Hope everyone got home OK - I very nearly didn't... I was coming back onto the A41 from the services near Hemel, which has one of those 270 degree sliproads on it, and I was experimenting with the proposition I've heard from a couple of places, reliable sources, that opening the throttle tightens up your line. The result of doing this on this long, long uphill bend was that I was going quite quick by the end of it, and pretty cranked over, when I got to the top and discovered that, contrary to my memory of the bend unwinding and joining the A41 in a nice long slip-road which I could ride along appropriately, the bend actually tightened up suddenly, and then popped straight out on to the dual carriageway. Coming round the end of the long uphill curve, as cranked over as I really ever wanted to be, going as fast as I really ever wanted to go at that angle, and waiting for the bend to unwind, then seeing a forest of solid looking metal road furniture right in front of me was not a truly great moment in my life. Thinking 'fuckit, if I'm gonna die I'd rather die trying' and leaning still further while rolling in yet more power was only slightly better. The heavy duty grinding metallic noises at this point as the centrestand met the tarmac were extremely worrying. The moment of total elation as I thought 'Shit I made it' and started to pick the bike up died in mid elate, as a car crossed my bows and I shot out just past his rear bumper. The last bit was luck, not skill - I could so easily have got round the corner successfully and shot out straight into the side of an artic with a triumphant splat... :-(.

It _felt_ like I was bloody near horizontal. In practice, I'm sure that many people in here lay their bikes over further every day of the week. From later inspection of the hero blob, I don't think I even got the peg down - I certainly didn't _feel_ anything, although I _was_ just a wee tad preoccupied at the time. My centre stand wasn't sagging, but it may be just a gnats lower with the bumpstop on the Motad exhaust, so I really wasn't very far away. In retrospect, if I had bottled out, or otherwise binned it, then if I'd missed the fairly uncompromising-looking metalwork I would have slid out onto the A41 and been mashed pretty comprehensively in the traffic.

The slip-road concerned is actually nothing of the sort - I reckon that the safe way to negotiate it is to bimble round the 'loop', then be prepared to probably have to stop at the top and wait for a big enough gap to blast out into. It'd be nice if a sign mentioned this configuration. It'd be even nicer if I had remembered it right from last time I did it (in a car, after the last barbie) and hadn't ridden round it like Bazza Sheene. Jeez, I've no respect for people who pile into blind bends more in hope than expectation, so I can't really be too soft on myself for doing the same, can I. Still, if you fuckup and get away with it, it counts as a learning experience I'd say...

I've now scuffed the LHS of my rear all the way to the edge, for the first time. I suspect that the exhaust can might be a bit of a barrier on the RHS, and I'd also like to try that one somewhere where I don't end up playing Russian Roulette with the traffic.

I suspect that being programmed to roll it on, not shut it off when bad things happen in corners is a pretty fundamental motorcycling instinct. Hopefully I have acquired it…

Ken Haylock [VFR750FG]