9000 kms, and still illegal...

I'm a lazy git. Let's face it. I think this whole business started as that- me being me.

A shiny new bike it was. I'd just picked it up. Paid a king's ransom for it too. A 'true blue thumper' my friend calls it. I refer to it as the cantankerous old lady. But I'm digressing, and I do that a lot. So, as I said, a shiny new bike it was. And what with drooling over it (NOT literally, sheesh!) and spending all my spare time tinkering with it and keeping it shiny and new, there never seemed to be any time left for all the legal niceties. Or so I kept telling myself. You know what I mean- getting the 'lady' registered with the local authorities, obtaining a registration number and defacing the spanking white licence plate with old world serif versions of said number. Things like that. But mostly, I think, it was the fact that I am, and I've admitted as much before, a lazy git.

And so, time passed. Sizeable chunks of it, in fact. And the bike remained 'illegal'. Not that that stopped me from riding it around town. Or out of it, for that matter. There's something about owning and riding a 'true blue thumper' that massages your ego and makes you feel like twice the man that you are. Though I've never quite figured out what that's supposed to mean. Perhaps that I have two of... Ummm... Never mind.

The more I rode, the more the theory seemed to make sense- the law doesn't seem to be too keen to mess about with thumper riders. Perhaps the fact that the bike weighs a quarter of a ton leads them to believe that the owner must weigh at least as much, if not more. Not quite the kind of person that the law (insert picture of friendly neighbourhood pot bellied, balding, middle aged, khaki clad official) wants to be messing with, ne?

And so a seed was planted. And it sparked to life, nourished itself and, sometime later, sprouted an idea. Not very bright, or even unique, as ideas go but an idea nevertheless. The idea was this-

"How far can I take this whole business? What would be the 'illegal bike riding' equivalent of The Full Monty?"

And more time passed. Huge swathes of it. And with the passing of time, my confidence grew. Hitherto, no cop had ever cared to examine the bareness of my license plate. None had ever stopped me or asked me to pull over to the side of the road for a 'friendly chat'. In fact, it seemed to me, the law went out of its way to pretend I did not exist. In an Adamsian world me, and my bike, would've been the proverbial SEP- Someone Else's Problem.

My new found confidence, or bravado if you will, has led me to do strange things indeed, to see if the law could be persuaded to brush with me. Well, not brush with me, per se, if you know what I mean. Purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry, and all that, of course. There's a theory to be proved, after all. So I have left my bike illegally parked. Often unlocked and unprotected. Twice in front of a police station. I have impudently ridden it up to the friendly neighbourhood guardian of the law to innocently ask for directions to a place I didn't need to go to. I have ridden across states. And back.

The law, however, seems resolute in its stand against my continued, and increasingly annoying, existence. Or that of my bike, at the very least.

9000kms, at last count, of a bright white number plate. 9000kms of flaunting the law.

And now I'm curious. Does this happen elsewhere? Is it really about owning the right kind of bike? Or is there a deeper, more sinister game afoot? More crucially, however, what will The Full Monty be?