Rain. Lots of rain. At night. Soaked through, 50-odd miles from my destination and on a lonely road in the middle of bleak West Country moorland. My headlamp was pointing anywhere but at the road, mainly because it was off another bike and had been hastily lashed between the yokes with bungees, because three hours earlier the Harley-Davidson Sportster I was riding had vibrated its own bulb to pieces just as I’d left home. As road trips go, this was bad and I was proper fed up.

Then came the electric shocks…

That was over 20 years ago, but my first decent ride on a Harley-Davidson is still painfully fresh in my memory. It coloured the way I thought about all Harleys for more than a decade. OK, so I loved the look of some of the old models, and I still reckon that one of the most handsome engines ever made is a Knucklehead, like a motor turned inside out, all tubes and bosses and chunks of sculpted alloy. And of course having seen On Any Sunday I, like millions of others, couldn’t help being struck by the brutal beauty of a bucking, sliding XR750 flat tracker (below) in the hands of the majestic Mert Lawwill. But XR750s, even today, are rare beasts in Britain.

As for the stuff I rode though the ’90s – and I rode most of the then current models – well, it was like climbing onto a fairground ride in a provincial town. Waltzer-gaudy behemoths that shook the money from your pockets and wouldn’t stop when you felt sick and wanted to get off. Massive heavy things, under-powered and under-braked that made the dodgems feel like finely honed sports cars. Harley fans told me I didn’t get it. No I didn’t, and I didn’t want to either.

Then in 2002 something extraordinary happened. The Harley From Mars landed on Earth. The VRSCA V-Rod (above) dropped among us like a spaceship. Here was proof that the blokes in Milwaukee had not only heard of liquid cooling, overhead camshafts and effective braking, but had engineered it into one of their bikes. The V-Rod managed to mix contemporary with custom with tradition with performance. And it does perform. I took an early one out for a blast in 2001 and when I gave it a fistful and felt 115bhp through my low-slung backside I laughed out loud, tickled to be so surprised.

Then 2008 finally brought something that echoed Mert Lawwill’s XR750. In the XR1200 (above), Milwaukee has given us a Harley suited to roads with those pesky things called bends. The styling reflects the dirt oval’s most successful race bike and has helped to boost an already growing interest in all things flat track. It’s a bike that combines the rorty chug of the old-style air-cooled pushrod V– twin with a feel that’s sportier than any street Harley before it.

Oh Mr Davidson, you’re spoiling us.

So do I get Harleys now? Well, I suppose I do, but then there’s more to get these days. But also, and you might call this age, I do find something comforting about, in the case of almost the whole Harley-Davidson range, a relatively basic motorcycle shamelessly showcasing proven old technology. Living history, you might call it. But then so is Bruce Forsyth, though I know what I’d rather be riding.

We’re not sure if there is any concrete connection between bike and skate culture.

Both share the fixation on rolling through the landscape, but, of course, with vastly different emphasis.

But in California — that melting plot of all things faddish and nex gen — there is now and then something unlikely peeps through the cultural meniscus — something that fuses what was always so seperate.

This pleasant little video records a snippet of a day in the life of a skateboarder and Harley rider.

An interesting little muse on the beauty of metalflaked hogs and skating through that distinctive Californian light.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hands up. I’ve never been a Harley man. It’s not just that I’ve never owned one. I’ve never bought into the whole burly, knuckleheaded, chrome clad idea that is a Harley Davidson.

It always seemed to me that that riding stance, that garrulous V-Twin — all those Harley-isms that put clear water between themselves and Euro-Jap bike culture — were so essentially other than myself as a European biker that it would be absurd to aspire to their unreconstructed Americana.

But my mind was changed recently whilst browsing in my local Ducati dealership (which happens of course to have a Harley outlet grafted onto the side, an extremely non-identical conjoined twin), when I glimpsed the latest XR 1200.

With its flat tracker aesthetic, those trick pipes and powder coated engine — and especially in its stripey orange trim — this looks like the sort of bike I could own.

We suppose that purist superbike jockeys will scoff at HD’s attempt to placate the other end of the market, and that card-carrying hog heads will wince also at such a jockish bike bearing the Harley Badge.

But if anything, I have always occupied the section of the biker subcult that cares self-consciously about how bikes look, how they hold themselves; where they sit in the panoply of the biking tribe.

I, on other words, am one of those bikers that fundamentalists of every hue can’t stand. So should the fact that I dig this Harley’s stance send the purists into a slathering frenzy of poseur-hate?

You decide.

‘Serious film buffs’ often dismiss the admittedly ponderous and indulgent 1968 film from Jack Cardiff that was based on Mandiargues’s quasi surrealistic novel as a slightly ridiculous joke.

But if you dig the aesthetic of the last couple of years of the sixties, you’re interested in the idea of girls on motorbikes being slightly unnerving and subversive, then you really should take the time to hunt it down on your local bit torrent.

The clip below gives a good flavour of the feel of the film. The bike riding scenes are ludicrous but still somehow kinda cool.  The Harley is almost comical and otherworldy in thc context of the French countryside. Marianne Faithful looks pretty and seductive and vaguely sinister in her skintight leather one-piece in combo with the futuristic open face lid.

But, you can’t help but notice the similarities with other films like Easy Rider and countless schlockish bikesploitation movies that equate motorcycles with freedom, rebellion and  sexuality. It’s cool to witness an European take  on the theme, and the main character’s interior monologues are  amusing — and her encounters with randy gendarmes laugh-out loud hilarious.

Perfect viewing for the frustrated biker on a wet Easter weekend.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The message that Harley-Davidson killed its sporting sub brand Buell broke to shocked yank bike loving global community last week. In response, Harley CFO John Olin told the press recently “We have not quantified the benefits of increased focus on [the] Harley-Davidson brand as a result of discontinuing Buell nor included any potential savings in our restructuring estimates.”

Reports have been current that net income across the HD empire has fallen 71.4 percent so far in 2009 compared to the same period during  2008, whoch was already a very quiet trading period.

According to various sources the company plans to get themselves out of their very large financial hole by building more large-capacity tourers and cruisers, as well as offering more performance add-ons and accessories to their existing range. They also plan to shut down production of the erstwhile perennial big seller the Sportster for the rest of 2009

It’s always a tragedy when companies go under, people lose their jobs and an absence is created in the culture of quality machinery. Though they were not to everyone’s tastes, Buell certainly produced some spectacular bikes over the years (our fave being the muscular XB 12-S), and pioneered some truly innovative technology, notably fuel-in-the-frame.

This obviously emotional statement from company founder Eric Buell says it better than any of us could hope to. And if you’re a Buell lover, then it might be time to get down the local dealership and scoop up an instant classic.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are so many car and bike culture books out there, it’s hard to pick a single volume or a series of books that stand out. So many of them are written by experts with an almost blinkered view of the subject matter to which the respective book relates, that outside the cloistered world of the aficionado, they have little appeal.

The books by Rin Tanaka on the other hand, are some of the most entertaining, beautifully produced books on the subject that offer a kind of visual narrative of the bits and pieces of car, bike and surf culture.

Tanaka is a collecting aficianado of material culture that references Harleys, helmets, hot rods – as well as skate and surf culture. He documents every possible manifestation of how these things have been marketed and consumed by people with passion, and draws broad lines that join the dots of things as disparate as Selvidge denim and Moonlight Risers.

Especially worth checking out is the Harley Davidson book of fashions, which is nearly impossible to get hold of in the UK, but all the more sweet when you finally manage to track it down.