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It seems to me the completely logical culmination of a process begun before memory - tricycle, bicycle, bicycle with card jammed in spokes to make motorbike noise, motorbike.

The bike sitting in my garage right now is noisy, smelly, expensive and - I suppose I can't deny - dangerous. Uh-huh, all of that.

Or, at least that's how it seems to the uninitiated. But here's the thing. What some of us know is that, in fact, it is the living (sort of), breathing (sort of) incarnation of something beautiful, delicate, and painfully rare - a childhood dream that did NOT wither and die, a childhood dream that was, instead, given life.

It was brought screaming into this world by a white-coated technician standing midwife-like at a workbench in a factory in some unpronouncable city. I like to picture him now smiling benignly and gazing with pride as his creation took its first faltering wheel turns into the outside world. I like to think that he knew this was not just a bike, but a childhood promise making its pre-destined way to a little boy who had waited just the three decades, and never lost faith.

1984. I was 16 with a leather jacket and a haircut rightly banned by subsequent parliamentary legislation. Miami Vice was the hot new show and Apple introduced something called the Macintosh (although I knew it wouldn't catch on).

On my 16th birthday, I emerged from the shed at the back of my parents' house, pushing my recently repainted (with a brush) Yamaha RD 50. My buff cardboard provisional licence, bearing an uncanny similarity to the 'Colditz ID cards' once given away in the Warlord comic, was tucked into the inside pocket of my 'Wolf' leather jacket. I believe that, had it only been practical, I would have worn it with pride on the outside of my jacket, out there for the world to see. I, Gordon Adair, am a provisional driver. Step aside.

It remains one of THE proudest, happiest days of my life. Or at least the first bit does. By mid-afternoon, I was coming dangerously close to heatstroke in my 'Wolf' leather jacket as I tried to somehow haul the aforementioned RD50 out of a ditch. That memory does not fill me with quite the same amount of pride, or indeed, happiness.

It was not to be the last time I would have to haul a bike out of a ditch/hedge/bed of ornamental cabbages. It was, however, the last time I was to do so alone. And here we come to another fallacy about biking - the image of the biker as an outsider; a mean, taciturn type, unfettered by the constraints of the societal norms the rest of us adhere to.

In fact, what I valued most about biking was never the bikes, it was the people on them. Biking gave me friendships that, 25 years later, are still going strong. Even now, at 41, I am again 16 when I get together for a spin with those same mates.

It's true that biking took some friends away from me too and the shock and grief of those losses is not something I would ever attempt to make light of. I still feel it very deeply. But the terrible truth is that accidents happen and not just in biking. When they do, they can have horrific consequences but should we really curtail our lives on the basis that "an accident might happen"? It's a terrible cliché to say that "if we worried about those things, we'd never leave the house", but sometimes cliches exist because they reflect a fundamental truth.

So my 16th birthday ushered in the era of parent-free travel. And where, with my 16 years of life experience, did I decide to go? Well, the beach - of course! Me and 22 lads I knew. We would set off en masse, charging through the housing estates of Armagh and causing fury among the neighbours as the high frequency note from 23 Micron exhausts interfered disastrously with TV receptions and set dogs to barking with a fury that wouldn't abate until the last of the blue haze of two-stroke fumes had finally drifted away about an hour later.

There is probably one word that crops up with motorcyclists more than any other; freedom. Brilliant philosophers have attempted over the years to define and interpret the concept of freedom . Well, I say 'pah'! The only reason they're still wondering is because they've never sat astride an RD50 on a sunny day at Cranfield, winking at the girls while gazing out across the sea, sand and mountains truly believing that somehow they would outlive them all, that the world and all that was in it was theirs to do with as they pleased.

Wisely (on reflection) legislation meant our machines were restricted to a top speed of 30mph. Twenty-five years ago, the wisdom of this law did not seem quite as easy to see as it does now. Cue the first stirrings of another, absolutely key, aspect of biking - fettling. Lurking in sheds, usually accompanied by an equally obsessive group of no-hopers, wielding spanners, rubbing chins and saying 'hmmmmmm'. Unlikely as it seems, this, I swear to you, is one of life's most dependable pleasures.

Reeds were replaced, gaskets were removed, ports were filed and oh the sheer joy of it all as, afterwards, you hurtled down a hill watching that speedo needle nudge round towards the magical figure of 50. Vital parts may have been rattling off the bike at the time and, to be totally honest, the hopelessly unreliable speedo needle usually fluctuated so much that your speed could have been anywhere between 5 and 65, but it was still an unbeatable feeling. For me, part of the charm of biking somehow disappeared when, one day, I realised bikes had become so reliable that I no longer felt the need to bring a full tool kit with me on every journey.

But there you are I guess. Biking, just like ever else under the sun, changes.

And yet, somehow, it doesn't. The fundamental attractions and pleasures remain the same as they were all those years ago and I, for one, hope they always will.