Considering where I'm posting, this may be pretty mundane to a lot of you, but it was new to me, and it is at least on topic, so here goes.... In the interest of staying on good terms with the neighbours, one of whom proposed the idea, I attended the motorcycle event at Douvaine on Saturday. It was pretty much as you'd expect, or at least as I expected - a celebration of fat slobdom and truly ghastly facial hair, terrible rock bands (funny to hear them singing in approximate english), random americana, and merguez-frites. It was majority Harley, but not exclusively. Funniest moment: there were some kids demonstrating wheelies, stoppies, and smoke generation, and there was a chap who was very proud of his bike and wanted everyone to look at it rather than the kids. So he parked his bike right in fromt of them and revved the shit out of it. Since he seemed to have replaced the silencers with loudeners this sent the audience rushing for cover with their hands over their ears, but they came back to watch the stunts so he did it again. This time it stopped abruptly and a couple of little metal disks and a spring or two rolled out from underneath it. He looked quite upset, but strangely I think I was the only person who laughed. Maybe I'm not polite enough to be a biker rebel. Strangest observation: the whole thing was incredibly well organized and good-natured. We all went off for a bimble around the countryside in a big procession of about 2-300 bikes, and in 46km of traffic disruption we saw nothing but smiles and waves, no mishaps (except a half-ton of chrome and turqouise paint, carrying two people and a dog, that briefly capsized on a hairpin bend) and not a single policeman. In fact the whole day the only police we saw were on the way there, a couple of gendarmes on bikes stopped beside the road, who may have had nothing to do with the event. Would this happen in the UK? Random philosophical musing: normal people have a sex life, but that is obviously out of the question for people so hideous as the majority of the attendees. Is this what they do instead? Thank you. I will not be getting a blog.
