RIDING WITH A Legend

Isn't it entertaining when an idea which you've previously considered, failed to achieve, forgot about, then pondered again ... quite suddenly and entirely unexpectedly and with no planning at all - actually happens! What am I talking about? Well, as you might recall from last month's magazine, my everyday go-to machine is a mostly modern Triumph, a Street Scrambler of a thrusting 900cc capacity . Its styling is a cleverly deliberate derivation of soft-roader Triumphs of long ago - a retro, if you like the term; a roadster for most modernists . And it's great, as I have said probably a hundred times already. When the modern Triumph concern rose from the ashes of the classic Meriden company, its Top Chaps all confirmed that the new company wanted to distance itself as far as possible from the old concern's machines' somewhat flimsy reputation for quality, reliability and general leakproofness. If asked, the factory chaps would tell me that they had no plans to reintroduce twin -cylinder models . They would instead, they said, concentrate on their charming and charismatic triples, styling some of them with a nod backwards to the classic days. The first time I enjoyed this challenging viewpoint was when I'd just returned a 750 Trident after a couple of weeks spent zapping about so that I could write exciting and hopefully encouraging tales about it. Snag was that I did a lot of riding with a scribbly colleague called Julian, who was testing a Kawasaki 750 Zephyr, which was a much more pleasant bike to ride. Why do I feel a bit embarrassed to be writing that? I have no idea, but it is true. We swapped between