Suzuki RGV250 SOLD

Within 36 hours of putting this on Gumtree I've had four messages showing interest. While I was at work. Oops. If you genuinely wanted it and were only in the area yesterday Barry, then I'm truly sorry. My fault, I should have checked.

I'd better tell you about it while I've still got it then hadn't I.

About nine years ago I woke up in hospital with a morphine drip. Ironic really because last thing I remember I was on my way home from the hospital where I had just finished a 24 hour on call. The theory is that I fell asleep just long enough to hit the back of a builders van. "Luckily" I only broke both hands, although my right hand was badly enough mangled to need 3 ops and the surgeon was considering using spare parts to fix me. The bike was written off, it was a Honda Superdream fitted with a single cylinder DR400 engine and fit right in with my philosophy of preferring my vehicles to be interesting. As an aside, from the state of my helmet and my memory since that time I would say that my hands weren't the only things mangled that day.

So I needed a small cheap reliable sensible commuter bike. Enter the RGV.

• Small - check
•  Cheap - not too bad, the seller priced it lower than he should have really. BUT if your interested and you don't already know then 22mpg is about average if ridden properly - ie caned but with expensive two stroke oil to stop it's pistons firing up through your gonads.
• Reliable - it stopped for no apparent reason. Not the first time. As far as I can tell they do that.
• Sensible - no.
• Commuter - I did, for a bit, but the mileage is still quite low for something this old so that should give  you a clue as to how much commuting really got done on it.

I LOVED IT. I HATED IT. I LOVED IT SOME MORE. I HATED IT AGAIN. BUT I STILL LOVED IT.

I have never before ridden on something that handled so well (hur hur), you just thought it round corners. Amazing. You had to keep it in the power band, I swear it had about ninety gears to facilitate this, you changed gear approximately twice as often as you breathed. This isn't as often as you might think because you only breathed about once every thirty seconds, when you remembered to. For a short while this was the most exciting roller coaster way to commute ever.

Unfortunately  something this highly strung is not really suitable for the town part of my journey. Or the narrow twisting roads. Or the open roads, if you had any attachment to your driving license emotional or otherwise. Not keeping it on the boil resulted in not starting at all, often with dirty spark plugs.

It was a difficult beast to live with, but available power of a 2-stroke 250 v-twin with the weight and size of a 125 made it all worth it. Another aspect of the size and the sound of a two stroke was the teenage drivers of hot hatches trying to race you from traffic lights in order to increase the size of their favourite toys, only to find themselves scratching their heads in a cloud of expensive synthetic two stroke. Priceless.

At the end of the day though the hassle of keeping it going and the pain of the riding position on my newly repaired wrist meant that I didn't try too hard to fix it. It gave up just a week or so into a new MOT so as put away it was doing alright apart, of course, from the engine.

In the time it took to write this, it sold. As with everything concerning this bike, with astonishing speed.

I'm glad I owned it for a while, it was insane but worth it. I'm also glad that very soon I'll be able to see a bit of my garage floor!