Winged Harley-Davidson shield design

The 6.14 is late again, so I am writing this on the back of a timetable under the clock at Carlisle, where the pigeons have decided I am a bench. Mum wants you to know the wings came back from the sprayers too bright, the silver gone like a new spoon, and Dad said they looked like something off a Christmas card for a hearse. He laughed when he said it. It is the first time since March I have heard him laugh at anything with an engine in it.

You will remember the shield, the black letters with the little curl at the top, and how you swore the scrollwork would never sit straight on the tank until you had drawn it out six times on greaseproof paper. You were right. Every flourish has a ghost of a second line running beside it now, the lines you kept meaning to tidy and never did, and I cannot look at the bike without wanting to pick up a pencil.

The man from Leeds came on Saturday with a trailer and an envelope of notes, and he rode it out of the yard with the engine coughing like a bad tooth. He did not ask about the wings. He only asked whether the paint would last a winter, and I said I did not know, because nobody does.

The train is signalling now. I am leaving this under the pigeons' bench with the timetable folded inside, so whoever finds it first can read the wings as far as the trailing lines, and then decide for themselves where the road goes.