Paris Salon de la Moto – Quick report from a visit to France’s largest motorcycle show. All the major brands on display with every model accessible to the public to touch and sit upon – a very large candy shop for this kid.

Bike I’d most like to own – Ducati Superleggera. Arun: I know you can get me one – but please don’t.

BIke I wish I’d built – Ducati cafe racer with Weber twin choke carb, kick start, and hydraulic drum brakes. Hard to imagine something cleverer and more retro.

Bike I least understand – Moto GECO by Eric Offenstedt. I don’t even understand how the front suspension works. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxKGn6T67KQ

Ugliest bike – Voxan Wattman. New French 200bhp electric that must be that large to accommodate all the batteries. Awful.

Bike I hope I don’t have to ride – Yamaha trainer provided by the French police. Very cute to see young riders with full uniform CRS officers on the back with the second set of clutch and brake controls.

London: Still the art, entertainment, culture, and over stimulation capital of the world.

A quick visit with no pre-planning and we managed to see …. the National Theatre’s adaptation of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (brilliant staging and beautiful performances and a puppy dog on stage to top it all off) … English National Opera’s production of The Magic Flute (funny and dark English version with impeccable main characters and a stage that was a technical marvel) … and the revival of Mojo (black comedy set in criminal Soho in the 50s and full of actors we all know from the Telly)

Also managed to fit in lunch at Scott’s of Mayfair (with Eric Clapton at the next table), a visit to the newly spiffied up Tate Britain, and my favourite museum – the National Portrait Gallery with a terrific exhibit on Elizabeth I and her times. Oh, and fish and chips at Borough Market and Indian street food at the market on the South Bank and Christmas food shopping at Waitrose and shoes from Church’s and the new Judi Dench / Steve Coogan movie Philomena which were all excellent.

Photos: Me getting as close as I will ever get to royalty – with a hologram of HRH Elizabeth Regina. Programs of various visits. Eros in a snow bubble at Piccadilly Circus. Diana and Charles in happier but still dopier times. School kids visiting Tate Britain.

Overall hard to argue with Dr. Samuel Johnson’s observation in 1777 … “Why, Sir, you find no man … who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

Field of Remembrance at Westminster Cathedral – Wide angle, enraging; close up it is heartbreaking.

Each November since the 1920s, the Royal British Legion has set out Fields of Remembrance to allow individuals to honour and remember the fallen who served in uniform. There are sections set aside for specific regiments and particular conflicts and individual roles – Airborne, Iraq, War Widows, Chaplains – and there are sections for families who just remember their lost ones alphabetically with identical crosses; no difference in rank in death. The two sections either side of the side door to the cathedral are marked simply as “Current Conflicts”.

I didn’t want to intrude by photographing the ex-soldiers in civvies with their regimental berets and medals on their blazers remembering fallen friends, or the ladies with kids reflecting on the loss of a husband.

The overall effect is choking.

Burning Man defies description – Just search for “Burning Man 2013” to see how much trouble the mainstream media has explaining Burning Man to an audience with a 30 second attention span. Impossible. We just spent a week in Black Rock City with 68,000 of our closest friends and here are a few glib generalisations of my own …

Burning Man is a drug and booze driven week long dance party. Burning Man is a desert Spring Break in costume. Burning Man is a bunch of old hippies still trying to create a tie-dye, hedonistic, atheist but spiritual, chaotic utopia. Burning Man is a carnival where the customers bring the attractions. Burning Man is a experiment in created community. Burning Man is being ruined by rich poseurs showing up with massive RVs, generators, showers, and Segways. Burning Man is a massive explosion of art and creativity. Burning Man is an opportunity for reflection and detachment from the real world.

All of these are true and I know that I haven’t even begun to understand what is going on.

Cote du Nord: the least accessible and most extraordinary gastronomic experience in Great Britain …. Dr. Chris Duckham is a GP with a fascination for food. Three nights a week in summer he indulges his obsession by cooking for up to eight people in the dining room of his home; a former school house in Kirtomy near Bettyhill about fifty miles west of John O’Groats overlooking the Hebrides. Next stop the Arctic.

Mick Sumpter and I had the pleasure of dining there and I have to say it was the most amazing meal I have ever eaten. Every one of the dozen courses was a perfectly executed combination of flavours drawn from strictly local ingredients. Just a few of them for example shown here …

– Salt fish brandade with pork crust – except the fish stock was reduced to a subtle soup served in medical pipettes to be drunk before eating the brandade. The soup was like a chemical accelerant for the white fish flavour.
– Mackerel broth with haggis espuma – a broth of smoked haddock, infused in a coffer maker with herbs and grasses, and topped with a foam made from local haggis. Served like an Irish coffee with the broth being drunk through the foam.
– Potato cooked in peat – just that – a potato wrapped in muslin and steamed in peat until it took on the whole earthy set of flavours and served on a bed of local sorrel and heather. Amazing.
– North Atlantic cool – a selection of local seafood served on a huge block of ice with a herring roe and horseradish sauce. With tweezers and a small paint brush to eat it with.

This went on and on. If this was in Paris or New York, there would be Michelin stars and celebrity status. In Kirtomy, Dr. Duckham goes back to treating patients and foraging for local ingredients.

Interview with Dr. Duckham …http://www.gponline.com/Off_Duty/article/1164878/life-GP-chef/

The restaurant web site … http://www.cotedunord.co.uk/

From Bettyhill to Applecross … stunning from start to finish.

The first panorama is from my window at the Bettyhill Hotel looking over Torrisdale Bay to Neave Island with a single white cottage on the headland. Following the coast along the top of Scotland took us past so many stunning vistas that it was impossible to capture them – every turn opened up something spectacular and largely empty – the view of Loch Eriboll is one that just appears as you crest the hill to drop down from the glen to the loch.

The roads in this part of the world are clearly best described as Top Gear Roads – the kind of place you’d expect to see Jeremy Clarkson hurling round the bend testing the latest Porsche Turbo with a helicopter capturing the ride and the spectacular scenery. Along the way we saw peat bogs still being used to collect and dry fuel and we could not resist the urge to ride out onto this abandoned jetty for the photo-op by the loch at a village called Tongue.

Finally we climbed over Bealach na Baa, the Pass of the Cattle, over the Applecross Peninsula – a winding road like crossing the Alps. There are no safe places to stop and take photos so this picture was nicked from the internet. At the top of the pass there is another spectacular view – this time of the Isle of Skye in the fading light.

Barter Books and “Keep Calm and Carry On" …. This image has now become totally banal but here is where it came to light.

During World War II the British government produced three posters to be used to improve morale in the face of desperate times in the UK. Two of the posters were printed and distributed but the third never saw the light of day until it was displayed by the owners of Barter Books in Alnwick (pronounced Annick) after being discovered in some boxes of old books bought at auction. They hung the poster, patrons loved it, they made some more, the rest is history.

The two posters that did make it into production and display during wartime were “Freedom Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might" and “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory" – not quite so snappy and memorable are they?

Barter Books is a total delight and alone well worth a trip to Alnwick; with nothing but old books, housed in the classic Victorian station building with a large scale model railway along the top of some of the shelves. There are sitting areas and a cafe that winds through the old waiting rooms and station master’s office. Great place for a couple of hours of rummaging and lunch.

In another of life’s amazing moments, in the jumble of old maps and travel books, the first one that Mick pulled out was the 1971 Ordnance Survey map of Sutton-in-Ashfield where we both were brought up and where we met as four-year olds. When I checked out, the man at the till said “Oh that’s funny, I was born there" and we were transported with a conversation about places we knew and people we’d met. Crazy times.

Here is a lovely video about the Keep Calm story. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrHkKXFRbCI

And link to Barter Books if you are ever in the neighbourhood. http://www.barterbooks.co.uk/html/About%20Us/The%20Bookshop.php

The Great Gathering …. On July 3rd 1938, Mallard established the world speed record for a steam locomotive near Grantham on the East Coast Main Line. The record will now stand forever.

This month the event was celebrated at the National Railway Museum at York with the gathering of the six remaining locomotives of this type – the A4 Pacific designed by Sir Nigel Gresley after whom one was named. Four of them were in the UK but two, “Dwight D. Eisenhower" and “Dominion of Canada" were returned from the US and Canada for the occasion.

These machines were not removed from service with British Railways until 1963 so, as a young enthusiastic nerdy ten year-old trainspotter, I had the chance to see them regularly thundering out of Newark when my long suffering parents could be persuaded to take me. The fact that The Great Northern pub was at the crossing at Carlton-on-Trent probably helped my Dad to be persuaded.

York was the first stop on a motorcycle trip that Mick Sumpter and I are taking – up the east side of the UK, around Scotland anti-clockwise, and then back to Cambridge via the Lake District and the Pennines. All the pretty bits with nice roads. I am sure that local ales and whiskies will be involved along the way.

Thanks to Hana and Patrick for a great trip ….. Hana Ptackova was the host for our trip around Morocco and she is the owner of Moto Adventours based in Spain but expert in Morocco. Patrick Trahan was our guide and coach and is a three time competitor in the Paris-Dakar rally and member of the Honda team in 2010 in South America. They looked after us perfectly.

The others are the rough crowd with whom I was traveling last week.

Fantasia or the Gunpowder Play ….. riding out of Ouarzazate along the Dades Valley late on a Friday afternoon, we ran into the town of El-Kelaa M’Gouna in the middle of an enormous market day and the Fantasia horse show.

People from outside Morocco call these events Fantasia but the locals call them Lab el Baroud, “The Gunpowder Play”. The display of skill consists of a line of jeweled horses and riders accelerating along the arena with each horse touching the next; at the final moment and at high speed, the horses rear and the guns fire simultaneously. I think the judges give extra points for speed, closeness, and synchronisation of the shots.

There are apparently thousands of these riders across the Maghreb and, in Morocco at least, there are also women riders as you can see in one of these pictures.