Going to be hard to get over this one. Not impossible, but hard.

We just dug out all the paperwork to send to the insurance for Rosie. On the insurance certificate, there's this lively little bit that says:

"Underwriters shall not be liable under Section 1 for loss or damage caused directly by theft unless between 2200 and 0600 your motorcycle is kept in a locked building".

I'm going to call this the "Santa Clause" - since I found it at christmas.

I've had so many bikes over the years, I lose track of the different policies. All of them, except this one, had a garaging excess - you'd have to pay the first £1,000 of any claim if the bike wasn't garaged and it got nicked. This one though, had the clause up there.

So now I need to pay to get my bike - my bike with god-knows-what wrong with her - back again.

On top of that, I got the renewal for the insurance. It's went up by 300%, and the claim is right on the bottom.

So, being uninsured, I would have been better to just shut up about it and not tell anybody - least of all the insurance company. I not only have to pay for the bike, I now have to pay an extra £300 a year for the privelege of claiming on a policy that doesn't have to pay out.

In what way, even stretching the definition to its extreme, is this fair?

Sometimes you have to wonder if being all law-abiding and stuff isn't what it's cracked up to be. The Police haven't been able to charge anybody with nicking the bike, so there's no chance of recovering any of the cost there. Sometimes you have to think that life would be much less uncomplicated if you wheeled and dealed and nicked things and got up to mischief for a living. You'd certainly pay less tax, that's for sure.

The plan was to collect the insurance, or get Rosie repaired and then sell her. That money was a new PR3. There'll still be a new PR3, but the money will have to come from somewhere else.

There's all kind of words floating round in my head right now. Probably best thing to do is go and calm down and worry about the stuff that I can do something about. Like Christmas, just round the corner.

We did the right thing here. We were honest. I could have said, for instance, that the bike got nicked from Swindon or somewhere. But I didn't. I could have broke into my own garage and said that she was in there. But I didn't.

Honesty, they tell me, is the best policy. Given what happened to Madge, and now Rosie, and the fact that I have ended up being stung on both of them, I am starting to wonder.

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