Sunday 13 August 2006
I’ve just got back from the Bulldog Bash, a four day bike show/biker festival at the Shakespeare Raceway just outside Stratford-upon-Avon. It started on Thursday and went through to Sunday afternoon. I'm not sure exactly how to describe it. It's more of a big party than anything else. According to those I spoke to who had been going for a number of years, the Bash seems to be becoming less of a bike show and more of a biker music festival.
It is the first time I’ve been… and I’m not sure I will go again - for a heap of reasons. It was interesting. I enjoyed myself well enough, and it was a chance to get away with some mates for a bit, but there wasn’t enough there to reel me in a second time. There were too few highs and too much trekking backwards and forwards between the campsite and the area where the food vans and the stages were.
There was plenty of music. There were bands playing on two stages from morning till night. But it wasn't my kind of listening. I'm looking down the programme now, it was pretty much all Heavy Rock and Metal from start to finish - with a scattering of Punk thrown in. I liked a couple of the bands, but most of them were very missable, and I did get fed up listening to lead singers whose voices might all have been second cousins to a cheese grater. There wasn't much to relieve the screaming.
It just kept reminding me of my neighbours. I live next door to a house which is divided into flats, and rented out on a weekly basis, so people are always moving in and out. Most of the tenants are fine. At first, the new people who moved into the rear flat about four months ago (just before Di died) seemed fine too. They were friendly and pleasant enough. Neither of them worked, so, with all this hot weather, they spent most of time sitting in the garden surrounded by yelling kids. That's OK. I like kids. But then I discovered that the bloke has a bit of a problem. He's a screamer. No, let me put that another way. I mean, he's a SCREAMER!!!!!!!!!
About twice a week the two of them have a domestic and it doesn't take long before he blows off one of the most mind-boggling temper tantrums I have ever seen - or heard! He can scream at her for hours, in a voice that rises in pitch until, I swear, he starts to reach the limits of human hearing! He's also a name caller. He calls her some of the most inventive names I have ever heard - most of them related to body parts, and not at all the sort of thing you would want to repeat to an elderly aunt. She usually responds to all his noise and fury by locking him out of the house, and refusing to let him back in until he calms down. His reaction to this is to scream louder. He then starts hurling garden furniture at the door and windows.
He woke me up one morning about a week ago. He was in the garden .
'Let me in. Look at the state of me. I've got no f***ing clothes on.'
I didn't ask how he got there in that condition, but I did wonder. It's an interesting question, if you are waking up in a dozy mood and have nothing better to do with your time.
Let him in? No way! She wouldn't and didn't. So this was followed predictably by the sound of furniture smashing against glass door panels. (The landlord seems to have had the foresight to put in toughened glass.)
Mostly, I ignore him. He is harmless enough when it comes to people. It is just property - his own - that he likes to damage. Or at least it seemed so. About ten days ago he lost it big time, and some of his frenzy came over the fence (literally).
My stepson and a friend of his were staying with me overnight. Sonny Boy had started to blow off. Not having heard him before they went out to see what was happening. Within seconds he was accusing them of Lord knows what and started hurling chairs over the fence at them. The chairs missed the two of them by some considerable margin (he's not a very good shot) but hit my bike and set the alarm off. Now that made me see red and I stormed out. Luckily he didn't do any damage.
But there is not the slightest point in trying to communicate with him when he is in this state. He might just as well be on another planet. So I just got everyone back into the house and left him to it. I did think about calling the police, but I'd already had a bad day and didn't want any more hassle. But I shan't hesitate to call the cops If he turns up and blasts off again. Funnily enough, he hasn't been around since.
I might give the chairs back if he apologises. But I doubt if he will.
My one worry is what effect this is all having on his kids. Strangely, like their Mum, they seem just to ignore him, and don't appear to be afraid of him or his behaviour in any way. Even the kids seem to think he is pretty pathetic!
But I can really do without all this right now.
The best band at the Bash was ‘Messiah.’ They were amazing, especially as none of them could be much older than seventeen. They had tons of energy. Their playing was really sharp. They had some really original ideas and there was plenty of imaginative guitar work. I’m sure my friend’s young son, Martin (aged 18) could tell me all about them - in mind-numbing detail. So I'm not going to ask. The only other decent band there IMHO was a heavy rock band called ‘The Almighty’. Their name is familiar, but I’d never heard them play before. The lead singer’s voice was of the cheese grater type. But he could actually sing and had a lot of presence.
It wasn’t just the music that was lacking in interest for me. The feel of the whole show was, well... different. The Bulldog Bash is organised and run by English and Welsh chapters of the Hells Angels. There were a hell of a lot of heavy looking guys wearing outlaw MC club patches on the backs of their jackets wandering around the showground. There were also a lot more cruisers in the car park and leather waistcoats in the beer tents than is usual at English biker events. The whole event had a raw edge to it that I didn't feel too comfortable with.
Among the traders, there were only a few selling items that were directly bike-related. I wanted a back protector but couldn’t find anything remotely like one. Most of the traders were selling life-style stuff. There were several stalls selling knives and imitation guns (most of them being bought by kids
.) There were several selling party flags and insignia. There were loads of tattooists.
It wasn’t all like that though. That section of the hippy movement that has coaesced with biker culture was well in evidence. I guess they came together through a common interest in counter-culture ideas and lifestyles. There were loads of stalls selling hippy/pagan/gothic/wicca items. If you wanted to find crystals, dragon sculptures, incense, books of spells, buddahs, Native American T-shirts, all that kind of thing, it was there in abundance. Similarly, if you wanted the same but a bit on the darker side (skulls and skeletons and all that stuff) then you didn't have far to go.
Then there was all the drug paraphanalia. What would you like to buy? A joint-rolling gift set for your Auntie Sue who has never got her head out of her sixties dope and acid funk? Simple. Roll right up. There were several stall selling ‘legal highs’: herbal durgs and balloons full of laughing gas, p.e.p. pills and liquid gold.
Interestingly, the police were noticeable by their absence. There were a couple of patrol cars parked outside the entrance to the showground but they never crossed the threshold onto the site itself. Well, who needs police when you have the Hells Angels organising things.
There was a smaller number of much straighter stalls: animal charities asking you to sponsor a wolf (something everyone should do!), osteopaths offering to fix your tired and aching back, and, yes, a very few traders selling you things for your bike. The green loos were fascinating (for those who wished to avoid the less-than-aesthetically-pleasing festival arrangements and have a relaxed and comfortable poo in a clean and ecological lavvy for a few quid a go!). Wonderful stuff!
Mostly I spent my time going off to get lunch.
And all this was taking place just a few miles from Stratford-upon-Avon where Shakespeare, was already doing his best to make this part of the West Country one of the biggest tourist traps (and areas of traffic congestion) in Europe. Getting in and out of Stratford on a week day is no fun. Come to think of it, it’s no fun at weekends either. On the way down we were lucky and only got caught up temporarily in the tourist mayhem. On the way back we managed to avoid the worst of the regular traffic by cutting round the town centre and heading back to Banbury.
About ten of us went down to the Bash on bikes from the club. I was nearly late getting to the meet, on Thursday morning, and not for the usual reason. There is some guy called James Stansfield who keeps giving my address, whenever he gets caught by the law or has fines to pay. I keep getting credit collection agencies and bailiffs writing to me threatening to come and take away my furniture, etc if I don’t pay this creep’s bills. I keep writing back, telling them that he doesn’t live here. How hard is it for these guys to check the electoral register?
They're not interested in my indignation, of course, and the letters keep coming. I found one on the doorstep Thursday morning just before I set off to go to the Bash, and felt so pissed off by it that I spent ten minutes of precious breakfast time emailing the credit agency, ‘Swift Credit Services Ltd’ telling them to get of my back. I also emailed the London Borough of Islington whose penalty parking fine they are trying to collect.
At least when I got back from the Bash the credit agency had written back, politely asking for more evidence. The London Borough of Islington, on the other hand, totally ignored me. That won’t go down well on their Performance Indicators for this quarter! I hope they get marked down by the government department that occupies its tiny mind with all its thoroughly ana 'performance management stuff'. That will fret their little bureaucratic souls.
Apart from all the hassle this involves I'm only bothered about one thing. Sunny, my 125 Hyosung (my second bike) sits in the back garden when I'm out at work. If the baliffs came round they could lift it neatly into the back of their van and drive off with it. The fact that it doesn't belong to the guy they are looking for almost certainly wouldn't bother them in the slightest. Baliffs are a law unto themselves.
To James Stansfield I say, if you are out there you bastrd, get a life and take some responsibility for it - quit hassling me with your petty misdemeanors, you moron!
OK, I’m in a very bad mood over all this. (Maybe you guessed)!
The club members who went down to the Bash on Thursday were not the ones that I usually meet at shows or on Sunday rideouts. So it was a chance to get to know some people I don't see much a bit better. That was good. We sat around in the campsite for long hours and just talked.
Several couples came down to the show riding two up - which was a bit of a problem for me, as their presence kept reminding me that I am solo now and that there is a huge Di-shaped hole in my universe. Those sort of feelings are getting more frequent and more painful as time goes by. Life is getting harder not easier. And it doesn’t take much to set me off. But at least the feelings are clear and relatively straightforward. I’ve had several months of very murky and confused grief and anger hovering around me which is harder to handle.
The ride down to the show was probably the most sedate I’ve ever taken with the club. No-one was in any hurry to get there - or anywhere. That suited me fine. At that kind of easygoing pace you can relax and just enjoy the countryside. Poor ol’ England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ is looking a bit dry and crisped up at the moment after one of the hottest and driest summers ever. Most of the trees have survived, but not all of them. There are some very dead looking ones out there. If it doesn’t rain soon, it’s going to be an interesting winter.
There is still plenty to enjoy in the countryside though. The English lowlands, like the English ‘highlands’ and all the 'lands' in between are still some of the most beautiful on the planet - or at least the most beautiful I've ever seen. As we got out into the Shire Counties we got off the main A roads, which we'd been sticking to for most of the route, and set off down some little twisty back roads with laden hedgerows and overgrown verges. I love these kind of roads. When you find yourself riding through villages with names like 'Hinton-in-the-Hedges', then you know you can relax and not worry yourself about potential traffic congestion - a few cows in the road, maybe.
There were several close calls with idiot motorists on the way down, which furnished subject matter for several conversations round the gas burner at the Bash campsite over the following two nights. But these things are getting more and more common wherever you go.
The weather stayed mostly warm and sunny. It did threaten to rain once or twice, but only managed to deliver a few drips. So we got there without getting wet. Well, most of us did. Not Martin.
Martin took a wrong turning at a roundabout and ended up going south on the A34 instead of north. The rest of us pulled over into a lay-by as soon as we could and waited for him under a cloudless sky until he could find a slip road or roundabout, so that he could make his way back north and find us. During his little detour, he managed to find himself riding underneath what must have been the afternoon's only dark cloud. Though small, it must have been a mean and agressive little cloud, because when he got back to us, he looked like a drowned rabbit. he was soaked to the skin and his boots were full of water.
The weather stayed fine until just after the firework display on Saturday night. Then the rain started to come down, not hard but persistent. It lasted through most of the night.
One pertinent fact that I ought to mention here is that my tent leaks.
There's little I can do. It's just a design feature. It’s a dome tent with carbon poles, but the vents in the inner tent are directly under to top of the dome, and there is no way to attach a 'hat' on the top, so anything wet and unpleasant that does penetrate the fly sheet drips straight through it - straight onto me. In the end, I just covered my sleeping bag with my leathers and let the water run off it onto a towel in the hope that it would soak it up. It sort of worked. Still, I had a damp and relatively sleepless night. Several other people got a little moist as well.
Sunday morning dawned windy and overcast. The wind kept the rain off just long enough for most of us to get breakfast. But it started to come down in big sploshy drops just as we started to dismantle the tents. (Nothing in this world is perfect!) We decided to go home early, partly because it was wet and partly because getting out of the showground and along the narrow lanes leading from it in the company of thousands of other bikers can be a tedious and frustrating business. The plan didn’t work, though, because everyone else had had the same idea.
Over a couple of hours the vast capsite with its flags (English, Welsh, Scottish, Cornish, Australian, Canadian, French, Spanish, Ukranian (I think!), Tibetan, Pirate, Chequered, party, unknown and inderterminate) just disappeared. Apparently, over 180,000 tickets had been presold. That makes for a lot of tents, a lot of bikes, and one hell of a road jam.
Next month is the BMF Tailender show up at Peterborough, which is much more my kind of event. I'm looking forward to that.
