Ignore the blog time/date stamp: this a retrospective update to get things rolling: the timings and workload weren't conducive to the real-time update that will follow from this point forwards.

Saturday 3rd April 2010: 12.00am

The weather finally breaks: dry roads, a clean bike and bloody good job too: you can't run a feature with a dozen identical shots of a black bike emerging into a grey day from a dark workshop.

It doesn't look like it will hold for long, but then I'm not exactly unoccupied so set off to find a location close to hand, and the best I can come up after riding round a small town for half an hour was a metaphor we've used before with a Fat Boy - a local fitness centre, which has a new playground adjacent that might just work, but in the end settle for a bloody big puddle. An hour later I'm back at the desk banging my head against it: a lot of them - like this one - have a silver birch masking the shape of the handlebars, and I can't believe I didn't see it. Still, I've got enough, and certainly enough to make the feature

It will be the last time I see the bike - with the notable exception of checking the headlamps - until the magazine has finally gone to press. Have covered all of thirty five miles so far, none of them that will give any real sense of what it's like as a bike. Never mind, though. We've got it for six months or so, so there's plenty of time to get in the saddle: the feature will be to introduce the model, its place in the model range, and this: the blog.