Valheru Rides!

I’ve been formulating this post in one way or another since June 2023 when I started noticing quite a bit more the behavior and general road habits of many of the other users that I cohabit the road with. I’d really like to be able to write one of those really deep, meaningful life lesson posts that sound like it was written by a guru about not sweating the small stuff while out riding. But frankly, it’s not my style, my turn of phrase, or even the reality of the whole situation.

So this isn’t that post…..

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about car drivers in the last few years, it’s that they love to moan. They moan like British people when discussing the weather, with the exception of a few people who absolutely love driving (Grand Tour, anyone?) I suspect that most people actually dislike it and I kinda get that. Being stuck in a metal box with a really detached worldview with no real stimulation (except speeding) or interaction with the outside world, there’s then the standard yearly road works coming up ahead that will likely comprise about 10km of cones before 3 bored looking highway maintenance guys continuing the ardent tradition of the ‘Council worker methodology’ (one digs, two stand and watch), ohh and FML there’s been another accident, because the sun shining in the southern UK is basically an omen of Doom with the surrounding air temperature about to reach something near to the surface of the sun……and if all that isn’t bad enough you’re on the M25, recently given the catchy name ‘The road to hell’. (It’s almost like Crowley had planned that part…..)

But if that’s not bad enough, who goes past you? It’s happy Jane on her motorcycle, she’s out making the most of the light breeze, her hair is streaming behind her as she filters through the traffic when it (inevitably) stops, she’s in full vented gear and looks to be enjoying life (because she owns a motorcycle!) while you’re stuck in a metal box for another 6-7 hours going nowhere, hating everything.

“Bloody motorcyclists nipping to the front like that…muhhhh.”

However, if she was right in front of them they’d be upset because she should have filtered to the front rather than taking up an extra space in the road that isn’t needed, because that extra 2-3 metres would make an absolutely huge difference to how long it will take them to get home.

And it’s not just filtering, at a particular motorway service stop (Wetherby) patrons were complaining that the motorcyclists had their own parking area. A few miles further down the A1M and at another (Blyth I think),due to the inevitable shortage of spaces, and no motorcycle space, people were complaining that the motorcyclists (including myself) were taking up whole spaces that we didn’t need, because we were only small.

Now these might seem like isolated incidents, and that could be correct if that wasn’t echoed across the experience of so many motorcycle riders that it cannot be a mere coincidence.

Whatever we do, someone is going to do a good bit of moaning, someone isn’t going to like what we have just done, regardless of the level of safety we had when doing it, and frankly the legality of it either. That could be the most textbook, advanced riding, police approved technique in the book, if someone is having a shit day, you’re going to get moaned at, so frankly…. Fuck ’em!

Do it anyway! 🤘