Back in the day (that day being some time around 1987), one of my flatmates owned a particularly nasty example of Yamaha's XS650. It was so awful that it gave rat bikes a bad name. It had been painted matt black and was congenitally bad tempered. It ran straight-through pipes and sounded like a dying dinosaur. At the time, the UJM reigned supreme and British bikes had a poor reputation for reliability. That XS650 did its best to make any Meriden Triumph look especially attractive.
The XS was so awful that when the AA would still provide breakdown
