But trust me on the sunscreen…

There are number of rules of thumb and truisms that crop up repeatedly when reading about or discussing motorbike safety.

For example, a crash helmet can be bought for anything from €60 to €600 leading people new to biking to often ask "How much should I spend on a helmet?" The will almost always receive the following answer.

Well first of all what you do is you think about your head.... and you think about how often you use it during an average day... then, based on that, you decide how useful it is to you and by extension how much it is worth spending in order to protect it.

Another common one is "All the gear. All the time". Essentially this means that even on the hottest days of summer (i.e. the day the Leaving Cert begins and the day the schools start back in September), when every fibre of your being wants to head out on the bike wearing just shorts and a t-shirt to enjoy the weather, you should still put on the same heavy armoured gear you would wear in the depths of winter. The logic being that it is far less hassle to have a shower than a skin graft.

Then there's the all encompassing, self explanatory "make sure you try to keep it rubber side down" and my personal favourite, the perceptive:

Most motorcycle accidents are caused by the nut which connects the saddle to the handlebars.

So this morning I set off for work determined not to be the nut connecting the handlebars to the saddle.

NOT a good idea in hindsight - probably should have taken my hands out of my pockets and put them on the handlebars!