People keep asking me when I am going to upgrade. They see me arrive on a bike with a single round dial, cable-operated everything and not a single riding mode to its name, and they assume I simply have not got round to buying something better. They are wrong, and I have stopped trying to explain politely. The truth is that after two decades of riding the most sophisticated machines on earth for a living, the bike that brings me the most joy is the one that does the least on my behalf, and I have made my peace with how strange that sounds.

This is not a rant against progress. I have ridden the radar-equipped flagships and marvelled at their competence, and I would recommend them to plenty of riders without hesitation. But somewhere along the way, motorcycling started solving problems I did not have, at the cost of the very thing that drew me to it in the first place. So allow me to defend the analogue motorcycle, not as a museum piece to be admired from a distance, but as a living argument for a purer kind of riding.

The Machine Talks to You

On a simple bike, information reaches you directly, through your hands and your backside rather than through a processor deciding what you are allowed to feel. You sense the front tyre find its grip, hear the engine load up before any tachometer would have told you, feel the rear step out a hair before an electronic net would catch it. Nothing is filtered or interpreted. My Royal Enfield Himalayan does not have lean-sensitive traction control because it does not need it; the conversation between rider and road is uninterrupted, and that dialogue is precisely what makes riding feel like riding rather than supervising a very expensive computer that happens to have wheels.

Fewer Things to Fail

There is a deep, practical serenity in simplicity that the spec-sheet crowd never mentions. A bike with fewer systems has fewer things that can strand you a thousand miles from home, in a place where the nearest dealer is a fantasy. When something does go wrong, I can often fix it at the roadside with the tools in my tank bag and a little patience. Try that with a machine that throws a cryptic error code and refuses to start until a technician plugs in a laptop and pays a subscription. Out where I do most of my riding, far from any dealership, simplicity is not a lifestyle choice or an affectation. It is genuine, hard-nosed freedom.