The Zen Method of Starting Your Engine From Cold

1) Wait four weeks for warm, dry weather to arrive as part of this wonderful British Summer we’re having.

2) Get the bike out of the garage in the morning and leave it in the sun for at least six hours. Occasionally go out there to put your hand on the engine, feeling how the block is warming to the touch under the sun’s influence.

3) During this interval, embrace cafe culture and head off to the non-corporate-MoFo local coffee shop for a large cappuccino. While you’re there, be a gent and try not to note the effect the warm weather is having on women’s wardrobe choices, but resign yourself to the inevitability of it.

4) Go back and watch the end of the Tour de France, saluting Bradley Wiggins’s momentous victory which will far outstrip anything that this country will achieve during the “McDonald’s Olympic Games” next week.

5) Clean and lube your chain.

6) Watch the highlights from the German Grand Prix, even though you secretly hate contemporary F1 for its stage-managing, total pandering to corporate interests and economic insularity, with cars that are so fast through corners now that they appear unrealistic. It’s like watching Scalextric.

7) Take tea. Do some Twitter.

8) Go out and feel the engine again. Note that it is nice and warm, and that by extension so is the coolant inside it. Start it up after four weeks of idleness without any choke whatsoever. Result.

Then,

9) Go out. Realise that after four weeks you’ve forgotten how to ride properly. Realise that your bike feels more like a tractor. Consider selling. Then find yourself behind a total bell-end riding a BMW in Birkenstocks, just because it’s 24 degrees. Resist the temptation to pull this guy over and show him the pics of Ian Hutchinson’s ankle operation…

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