I’ve fixed the brake light now; it was a cut or pinched cable that goes from the switch to the negative terminal on the battery. I blame the chain for hitting it (its previous route up to the battery practically touched the chain, it turns out!).

The tail light isn’t fixed yet, but that’s going to be something of a yak shaving exercise unfortunately. To get to the cable I have to take off the seat. To take off the seat I have to take off the luggage rack. To take off the luggage rack, I have to take off the panniers. I know there’s only 3 steps to this, but to be honest, if i’m not planning on riding when it’s dark, i don’t need a tail light anyway, so I have until second Monday in September to fix that (when the local AJS & Matchless Owners Club meeting is happening).

Anyway… i’ve managed to rack up another 50 miles or so in the last couple of days, the first of which was a very enjoyable 20 mile run into the local countryside on Friday which you can find on the new Motorcycle Routes section of my 1966 Matchless G3 web site! :-)

This route, by the way, (and all future routes) was (and will be) recorded with Nokia’s SportsTracker application running on my Nokia E90 mobile phone (which has a built-in GPS) – an excellent piece of software in my opinion that makes the GPS in the phone well worth having (using the GPS for navigating around the country as a “satnav”, using Nokia Maps, also makes it worth having, of course, but SportsTracker is great too). SportsTracker basically uses the GPS to record your longitude and latitude through an entire journey while also recording your speed, distance, time, altitude etc… – it can then export all that information as a KML file which you can either load into Google Earth or upload to your web site and point Google Maps at, which is exactly what i’ve done on the Motorcycle Routes page!

The second run was with Sarah, when we visited Bar Hill to see my grandparents (11 miles) and then rode back cross-country (20 miles). That was also very enjoyable! :-)

Today, it’s raining, so i will probably not go out today!