You guys must be tough ........... or young.
When the temperature drops below about 5c I wrap the bike in a thermal blanket and go indoors for the duration. The alternative is slow death by celcius. It's the sheer wind-chill that does it for me. It might be 5c sitting at the lights, but start bend swinging, and you might as well be on a bloody iceberg fraternising with a penguin colony.
First to go on a sub -5c rideout is my fingertips, quickly followed by the nose ...... which starts to drip rhythmically. This, when blown backwards by the freezing blast (I ride with an open face helmet) solidifies in glistening snail-trails in the oddest places. Imperceptibly, the numbness creeps up the hands (and you wonder what the chuff's gone wrong with the clutch) and then the arms. I start to feel as if I'm controlling the bike through arm-stilts .... Then the knees lose sensation about the same time as they start to shake and knock - this is pretty weird, as the numb legs start beating a tattoo against the tank while their owner can't feel a bloody thing. Looking down, it's like a pair of tomcats fighting in a denim sack.
It's about then that I find I desperately need to take a leak. The need to pee (according to my wife) produces a kind of pained grin on my face. This is a right pain in the butt for two reasons. Firstly the grinning bares my teeth to the cold wind. When you get to a certain age, cold and teeth tend to become mutually exclusive, getting promoted by experience to "Not a good idea to combine" status - and this is why you rarely see pensioners biting into large King Kone Kornets. Y'see, the ageing process causes your teeth to get sensitive - baring them to a sub-zero hurricane is therefore not terribly advisable. Biting into a King Kone delivers a kick in the face like a heavy snogging session with a randy cricket bat - grinning into the wind on a bike, while admittedly slightly less agonising, is still pleasantly reminiscent of chewing a live 230v electric cable.........
Next, the cold air blast tends to freeze my ageing facial muscles into whatever position they last settled in when I last remembered to move them (another age thing). So, after about half an hour or so of looking, with increasing desperation, for a place to take a whiz, my face gets locked into a sort've manic snarl. This means that, when I finally find somewhere I can actually have a pee without getting arrested (This is Britain remember) I clamber stiffly off the bike, stagger drunkenly into the rest-room on legs that belong to somebody else and with my arms frozen stiffly out in front of me, all while wearing a mad, snot-streaked grin that makes me look like some kind of crazy rapist. I'm amazed I haven't been jailed by now.
Then I have to navigate the intricacies of one of Mr Levi's best and most obstinate zippers with fingers that feel like remote controlled chopsticks ..... I usually succeed in time.
So you see, I leave my bike at home anytime after about September 1st...........
by Old Dog » Wed Jan 21, 2009 2:20 pm 
The wet, the dark, the ice all conspire to defraud me of my inalienable right to ride my bike (Skorpion 660). 
so i pulled out the BMW ready for the off and...............yep, you guessed it right, it p*****d down, back to the shed for at least another week 