It's amazing how the past can come back to unsettle you, even if in a good way.
     This week, I got an e-mail from the editor of a classic motorcycle magazine who's been contacted by someone writing a book. That person had seen a feature I'd written two years ago that's archived on the magazine's website, and wanted permission to quote me and reproduce a couple of my photos.
     My immediate reaction was "Huh. What a sign of the times: Guy in the U.K. e-mails a guy in the U.S. wanting to use something a guy in Canada wrote about Triumph motorcycles circa 1981."
     But when I went on the website to see which photos he was looking at, I was flooded with what I could call nostalgia. Except it's more than that.
     I was suddenly back in August 1981, where it really all started for the Tiny Perfect Redhead and me. Back  in the English Midlands, pursuing, as I was later to write, my two passions -- her in Warwick, and the Triumph motorcycle plant not far away in Meriden.
     She and I missed connecting because of a Canada Post strike that made communication next to impossible. In a world where e-mails flit through the ether by the billions, it's hard to remember what havoc one late or missing letter could wreak.
     In the event, I decided to wander around on my own. It was very hot, and I was decidedly uncomfortable getting around by bus and train and on foot, lugging camera gear and clothes in old army backpacks. There was also more than a whiff of civil unrest in the air, since riots had earlier spilled out of Brixton's slums and were sweeping the country; one nearby had helped convince The Redhead it was time to return to Canada -- well, that and Des the Stalker.
     I went to places I knew she'd know, taking photos of St. Mary's Church in Warwick and poking around the Norman crypt beneath it; stopping over at the Lord Leycester, the hotel with the pub where she'd worked; wandering around Warwick Castle and generally doing other touristy things, like looking the wrong way for traffic -- and almost getting arrested (that's a post for another day).
     And I also went on a personally guided tour of the Triumph plant, whose labour force had declined to about 100 men and women, less than a tenth of what it had been a decade or so earlier. It was a shattering wakeup call for someone who'd always loved the legendary marque and all it represented.
     That visit in turn took me to the Earls Court exhibition hall in London, the cavernous site of some of the most exciting motorcycle shows ever held in a country that really started the whole two-wheel craze at the turn of the 20th century.
     It was the Earls Court story -- "Bike '81" -- that prompted the inquiry from the aspiring author.
     There were only two British motorcycle displays in the entire place. One, destined to be mercifully short-lived, was a bloated exercise in vanity called the Hesketh. The other was Triumph, and they couldn't even afford to sponsor their own stand without help from the Triumph Owners Club and one of their major dealers.
     It was hard to imagine what a fantastic assortment of other British lines would have been there only a few years earlier. BSA, Ariel, Norton, Matchless, to name a few -- all gone.
     Inevitably, Triumph went too. In 1983, the remaining few hands agreed to close down the co-operative they'd formed to take over the company in 1974. The property was sold to a housing developer named John Bloor, and the only reminders of that once-flourishing firm are some residential street signs and a small memorial.
     Bloor had also acquired the Triumph name, manufacturing rights and trademarks, and not long after, he started an entirely new plant in nearby Hinckley. It's a state-of-the-art concern, giving new definition to the title "Trusty Triumph" and producing a world-class motorcycle.
     But they are not turning out "The Best Motorcycle in the World", as the original company once proudly declared in its literature.
     So that's why I'm going to let that man in the U.K. have the use of my photos and whatever words he chooses to publish from the original article. 
     Legends, like passions for Tiny Perfect Redheads, should live on.

 The TPR in a pensive moment, 1981.