When I was a student, I and my friends had a half-serious biker gang. Half serious, because on the one hand we knew that most real bikers were just thugs, but on the other hand we loved the mythology of two-wheel knights living by their own codes. So we made ourselves colours - cutoff jackets with the name embroidered in gothic letters on a banner with a colourful logo - but since we were students, they were full of what would now be called post-modernist irony, like "E=MC2" instead of the initials "MC" for Motorcycle Club.

And it was all fun and games until the day at the Windsor Free Festival when I was cruising through the campsite looking for the rest of the club, and looking everywhere except where I was going, until I realised that I was in the middle of a camp full of big mean motorbikes and big mean men. They assured me that they quite understood that I hadn't intended any disrespect by driving into their camp wearing another club's colours, and since they were feeling pretty mellow that day they didn't mind letting me leave alive, but as a matter of principle, the offending jacket had to stay.

In the words of Oscar Gordon, there comes a time in a man's life when he has to take a stand or he can't face himself in the mirror when he shaves: but I had already shaved. So I handed over my colours, and turned my bike around and put several hundred yards between me and the Hell's Angels, and stopped to shake.

And I felt about six inches tall and made of dung. Logically, it was just a jacket, I could make another, it certainly hadn't been worth getting my head and my bike kicked in for. Cynically, while the legend says that a biker defends his colours to the death, I bet plenty of those guys would do the same if they were outnumbered and cornered. But what I remembered was the Roman saying "Eagle lost, honour lost: honour lost, all lost."

Honour? Self-respect? Pride? Balls? Not sure what to call it: but I lost something that day that took a long time to rebuild.