I took this photo earlier in the year and Veloce has used it for the dummy cover in their catalogue but it was taken with a cheap camera, so insufficiently pixellated.
I said I would retake it with my more expensive camera. One thing and another got in the way and it was only today that I was able to go for it. The location was an hour away, and I drove up in the mobile sauna bath with lots of bikers, some of them apparently suicidal, going in the opposite direction.
However, some bastard from Electricité De France has stuck a bloody great concrete pylon right in the line of fire! Alas, this photo will not be on the cover.
Driving today was possible only because I had fitted a new battery on Friday. I think the other one was fried by rectifier failure. On the suggestion of my Morgan dealer, I first went to my nearest Harley dealer, in Roquebrune, about half an hour from here (I wish my Morgan dealer were as near), but it seems that H-D batteries are entirely dissimilar. The Harley guy looked at the M3W battery with one of those "What the **** is that?" expressions, directed me to Feu Vert in Fréjus (where Julius Caesar landed for the invasion of Gaul).
Feu Vert is the equivalent of Halfords and they didn’t have one either, but the guy there helpfully directed me to a little shop on the outskirts of Saint-Raphael, 3km down the road. This man is a battery man. He sells every kind of battery, big and small, and only batteries. He has batteries on shelves from the floor to the ceiling. I thought shops like that no longer existed. He had the wild goose that I had been chasing. I took it home, filled it with the toxic fluid supplied and installed it. The motor fired up instantly, which always comes as a surprise to pessimists. I note that batteries have not got any cheaper since I last looked. Someone must have made a nice profit on that on its way from China.
