My motorbike jacket has been amazing and phenomenal and has served me beautifully. But the rigours of a decade-plus of motorbiking have rendered it quite spectacularly scruffy. Parts are literally falling to bits. It's well past time for a new one.

In I popped to motomart.co.nz's Lower Hutt store. I 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 informed me that although most Harley enthusiasts are great fun and level-headed, there's a certain purist hard core who spit tacks at people with the temerity to use Harley gear yet not use Harley bikes. These purists consider such fence-sitters filthy casuals, and posers, and complete goddamn scum, and can become quite phenomenally nasty.

I pondered this.

I stared 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.