HELLO, AND WELCOME TO THIS NEW ISSUE OF BSH!
(Watch this next line be the kiss of death for the weather…) The spring appears to be here – temperatures’ve gone from perfect-for-polar-bears to ‘hmm, I might not need thermals/two pairs of gloves/a-neck-tube-so-thick-you-could-lag-freezers-withit today… maybe… possibly…
You can tell that for us, as biker types, the Covid pandemic’s pretty much over (it isn’t, of course, but most of us’ve been stuck full of more holes than a pin-cushion… well, a very small pin-cushion anyway) ‘cos the events calendar for 2022’s already fuller than Virginia Giuffre’s bank account, and still filling.
Seriously, there’re more events planned for this spring, summer and autumn than I remember there being pre-bat devastation; our events listing, starting on page 82, is already filling fifteen (yep, fifteen!) pages on my computer (and another six’ve come in since I closed the file yesterday). There’s so much on, in fact, that it’s pretty much a forgone conclusion that attendance at events across the board will, most probably, be down ‘cos there’re so many rallies, shows, parties, autojumbles, rides, etc., and only a finite number of us lot to go to them. It means that you’ve got so much choice of what you can do at weekends (and pretty much every day of the week too, with the explosion in bike nights) that there really is no excuse for having to trawl the aisles of B&Q until at least October.
Me, I’ve been compiling a calendar of where I’m going when – something that’s usually fairly simple and straightforward to do but, this year, almost requires a PhD in logistical planning. Sadly, I was crap at maffs at school (and I’m not much better these days either) and, as a result, it’s only April and I’m already getting a little scared opening the events pages…
Elsewhere, the powers-that-be’s relentless drive towards electrocuting all of us… sorry, sorry, electricasising (is that a word?) all of us is carrying on, regardless of the fact it’s been proven time after time after time that the country’s infrastructure isn’t up to everyone having electric cars.
The other day I heard a radio programme in which they were discussing, completely uncritically, that we are either all going to have electric cars or, if we live in towns or cities, push-bikes, and blithely announced that pedal-irons’re the fastest way of getting around our congested urban connotations. Now, I’ve heard this trotted out almost ad infinitum over the years, and so I decided to drop the programme an email to say, basically, bicycles aren’t the quickest way of getting around a town. They may be the ‘greenest’, yes, but for rapid travel in built-up areas motorcycles (and ‘peds, scooters, etc.) are far, far better. I duly did so, and received back a ‘mail saying, ‘Thank you for your email’. A few minutes later they started to read out listeners’ emails, all of which supported the programme’s view, and guess what? My contrary opinion wasn’t mentioned…
This is the problem we, as motorcycle riders, are up against. I hate to sound all paranoid conspiracy-ist, but the green lobby’re so powerful these days that what they say goes – no ifs, no buts, it just does. They (most of whom, I suspect, have financial/other non-altruistic reasons behind their stance) use the spectre of global warming, which has indeed been proven time and time again to be happening no matter what the nay-sayers may opine, to advance their cause, but the problem is that (a) it’s a little too late, and (b) forcing the country to go electric when we really don’t have the capability, and potentially penalising those who can’t, isn’t the right way to go about it.
Personally, donning my tin-foil hat, I suspect that the powers-that-be know the infrastructure isn’t up to the job, but they’re not going to say otherwise because (a) it’s not in their interest (votes, jobs, bank balances, etc.) to do so, (b) they’re only in it for a relatively short period, and when they go, leaving the rest of us deeply in the sh*t, they’ll have sufficient wedge/age behind them for it not to worry them too much, and (c) they’re expecting hydrogen fuel cell technology to’ve advanced to a point that it’ll take over before they need to spend a frighteningly large amount of money updating our electrical grid – they’ll fleece us all by getting us to spend our money on ‘leccy cars and bikes, and then they’ll do it again with hydrogen fuel cells.
Watch this space… (it’s got aliens in it).