Published on: 16 Jun 08:25

My motorbike jacket has been amazing and phenomenal and served me beautifully, but the rigours of a decade-plus of motorbiking have made it quite spectacularly scruffy. Bits of it are literally falling apart. Time for a new one.

I popped into motomart.co.nz's Lower Hutt store, and spent an hour and a half trying on damn near every type of protective jacket they stock. Perhaps a third of their stock is specialist-branded Harley Davidson gear. You can tell because they all have HARLEY DAVIDSON sprawled across them in colossal, stitched-on capitals.

I merrily made my way through that kit too, trying on jacket after jacket. The shop attendant accompanying me, however, had become a tad subdued.

He asked me if I myself owned a Harley. I said no. He then told me that although most Harley enthusiasts are great fun and level-headed, there's a certain purist hard core who spit tacks at people who'd use Harley gear yet not use Harley bikes. These purists consider them filthy casuals, and posers, and complete scum, and some can become quite phenomenally nasty.

I pondered this, staring at the colossal HARLEY DAVIDSON logos emblazoned across every jacket before me.

A thought occurred.

"Can I suggest a compromise?" I replied. "Something that might help these purists feel better? To set their hearts and minds at ease? To mollify them, to lower their hackles? I could make a teeny-weeny alteration to my jacket's logo. Using the same lettering, same font, add a single tactful word. Instead of just HARLEY DAVIDSON, it should say HARLEY DAVIDSON SUCKS."

He doubled up laughing, then showed me a jacket superior to anything in the Harley section.