I'm pretty much the same size I was forty years ago. OK, the leather bike trousers I bought in 1974 are a little tight these days but nothing a week on bread and water wouldn't sort out. Bikes, on the other hand, seem to have been spending the last few decades on a Big Mac and Lard diet and have become huge and bloated, lumbering their way down the tarmac and needing car sized parking bays.

How do I know this? Because yesterday I spent an hour or so wandering round my local Triumph dealer's showroom. They keep a small collection of classic (70's mainly) bikes scattered here and there in between the current stock so it's possible to do a direct comparison. The older stuff - many of which I owned in the past - looks tiny, almost like toys, yet I happily did many thousands of miles on them round Europe and beyond, often with pillions, without worrying about their weight. The current bikes were mostly all physically bigger and a lot heavier (the exception being a secondhand Enfield).

No doubt they were a lot more sophisticated and, despite much bigger engines, were probably just as economical but my point is that I'm just the same size as I ever was but I'm having to manhandle much larger heavier lumps of machinery around. No wonder they're unwieldy off road. There's nothing wrong with 200kg+ bikes that become 250kg+ when they're loaded up as long as you're riding them along smooth endless tarmac. It's when you have to ride them on a cross rutted sandy piste or push them uphill on an adverse camber that the problems arise. And lets not talk about snow.

Lighter bikes do exist - I have three of them under 150kg but mostly they're small capacity (my 125 is 88kg) or crude to the point of needing a mechanically adept (or insensitive!) rider (My XR600 is about 130kg, my CCM is about 145kg). The market seems to have decided though that more weight is an acceptable compromise for more sophistication - or maybe it's just that bigger sells easier. Either way, we now have still normal sized people trying to manhandle bikes that would have been laughed at a few decades ago - even the original Gold Wing looks small now.