Rat Bike Show

When Andy and Dave from Back Street Heroes Magazine first told me about the planned National Rat & Survival Bike & Trike show, I got pretty exited - finally a show without any chrome-and-paint Harleys, or carbon fibre Japanese penis extensions!

The show was held in mid-April at a Roadhouse/pub in the Peak District*, and the timing turned out to be a bit of a mistake: In the run up to the show weekend it rained for four weeks nearly every day, as it did on the show Friday, so I decided to ride up on Saturday morning and make a one-dayer out of it (the weather report promised an improvement). Come Saturday morning and the weather was nice - at least in London. I even considered taking the Katana, but as the mere thought of rain makes that machine cringe I set off on the police BMW I bought a few weeks ago, hoping for the best.

But - no sooner did I cross the Circle of Doom**, the skies opened in what turned out to be one of the worst rainstorms I can remember. Somehow the decision to remove all the police bodywork, windscreen etc from the BMW the week before started making less and less sense... I pulled into the next gas station, and after numerous cigarettes and cups of coffee the rain eased off a little bit.

On to Derbyshire, and to the show. The venue should've been easy to find - they said the pub is on the road from Ashbourne to Buxton, but what they didn't say was that this road is 35km long and every other house along it is a pub! Finally one of the pubs had some decrepit-looking bikes outside it, and it turned out to be the right one. There were a few tents and bikes in a large field alongside. So I paid my £5, and rode into the filed to find a place to put my tent, and promptly got the BMW stuck in mud all the way to the driveshaft! Luckily there were some helpful people around who'd been there all day and didn't mind the extra mud they got all over themselves lifting up my back wheel.

A walk around the site revealed some cool bikes and trikes like a hardtail R100 BMW, an off-road GoldWing plus some old show circuit favorites like The Rattler, Gaspode and the FutureBike, but also a whole bunch of little Hondas which quite clearly had been "ratted" especially for the show. Surely that's missing the point of a rat bike??

Anyway, the organizers had lots of cool stuff planned including dirt drags and prizes for the best bikes in 15 categories - in the event they were hard pressed to find 15 suitable machines! Nothing much happened all day, some guys rode their trikes up and down the drag strip, some even their bikes but with all the mud this was a rather dangerous affair. The rain never really stopped, so 90% of the people were to be found inside the pub anyway.

I had made arrangements to meet a number of friends at the show, amongst them Andy and Dave who sort of invited me up there, but none of them turned up. In the end Len (of Rattler CZ fame) was the only person there I actually knew. A punk band called "Dog's Bollox" was on later in the evening who were pretty good, but as they played outside in a large tent where it was considerably colder then inside the pub, they didn't get the attention they may have deserved. The party went on til early in the morning.

When I got out of my tent Sunday morning (after failing to fall asleep because it was so cold) it was horrible: rain, cold, fog, mud, everything. The organizers had the "custom show" and prizegiving planned for 3 in the afternoon, but like most of the others I decided to pack up and ride back home around 11. It continued to rain for most of the way back, and for the first 50km or so the fog was so bad that I didn't dare to go faster than 40km/h.

It would have been a great event, if only a few more people had come along, and if the weather would have been better. It was the first try to host an event like that, and as such I suppose it was a success of some sort - in any case I'm looking forward to the 2nd Rat & Survival show.

So next time somebody tells you the British are preoccupied with the weather all the time, you know why. And when he then tries to tell you that it doesn't rain in England all the time, don't you believe it. It does. I really should have moved to California instead!

* which is one of the more scenic parts of England and also has some nice biking roads

** the Freeway that goes all around London, also known as the M25