bviously, whenever I rode without a helmet, I would be wearing sunglasses or goggles to protect my eyes, along with reinforced gloves and boots and full leathers with body armour. I'm not stupid. I was proud to hold a Gold award on motorbikes from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. Long experience had taught me the risk of eye injury from flying insects and debris. Many painful spills had imparted an understanding of the horrible consequences of coming off a bike if you’re not wearing stout skin covering (most deaths in hospital after bike accidents result from irreplaceable skin loss). The sight of swarms of nitwits riding around towns on scooters wearing what they merrily call "skidlids", at the same time as they are covering their flesh with nothing more substantial than a business suit or a summer dress fills me with dread. They little realise the ghastly risks they are taking.
But the likelihood of injuring your head is relatively low (I never did among my numerous mishaps on bikes) and the risk always seemed a reasonable trade-off against the pleasures.
Wearing a helmet on a hot day feels like boiling your brains in a galvanised bucket. It also mucks up your hair something horrible. How can you look like James Dean on his Triumph or Tom Cruise on his Kawasaki Ninja in Top Gun if - when get off your bike outside the girl’s house - you remove your helmet and reveal a pate plastered with slimy thatch? Obviously, you want to see yourself more like The Fonz in Happy Days, flicking a comb through your lustrous locks and shooting the cuffs of your biker jacket before setting about the business of the evening.