SOUTHAMPTON MAG SHOW.

We had ice creams. Big, swirly drippy cones with chocolate flakes & raspberry sauce & nuts & hundreds & thousands. Very nice they were too.
Been to the Southampton MAG show today at the Cricketers pub in Eastleigh. Boy was it hot! Absolutely sweltering all afternoon. That guaranteed a good turn out but also meant wandering around in leathers became a real trial -hence the ice creams.
The Southampton branch of the Motorcyclists’ Action Group have chosen a great pub for their weekly meetings & annual show. Big & spacious with comfy leather sofas to lounge on indoors, a nice big beer garden outside & plenty of parking space. Just as well really. Rainbow & I trundled in at around 12.30 to find the place already filling up. I was surprised just how many bikes kept arriving, considering how little advertising I’d seen for this do. Some top notch machinery, including several magazine feature bikes, filled the carpark at the rear of the pub & spilled onto the road outside. The show only ran from 12.00 till 4pm but bikes were still turning up at 3.30 when the prize giving was held. I do enjoy these small pub shows -always seem to have a very friendly chatty atmosphere about them. No need for a disco or band or silly games, just catch up with old friends, peruse the trade stalls or grab a burger from the barbeque & sit in the sunshine & watch the world go by. It was nice to bump into Biker Gran, one of our own forum members, who’d ridden up from Poole on her GT550 trike. After some fairly major surgery on her leg, which involved steel pins & framework & other gruesome paraphernalia, she couldn’t manage the standard gear change pedal, so had come up with her own loopy, yet impressively effective hand conversion, consisting of a golf club, it’s head jubilee-clipped to the original pedal with the shaft running inside a plastic tube gaffer-taped to the side of the tank. Pulling upwards or pushing down on the handle neatly clicked it into the required gear. A clever lady! At the risk of sounding a sexist dinosaur, it was nice to see plenty of girls riding their own bikes, something quite rare until only a few years ago. Lots of young children riding pillion on their parents’ machines today too, which bodes well for the future of our lifestyle. Hopefully there’ll be plenty of nice, laid back events like this for them to enjoy.
Rainbow & I stayed on for a while after the show came to a close to enjoy a quiet drink in the pub before she headed home to Southampton & I turned onto the M3 towards Basingstoke. Spent the whole journey white-lining up between queues of slow moving car drivers, sweltering inside their motorised tin boxes, gazing blankly out at me as I passed by. Thank God I choose to ride a motorcycle!
After a hot, sticky day of unbroken sunshine at the show, we were treated to a spectacular lightning storm this evening with torrential rain. That’s happened several times at shows I’ve attended this summer. Maybe someone up there likes us!

-Andy.