Monday, 12 May 2014

The price of safety

Followers of Bassman's blog will know that he recently bought a fab new motorbike helmet, and at a reasonable price too. The stylish black & white floral design makes my old boring blue helmet look even more dowdy than it already does (and it's well over 6 years old so, for safety reasons, it needs to be replaced anyway), so I decided to upgrade too.  Unfortunately, the smallest sized helmets in the shop on the day that Bassman bought his were all too big for me, so the shop ordered in a couple of extra-smalls in my preferred patterns and today I went to try them on.  Yay!
My preferred option.  Bassman has this in black & white.
Or rather, not so yay.  Because it turns out that I have a teeny tiny head.  In fact, my head is so teeny tiny that it's almost child-sized. Extra-small is too big.  Even extra-extra-smalls (which the lovely and patient biker woman managed to find under a huge stack of boxes) move around more than they should.  I was miffed and she was perplexed.  The Chief Assessor of Motorcyclists for Scotland, who had dropped into the shop for a cup of tea and a chat, was amused.  FFS.  So, here are their suggestions for what to do next:

1)  I could try a large child's helmet, which is a bit smaller than an XXS.  Woo hoo!  I could have something like this:


2)  I could wear a balaclava under the XXS to fill in the extra space. 

No.  Just...no.  Not even the lion.


3)  I could accept that the brands that the shop carries don't suit my pinhead and try the other bike shop in Inverness to see if another brand fits any better.  On the surface, this sounds reasonable but this shop only stocks the more expensive brands.  Shock horror.  How will I ever cope?  Actually, I should have known: when there is an expensive option and a less expensive option, circumstances will conspire to force me to choose the expensive option.  It's a curse, but I've learned to live with it.

Or at least make my head a normal size.