw puzzle for grownups, there was no lid with a picture on, so it was a lot of guesswork and it gave me a good opportunity to see all the bits that are wrong with it. You would not believe how much Rob and Greg had dismantled the poor Kawasaki, without any rational reason or any sign of wanting to put it back together (the exception being that most of the fixings had been but into labeled up bags, but why that had taken most of them off in the first place was unfathomable). So with the light beginning to fade I had converted what looked like an explosion in a parts factory into a reasonable semblance of a motorbike. And like most old jigsaws there were a few bits missing here and a few that wouldn't fit there. But it was bike shaped and I liked what I saw!