At 79, his wheels are still turning

ROGER MORONEY
"I like to keep this busy," 79-year-old motorcyclist and man of words Lew Goodman said as he tapped the side of his head.
"Lots of people my age are out there running about. I've got a mate, he's a painter and he's got an exhibition coming up soon. He's 79 as well. Age is nothing these days ... nothing."
Then Lew and I looked out the window of his Greenmeadows home and we both lamented the pouring rain.
"We'll have to go for a strop another time," he said.
He and wife Elaine's 1200cc Honda Aspencade motorcycle and sidecar would have to stay in the garage until we got a better day.
Although Lew had been keen, despite the rain, it was me that wasn't so keen as my jacket wasn't entirely waterproof. It doesn't matter how long the journey is and it doesn't matter what the weather is up to, he and his wife never shy off packing a few things away into the giant bike's panniers and heading off somewhere.
So big is the outfit I asked Lew if like some big touring machines it had a reverse gear to help back it out of the garage.
"Yeah it's got reverse," he said.
"She's in the kitchen - she pushes it out for me." Elaine left making the coffee for a moment and poked her head around the lounge door and nodded. "He's not kidding," she said.
"He gets me to help push it out."
Their car, by the way, stays outside. The sidecar outfit goes in the garage.
Asked to reel off a few of their travels, Lew got as far as "Northland, New Plymouth, East Cape ... " before simply saying "oh, all over the North Island."
Elaine chimed in "and all over the south."
Unless it's in the saddle of his bike, or at the computer doing a bit of writing or "fiddling about" with electronics, Lew is not one to sit about and dwell on the fact his next birthday is his 80th.
He started riding motorcycles about 50 years ago after arriving in New Zealand from his birthplace, London.
"I came from London to Woodville," he said.
"Got off the boat in Wellington, travelled up here and we stopped at a corrugated iron shed. I'd never seen a corrugated iron shed before - it was Woodville," he laughed.
His uncle living there had sponsored him out to New Zealand and he's never ventured back. "Look at this country - why would you want to?"
He said effectively he was still British though because he simply never got around to doing the nationality paperwork "thing."
His first bike was a Francis Barnett, although over the past couple of decades he'd bought Japanese bikes.
And through all the tens of thousands of kilometres he's only had one mishap, and that was seven years ago and only after a front tyre on his 450 Honda went flat and rolled off the rim as he entered a corner near Taradale.
"I broke my wrist. You should have seen it - had all the wah-wahs (sirens) out there."
Before he hooked up with the 1200 about five years ago, he ran a 500cc-powered sidecar outfit and recalled, with a grimace, a memorable trip he and Elaine embarked on to a sidecar rally at Waitomo.
He sighed as he shook his head.
"It was cold ... and I got the gout."
With his left big toe inflamed and painful, there was no way he could shift gears with his left foot. So he attached one end of his bootlace to the gear pedal and pulled the pedal through the gears all the way back to Napier.
"Worked a treat," he chuckled.
He has long been interested in literature, and with a shake of the head said he would have loved to have pursued being a full-time journalist.
But he has been an aspiring author, and although many of his manuscripts (among them a large number of stories for children) had been rejected through the years he did get a book published in 1999. It was Jerry Attrick's Dictionary and sold several thousand copies.
"Although it finished up in the $2 bin at the Warehouse ... that's a bit disconcerting isn't it?"
But he continues to write, although some of the stories he would have loved to chronicle are lost forever. Before embarking on a biology teaching career at Karamu High School in the 1970s, Lew worked as a psychopaedic nurse at a mental institution in Porirua.
"I met my wife in a mental hospital - write that down," he said with a growing grin, before adding that she too worked on the nursing staff there.
"It's coming up to our 50th wedding anniversary. I'm going to get her a new back tyre for the bike."
He worked with mentally infirm old men whose lives would have made remarkable reading.
There was an old sea captain, another had been through the great fire of San Francisco, another had worked the goldfields of Alaska and would talk about how it was necessary to carry a pistol everywhere during those wild days. "They never told their stories. All lost, just lost."
So he may just content himself with possibly doing a re-write job on a manuscript he reckons in this age may just be a little too "un-PC."
It is called The History of New Zealand: 15 Historical Events That Never Happened.
"It's a bit of fun," he said, before again looking out the window and bemoaning the pelting rain which had ruined our planned "strop" on the bike.
"We'll make it another day," Lew said.