Last summer we took delivery of this true moto simpatico. Our instructions were to revive, restore and upgrade – to prepare for future touring. Now that the rebuild has begun in earnest, it’s time to start to tell her remarkable story. She is a much-loved, well-travelled and very tired old girl. Bought new in Johannesburg by her one and only owner, her first job was to carry him and his new wife home to England – overland from Botswana and East Africa, via India, Nepal, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iran, and stopping off at the Guzzi factory in Mandello along the way.

This is a man happy to have put his side-valve days behind him. A demobbed War Department Norton 16H, repainted civilian silver in his mum’s Pimlico basement, had taken him courting. But now a Triumph Speed Twin would carry him and his new wife around London … and far beyond. Four sons still lie in the future – poor sod – but here he is about to head home to a gorgeous wife on the bike of the moment, Edward Turner’s masterpiece. Does it get any better?

With the Spada Royale now ready for long distance duties, and the timely appearance last summer of a lightly-used aluminium tank, the fates had begun to tell me that it was time to crack on with my plans for a Le Mans II-based cafe racer.

I bought my Le Mans about 15 years ago as a non-runner. The taxman had just taken my Ducati 900SS from me (along with our two-up tool, a BMW GS1100), and buying the Guzzi took every penny of what little I had left. Non-runner or no, it seemed like value for money. It was, after all, a round barrel Guzzi Le Mans! How great was that? I was fulfilling a boyhood dream with this thing. And it came with a small mountain of ‘spares’ which included no less than three crankshafts. More of all that on another occasion, but suffice it here to say that there were good reasons for her status as a non-runner, and it would take a lot of money and a lot of work to make her well again.

Fast forward four or five years and here she is in her new incarnation, dressed like a Mark 1 (silver and black livery notwithstanding). The rearsets and the fairing were among the ‘spares’. The lovely aluminium front mudguard came courtesy of John Williams. The exhaust system is by Keihan. And all the very expensive new engine internals that you can’t see came from Wessons (Brian where are you?) and Spares GB (and Mo where are you?).

For a while I had a Spada as well so that we could travel comfortably two up, and we took it round France and Spain almost without incident (if you exclude the crash). Here’s Spada and pillion at Jerez for the GP in 2000, and me with her on the hot, dusty road.

In due course the Spada went to pastures new but I soon began to rather miss the kind of touring we’d done together, with that lovely visceral connection you make with an old bike and her mechanicals over a long journey. Soon a trip to Netley Marsh found me staring at some amazingly cheap Guzzi bits – a Spada tank and bars, and some stainless mudguards – and there and then I hatched a plan to refesh the Le Mans as a T3 lookalike.

And this was the result.

But with the arrival of our new Spada Royale, we have come full circle. We hardly need two tourers and I really miss those head down/bum up blasts past RNAS Culdrose and on to the Lizard that were such a delightful part of owning my Le Mans when she was still unadulterated by comfy seats, low pegs and high bars.

So what next? Well, I’ve made a start and here she is. More on the detail later, but I’ve already ridden her and can report that she is indeed a mighty hoot!

Well I still can’t say for sure that it would be any help with, for example, a headache. But even I, Gaffa tape’s most enthusiastic promoter, have been startled by recent developments in its application for medical purposes.

A friend of mine, a gifted craftsman in iron, copper and wood, is notorious for inflicting self-harm in the course of practicing his art. He recently arrived here with another enormous gash in his hand. A less creative man would have taken it to casualty. He had neatly mated the edges of his wound with good old GT. More suture than sticking plaster. It healed a treat, which is fortunate because he soon had several more deep lacerations to strap up.

Then a friend and fellow Guzzi nut from Devon (he of the police V50 featured elsewhere) revealed that when he took his painful foot to the doctor, and a splinter of glass or metal was suspected, his GP did book him an X-ray three weeks hence but also suggested he try an alternative remedy in the meantime: foot soakings morning and night plus the day-long application of Gaffa tape in between (to coax the shard to the surface, apparently).

I don’t doubt that unusual applications of GT abound across the globe. I was once told of a chap who would renew his girlfriend’s ‘Brazilian’ at low cost using GT. Or was that a limerick? But for the stuff to be ‘prescribed’ by a registered medical practitioner? Surely this takes us to a new dimension!

But then I saw this and was reminded that there is indeed very little that is truly new under our sun. If you’ve watched On any Sunday you may recognise this poor quality screen capture.

For everyone else: it is the broken leg of Amercan motorcycle racing legend Dick Mann, wearing a Gaffa tape cast so that he could carry on doing this sort of thing.

There’s more photos and a very nice interview with the great man here.

By the way, none of this eulogising of GT and its wondrous versatility means we condone this sort of thing.