I Planned Every Number Except One

I Planned Every Number Except One

I told myself it was about twenty-five thousand dirhams. Then I opened the folder and added it up.

Everybody asks the same question. Not "is it fast", not "where do you ride". They ask what it cost.

I always have that number ready. I had looked at it from every angle before I signed anything. I had explained it to myself, out loud, in the car, more than once.

And I want to be fair to myself here, because this is a confession and confessions work better when they are accurate: I planned most of this. The bike, yes. The gear, absolutely — I bought that six months before the bike arrived, on purpose, having thought about it. The licence I wrote about a few weeks ago, and nobody gets surprised by a licence.

There was exactly one number I did not plan. It is not the biggest one. It is the one I think about.

The Three I Planned

The bike came to somewhere between ninety-two and ninety-five thousand dirhams, with the optional accessories fitted from the factory.

The gear was five to seven thousand up front — that is what I would have told you, and I would have said it with confidence. I had owned helmets before, in Pakistan, as a young man, when it was cold. For the weather, not for my skull. Those cost a few hundred rupees. The one on my head now cost about three thousand dirhams, and the jacket and trousers about two.

The receipts say just over nine thousand, and a chunk of that set was not even for me. So I was wrong about this one too, in the safe direction, which is the direction you are always wrong in when the money went on something you are not embarrassed about.

You can read that as inflation, or as a rich country, or as an old man being careful. I read it as the clearest line in my whole spreadsheet between the rider I was and the rider I am. I would spend it again tomorrow and twice over.

The licence was just under four thousand, plus retests. I needed retests. That is in the other article and I am not going to relive it here.

So: three numbers, all decided in advance, all defensible, all still fine by me.

The One I Did Not

The bike arrived in September 2024. In the months after that, I spent another twenty to twenty-five thousand dirhams on it.

That is what I have been telling people for two years. I have said it at dinners. I have said it on camera. It had the comfortable ring of a number a careful man would know about himself.

Last week I put every receipt from that folder into one spreadsheet, because I wanted the real figure for this article and I assumed it would confirm me.

Fifty-five thousand, six hundred and eighty-three dirhams.

After the bike. Not counting the gear I bought before it. Not counting the licence, the insurance or the fuel.

I was not slightly out. I was out by more than double.

Why the Guess Failed

Here is the part I find genuinely interesting, and I think it is the only useful thing in this article.

My guess was not random. In the first four months after the bike arrived I spent twenty-two and a half thousand dirhams. That is almost exactly the number I have been quoting. My memory was accurate — it had simply stopped recording.

I remembered the honeymoon. I did not remember the twenty-one thousand in 2025, or the eleven thousand so far in 2026, because none of that felt like the same event. It felt like Tuesday.

Nobody spends fifty-five thousand dirhams in one go. You spend four hundred. Then six hundred. Then one thousand two hundred. Each number on its own is too small to be a conversation — with yourself, or with anyone else. It never arrives as a decision. It arrives as a parcel.

I called it a midlife crisis at the time. I was joking. I am now less sure I was joking.

The Risers Have a Date on Them

I have been telling a story about the handlebar risers for two years. That I am tall, that the standard bars were not right for me, that I sorted it out.

The receipt is dated the fifth of September 2024. The bike had been in my possession for a matter of days.

One thousand and seventy-one dirhams, on a line item between a phone mount and a tank bag, before I had ridden the thing anywhere that could have told me whether the bars were wrong.

I did not have a sore back and a solution. I had a theory about my height and a browser tab open. And I fitted them so early that I can never run the comparison — I bought a solution and then immediately lost the ability to check whether there had been a problem.

I have spent twenty years in a job where my entire function is to stop people doing exactly that. Write the requirement. Check it is real. Then build. I have sent other people's requirements back for less than this.

And then I bolted a part onto a motorcycle because a man on YouTube was tall too.

The Audit I Did Not Enjoy

So which of the fifty-five thousand earned its place?

The luggage did, clearly. A bike with proper bags is a bike you can actually leave on, and it has paid for itself in trips I would otherwise not have taken.

The navigation did. I still think a phone clamped to a handlebar is a temporary arrangement that has not yet realised it.

Then the spreadsheet sorted itself by size and showed me my largest single purchase, which is not the luggage and not the navigation. It is an inflatable bubble garage for the bike. Four thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine dirhams.

I would like to tell you there is a good argument for it. There is an argument for it. It involves dust, and humidity, and the words "protecting the investment", and it was extremely persuasive at the time, which is a sentence I should probably have tattooed somewhere I can see it.

The bike now has better accommodation than some of my relatives.

Underneath that, in a line I had genuinely forgotten, is a second helmet — bought in February of this year, while the first one was still perfectly good and still on the shelf. Two thousand seven hundred and seventy-five dirhams. Nobody makes you do this. Nobody even suggests it. I have one head, and I have spent nearly six thousand dirhams on places to put it.

And the radar. I have told people the rear radar came with the bike. It did not. I bought it in April this year for seven hundred and twenty-four dirhams and paid another two hundred and fifty-three to have it fitted. It is a good buy and I would do it again — but I had quietly filed it under "things the bike came with", which is exactly the filing error this whole article is about.

What Came Back

In fairness to myself, I did claw some of it back. I sold the old navigation unit when I replaced it. I sold a jacket. I sent a set of trousers back to Germany.

Three thousand one hundred and twenty-eight dirhams returned, against sixty-eight thousand spent.

Four and a half per cent. That is the recovery rate on a motorcycle hobby. I have used the word "resaleable" in front of my wife more than once, with a straight face, and I would like to formally withdraw it.

The trousers are the honest bit of that story. The refund came back. The customs charge on the way in and the postage on the way out did not, and between them they cost five hundred dirhams to achieve nothing at all.

The Bill That Never Came

Now let me ruin whatever sympathy I have built up so far.

Every experienced rider who heard I was buying a big BMW gave me the same warning, in the same tone, usually while looking into the middle distance. It is not the bike. It is the servicing. Oil and filters every ten thousand kilometres. Valves, plugs, final drive at twenty. Owners of this bike in other countries talk about a thousand dollars a year and more, and they say it the way you tell somebody about a diagnosis.

My bike came with a five-year warranty and every service included up to one hundred thousand kilometres.

All of it. Oil, filters, the big twenty-thousand service, the lot — already inside the price I paid on day one, which is a number I have never once been confused about.

So the single expense the entire motorcycling world warned me about is the only one that has not cost me a dirham. And the expense nobody warned me about — the one with no schedule, no invoice from the dealer and no warning light on the dashboard — has taken fifty-five thousand.

Which means I cannot blame the motorcycle. The motorcycle has behaved impeccably. The expensive component in this system is a man on a sofa at eleven at night with a browser open, and there is no warranty on him at all.

What is left of the boring numbers is genuinely boring. Registration renewal is a couple of hundred dirhams for the motorcycle, plus inspection when it is due, so under four hundred all in. It turns up once a year, it is the same every year, and it is the only part of this whole exercise I have ever estimated correctly.

Insurance and fuel I am not quoting, because I want to quote my numbers and not a comparison site's, and I have not sat down with the paperwork. I will put the real figures in the comments when I do. I would rather leave a hole in this article than fill it with something that sounds right.

The Number I Have Been Avoiding

Add up only the parts I actually know — ninety-odd thousand for the bike, four for the licence, and sixty-five thousand of gear and parcels after everything that came back — and it is somewhere around a hundred and sixty thousand dirhams to get one 55-year-old man onto a motorcycle and keep him there for two years.

I did not want to write that sentence. It sat in my drafts looking at me. But an article called a confession that declines to do the addition is not a confession, it is a brochure.

One genuinely encouraging thing did fall out of the spreadsheet, and I will take it. The first year of ownership cost thirty-nine thousand. The second cost seventeen. Whatever this is, it is wearing off.

And Then the Part That Is Not Money at All

Because the most expensive thing about this hobby is not in any of those numbers.

A ride is not two hours. It is the early start, and the gear, and the ride, and the coffee stop that is the actual point of the ride, and the wash afterwards, and then an hour spent looking at photographs of the thing I have just finished doing.

That time comes out of one account, and the account is my family.

I did try to solve it the obvious way. I tried to recruit my wife. I made the case more than once, from several angles, with visual aids. She very happily and gracefully rejected all of my attempts.

My friend Tariq rides with his. They go together, they split what it costs, and the hobby happens inside the marriage instead of beside it. I am not going to pretend I am not slightly envious of that arrangement.

So, Was It Worth It

Yes. Obviously yes. I am not writing this to warn you off, and you should be suspicious of a man who itemises a hundred and sixty thousand dirhams and then tells you it was a mistake, because he is about to go riding.

But if you are standing where I stood two years ago, with one number in your head and a dealer in front of you, the thing I would tell you is this.

You will plan the bike. You will probably plan the gear, because everyone tells you to. Nobody will tell you to plan the two years afterwards, and that is where the surprise lives — not because the number is huge, but because it never presents itself as a number at all.

And do not trust your own estimate of it. I am a product owner. Estimating is the job. I was out by thirty thousand dirhams about my own motorcycle, and I did not find out until I opened the folder.

So Tell Me — This Is What the Comment Box Is For

Two questions, and I want the second one more than the first.

One: what would you guess you have spent on your bike since you bought it? Write the number down before you go and check. Then go and check.

Two, and this is the one I really want: what did you buy before you knew whether you needed it, that you still cannot honestly evaluate? Mine is bolted to the handlebars and I look at it every single ride.

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