On starting.

The first video. A near-drop in a Newtown car park trying to decide whether to hug another rider, and a lesson in how anything begins.

The Motociclo car park in Newtown is a slab of bitumen behind a roller door, the kind of yard where a dropped bolt rolls under a workbench and stays there for a year. Another rider walked over as I was getting on. Mid-fifties, helmet under his arm, the easy bearing of a man who had owned more bikes than he could remember the registration numbers of. He’d been watching me wheel Hunter out and he wanted to say something nice about Royal Enfields.

I could not, for the length of about four seconds, decide whether the social move was a hug or a handshake. He read it the same way I did, which is to say neither of us committed, and in the half-step where I was trying to free a hand from the bar I let the bike list a few degrees further than was wise. I caught it. Just. The sidestand bit, the tank rocked, and the small humiliation of nearly dropping a brand new motorcycle in front of a man who was being kind to me passed in about a second and a half. He pretended not to see it. I pretended he hadn’t pretended.

Hunter is a 2025 Royal Enfield Himalayan 450. Olive green, knobblies, a panel-beaten tank that looks like it was made for a film about a ride that did not go to plan. I’d picked him up an hour earlier. The name arrived on the ride home and stuck before I’d thought about whether it should — Hunter, because the eventual aim of all this is a long ride looking for something I haven’t found yet, and because a name is a useful thing to have for a machine you will, eventually, be afraid of.

The first video of anything is always slightly mortifying. That is the price of doing it.

The plan, in so far as there is one, is an around-the-world ride. Not soon. The honest version is that right now the work is smaller and a lot less photogenic. Learn the bike. Learn to film. Learn to stand in front of a lens and say something true without sounding like a man auditioning for a role he hasn’t been offered. Learn, mostly, to be a beginner in public, which is the part most people skip and the part that, by skipping, makes them never start.

The first video of anything is always slightly mortifying. The framing is wrong. The audio is too low. You say “um” in the place a better speaker would have said nothing. You watch it back and the version of you on the screen is a small stranger. That is the price of doing it. Pay it once and the second one is cheaper. Don’t pay it and the price never goes down — it just sits there waiting, accruing interest in the form of all the things you didn’t make.

The channel is called Motorcycle Seat Wisdom. The phrase is half a joke and half not. Seat wisdom is the kind of thinking that only happens at eighty kilometres an hour on dirt with no one to talk to — when the road is doing enough of the work to keep you alive but not so much that you can’t notice the colour of the paddock, the angle of the light, the question you’ve been avoiding for a fortnight. It is what a brain does when you remove its phone and hand it a horizon. It turns out to be quite a lot.

I rode Hunter out of Newtown into the southbound traffic and the first set of lights on King Street and the small, ordinary terror of being a learner on a road full of people who were not. The kind man waved. I waved back, badly, with two fingers off the clutch. The light turned green.

The bike found first gear.

The road found me.

The next thing started.

A written companion to Should I hug him? on the Motorcycle Seat Wisdom YouTube channel.