Hello and welcome to E109 of Front End Chatter, a biking podcast without barriers or boundaries – we know not the meaning of constraints other than the fairly obvious extent of our knowledge and articulacy, the limits of both of which will become obvious as soon as you press ‘Play’.

However. Enormous and sincere thanks to our patrons at bikesocial.co.uk, which is where you should go for new bike news, reviews, consumer info and racing gubbins – and Bennetts, the bike insurance bods who are often the cheapest and even when they’re not, at least put something back into biking. Like this podcast. It’s not all about you, you know.

Aaaaand on this edition of FEC we have:

• no news to speak of because the last FEC was plenty newsy enough thanks
• a patchy film review of 1917 – Kermode & Mayo we are not
• what we’ve both been up to, including riding around the Peaks on a 2020 Africa Twin, and a visit to Triumph’s splendid museum at Hinckley...
• a look at the state of UK biking in 2019: what’s selling and what isn’t
• gossip about Ducati’s V4 Superleggera
• a rant about the irrelevance of quoting dry weight figures instead of wet weight figures... in fact, taking any manufacturers’ quoted figures as gospel and repeating them, parrot-fashion, without question. And does it even matter?
• FEC sack emails on a wonderful variety of topics such as:
• protective clothing standards and the merits of textiles v leather
• the return of two-stroke to MotoGP
• snowflakes
• how to deal with mansplaining
• motorcycling dead ends and missed opportunities
• long legs and webbed toes

...and much, much more. Thanks for listening, apologies for rambling on so much (never mind editing your letters, we should try editing the replies), and please keep your mails and thoughts and queries coming to:

[email protected]

Big up ’spec again to bikesocial.co.uk and Bennetts...

And get us both on the Twitters (again)

@Mufga

@SimonHbikes

Aye.