Been riding for 25 years now and last summer I decided I was fed up with having to take my lid off when paying for petrol, etc, so I bit the bullet and bought myself £800 worth of flip top frontage with built in bluetooth, speakers and a partridge in a pear tree....

and since then I've had more trouble with pillocks demanding I take my helmet off than ever before!


I pulled into a BP station just off the A417 in Gloucestershire and went to fill up.....but nothing happened, pump not switched on. I did hear an odd noise coming out of the PA system at the garage but whatever it was was just bips and screeches. After a few minutes of waiting I went into the garage with the front of the lid flipped up, walked up to the desk and asked what the problem was, only to be told:

"Take your helmet off at the pump."

"Why?"

"It's company policy."

"Why?"

"Cos it is."

...

"You want me to remove a piece of safety equipment while sat on my bike parked on a slippery garage forecourt with spilt diesel and sand everywhere with cars driving past me at close quarters? No."

"Well you can't have any petrol then."

"Fine, where's the next garage?"

"Oh....20 miles up the road!"

"You lying c***. There's one 3 miles away and you know it. I think you're lying about the rule as well. I want your name, I want your managers name and I want the area managers name and contact details."

And this fella turned purple.

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Again, another BP garage, this time at motorway services on the M4 near Reading. This time the PA system was working but it wasn't the lid they wanted off, they wanted me to get off the bike to fill it up.

So....I wandered in and explained that if a bike doesn't have a centre stand then you have to sit on it to fill the tank or you'll never have a full tank. Didn't make any difference, this 18 year old wench behind the counter stuck to the same line over and over again. So.....I went out to the bike, waited for her to turn on the pump.....sat on my bike, filled it up and then got off again to go pay. The look this wench gave me.....

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My local Tesco supermarket.....


I've been in there numerous times without taking the helmet off, flip the front up and it's fine.....until the day this absolute meat head security guard came up to me and just said.

"Take your helmet off."

"Why?"

"Cos I said so."



Now that.....was not the right thing to say.

"Yeah? Who died and made you queen of Sheeba then?"

"What?"

"Why do you want me to take my helmet off. I'll be reasonable, if you can give me a good reason why then I'll happily remove my helmet.....but I don't think you can give me a good reason." Secure in the knowledge that this double figure IQ'd pillock simply did not have the wit for this at all.

"We've had trouble."

"With what?"

"Bikers."

"Yeah you're gonna have to do a lot better than that. The usual reason for someone to want a biker to remove his lid is so you can see his face...." [waving my hand around in front of my perfectly visible face] "Need I go on? The other reason people want bikers to take a lid off is cos they think they're more dangerous with it on. Allow me to explain how motorcycle helmets work: The outer shell is hard but designed to flex to spread an impact out over as wide an area as possible. Underneath the shell is a shock absorbing material, usually something like polystyrene, to soak up the force of the impact. Now, as I'm sure you know, when you compress polystyrene you can't uncompress it again.....so what this means is that once a helmet has absorbed a shock it's ruined and you'll need to buy a new one. The upshot is.....if you're worried about being head butted by someone in a helmet, you'd be much worse off being head butted by someone without a lump of polystyrene in the way. Secondly, anyone wearing an £800 helmet isn't going to ruin it by headbutting you. And thirdly, if you really want scrotes in cheap helmets to take em off, well done cos you've just armed them with a club that can be swung with much more force than a head butt."

He looked at me for a good 10 seconds and then just turned around and walked off.