I HAVE NEVER ridden a motorbike. Not once, not even round a field as a teenager, not even on the back of one as a passenger.

It isn’t that I dislike them. I love the look of a nice retro Norton as much as the next man, and there’s something about the sound of a Ducati that I adore. I just know myself well enough to know it wouldn’t suit me.

I like doors. I like a roof.

I like the small, boring comfort of being in a metal box when something goes wrong, rather than being the only soft thing on the road. I also just don’t have the coordination. I stumble getting out of bed in the morning and hit my shin on the edge of the bed I’ve got out of for years.

So I watch the world of biking from the outside, and lately what I’m watching is interesting. A good few men I know, roughly my own age, have taken it up in the last year or two. Not lads starting out.

Men in their late 40s and 50s, mortgage mostly paid, kids mostly reared, suddenly turning up with a bike in the driveway and a look on their face I haven’t seen since they got their first car.

It turns out there’s a name for this. Bikers call it being a born-again biker: someone who rode in their 20s, gave it up for family and career, and comes back to it once life settles down a bit. It happens everywhere, not just here.

A Canadian study a few years back found injury rates among older male riders climbing sharply while the figures for younger riders and women stayed flat, and put it down to exactly this: a wave of men in their late 40s and beyond getting back on two wheels as a leisure pursuit.

I mention all this because the Road Safety Authority published a new report recently, the Motorcyclist Spotlight Report, covering fatalities and serious injuries between 2021 and 2025. It’s sobering........

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