The terminology was new, but the patterns, structure and tone of the bikers’ conversations, and the unspoken rules and tacit understandings I was starting to detect, kept reminding me of something; I had the strange sense of somehow having ‘been here before’. It took me a while to realise what it was because I was suffering from ‘ethnographic dazzle’ – blinded by trivial surface differences – but eventually I twigged: bike-talk was exactly like horse-talk.
