I haven’t managed to write a blog post for quite some time. This is mainly because during weekends I’ve been busy and during evenings I’ve not been able to motivate myself! Anyway, I have a few moments now, and a lot to summarise, so here goes!
Sarah and I have had several enjoyable days (and an evening) out since the last blog post on 29 March 2009! Most of these occasions are summarised below.
AJS & Matchless Owners Club North Weald Section Meet
Every so often, the AJS & Matchless Owners Club has a meeting where various sections of the club meet up to say “Hi” and discuss all things motorcycle-related. This particular one was at North Weald Airfield where we met up with another section or two. I forget which ones though, I’m afraid!
As you can see from the above photo, there were quite a few bikes there – perhaps 80 in total; they’re not all visible in this particular photo though.
All in all, a very enjoyable day! I got to meet lots of new people and was able to sit within feet of the taxiway to the runway in use for that day. I even saw a Spitfire power itself down the taxiway to the end of the runway just before throttling up its wonderful Rolls Royce Merlin Engine and taking off into the distance!
Photos of the North Weald Section Meet can be found here.
Sandringham Arts and Crafts Fair
I don’t really have a general photo to summarise this event, so here’s a rather specific one:
This event was exactly what you would expect from an Arts and Crafts Fair. It had honey, jams, wood turning, wood carving (shown above!), cookery and various other things. We also spent a few hours in Hunstanton after visiting the fair to have Fish and Chips by the sea, which was also quite enjoyable and relaxing!
Photos of Sandringham and Hunstanton can be found here.
Cambridge Museum of Technology Steam-Up Day
For Sarah, I think this day was decidedly average. For me, however, it was great!
I’ve been to the Cambridge Museum of Technology many times, and I can highly recommend it to anyone interested in pumping engines, steam engines, big single-cylinder gas engines and all things industrial. On this particular day, they had the main big boiler fired up and most of the servicable engines running. They also had a model tank club visiting with very accurate scale models of various military vehicles (mostly tanks, of course!) which they were remotely controlling around the site.
Photos of our day at Cambridge Museum of Technology can be found here.
Videos of our day at Cambridge Museum of Technology can be found here.
Cottenham Yesteryear Road Run
On 19 April 2009 the Cottenham Yesteryear Road Run took place. This is a charity event raising money for MAGPAS. 400 or so classic and vintage cars, motorcycles, tractors, trucks and military vehicles took place in the road run which went from village to village showing residents and visitors all the vehicles and also collecting money for MAGPAS, as mentioned above.
As of 20 June 2009, this year’s Road Run had collected £12,000 for MAGPAS, and I’m glad to have contributed at least slightly to something contributing to such a good cause!
Photos of the 2009 Cottenham Yesteryear Road Run can be found here.
Videos of the 2009 Cottenham Yesteryear Road Run can be found here.
FBHVC Old Vehicle Drive It/Ride It Day
The FBHVC Drive it/Ride It Day is not an organised event as such. It’s a day where the Federation of British Historic Vehicle Clubs (FBHVC) request that as many historic vehicle owners get their vehicles out on the road for the day to show to the nation that these vehicles exist and are still driveable/rideable!
Sarah and I decided to ride to a pub in a nearby village to have lunch by the river and to then ride home, and I must say, it was another great day! 
AJS & Matchless Owners Club Motorcycle Run
Throughout the year, various members of the Fenrunners section of the AJS & Matchless Owners Club organise motorcycle rides around the county (and beyond!), and this ride was no exception. We met at The Chequers Inn at Wrestlingworth before setting off on a 75 mile route, finishing back at the Chequers Inn again! These 75 miles were ridden in one continuous stretch, which, despite being the longest non-stop ride I’ve ever done, was very enjoyable!
6 of us turned up at the pub in the first place, but within 500 yards or so, 2 people had broken down, leaving only 4 of us to take part in the run. Luckily enough, though, despite 2 bikes breaking down within that short distance, they were both up and running again by the time we got back and were both ridden home later that day with no problems!
I have no photos of this event, I’m afraid, but I do have the route as recorded by my GPS if you are interested!
The Nesting Blackbird
This wasn’t an event at all, but it is worth mentioning!
At the beginning of April, Sarah noticed that a blackbird was nesting on top of our water butt, 5 feet off the ground, in the corner between the fence and trellis running down the front edge of the canopy in our back garden, and around 12 feet from out back door, which is used all day every day!
The blackbird didn’t seem to care about Sarah and I going in and out of the back door and using the garden for BBQs etc… or even hanging washing out on the line which was around 4 feet away from her nest! I was also able to setup my tripod and camera behind the trellis pointing into the nest, about 12 inches away, zoomed right in to take some quite impressive photos.
The blackbird then laid 5 eggs!
At this point, Sarah and I looked up various facts about the blackbird and learned that these eggs were going to hatch in around 2 weeks. Before that time, however, roughly 3 weeks after the blackbird started nesting and 1 week after the eggs were laid, the blackbird appeared to have deserted the nest entirely!
After 24 hours of staying away to give her a chance to come back, we realised she wasn’t coming back and upon looking into the nest again, we realised that there were now only 2 eggs remaining.
I would like to add that we really don’t think it was us that scared the blackbird away as we had never attempted to touch the nest or disturb the plants growing around it – the gap in the plants through which the photos were taken was there naturally, and the blackbird had never been bothered by us in the past at all!
A couple of days later, there was only 1 egg left, and it was slightly cracked from the outside, so we figured something had found the nest and taken the eggs, sadly.
Anyway, we do seem to have either the same blackbird, or a different one, nesting in a new spot in the garden now, and this time we’re not going near it, just in case. I guess we’ll see what happens in due course!
More photos of the blackbird, the nest, the eggs and a few other birds in our garden can be found here.
Jampot Spares Limited Open Day
Although this was a very enjoyable day, it did start off badly!
The Open Day at JSL is an event often visited by lots of club members. A lot of these members I know from the club web site as they have helped me get the bike on the road over the last year or so, but I’ve never actually met them. This event was going to be a perfect opportunity for Sarah and I to not only meet these great people, but to turn up on the motorbike so they can actually see the bike they’ve hearing and talking about so much.
However, that, sadly, was not to be. Having wheeled the bike out into the open, started it up and got kitted up, I rolled it off the stand, pulled in the clutch, put it into first gear, and the engine stopped. The exhaust valve had jammed open again, like it did early last year.
We therefore attended the JSL Open Day by car. As I said, it did turn out to be a very enjoyable day, but for the first half an hour or so, before we arrived, I did feel rather annoyed, to say the least!
Photos of the JSL Open Day can be found here.
Videos of the JSL Open Day can be found here.
Classic Bike Show, Stanford Hall
I attended this show by car, as it would have been rather a long and tedious journey by bike! It was another good day with perhaps a hundred or two classic bikes on show, plus another 1,000 or so in the car park field, ranging from vintage pre-war bikes to modern Hondas and Kawasakis.
The Photo above shows the AJS & Matchless Owners Club stand which, as ever, was nicely presented!
I didn’t buy anything other than a mug, pin badge, cleaning cloths and a tube of Autosol on this particular trip, but there were an awful lot of things to buy, ranging from almost complete motorcycles to individual nuts and bolts. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to admire some old bikes and to also spend a couple of hours trawling through the autojumble stalls!
Photos of the Classic Bike Show can be found here.
The Sidestand Spring and The Hurt Finger!
I have known for a very long time that the spring holding the sidestand up on the Matchless was both stretched slightly, and hooked onto the wrong place on the frame.
A fellow club member (thank you, Peter!) kindly donated a new sidestand spring to me and showed me, on his bike, where the holes in the frame should be to hook the spring into, so armed with that information I headed into the garage to fit the spring!
I won’t go into too much detail here, but in summary, the spring is quite tough. Having hooked one end into the frame underneath the bike, I began to pull the spring towards the side stand to hook on the other end. In doing so, the spring slippped out of my grip and the hooked end went into the skin on the bottom of my finger and pulled my hand back under the bike. Having looked under the bike to see what on earth I’d just done, I saw the end of the spring trying to push through the skin on the top of my finger!
I quickly removed the end of the spring (which had gone roughly 15mm into my finger!) and made my way into the kitchen whereupon I cleaned it up and sat down on the sofa for Sarah to kindly bring me a cold glass of water!
Needless to say, I felt rather ill for the next 20 minutes, but there was actually very little pain, almost no bleeding, and 7 days later it was as if it never happened. Very strange…
Souldrop Open Evening & BBQ
A new motorcycle workshop has opened up in Souldrop recently and they decided to have an Open Evening and BBQ, which Sarah and I, of course, attended!
It was a great evening! Roughly 20 people turned up, most of them on two wheels, there was plenty of food, all barbequed by myself ( ) and it was a late, but very enjoyable evening!
Photos of the Souldrop Open Evening & BBQ can be found here.
AJS & Matchless Owners Club Crosskeys Pub Inter-Section Meet
Similar to the North Weald Section Meet mentioned earlier in this post, this event took place at The Cross Keys in Norfolk.
It was an incredibly sunny, and rather warm, day and in total I rode 134 miles! We met some more new people, spent a few hours chatting about motorcycles, had a great pub lunch and then rode home!
I must say though, 134 miles in one day, with the last 65 of them being non-stop, is quite tiring, especially at an average speed of 30 mph with a top speed of 45-50 mph! The last 65 miles, for example, took 1 hour, 54 minutes!
It was thoroughly enjoyable though, so I’m not complaining!
Photos of the Crosskeys Section Meet can be found here.
Somersham Carnival
As of the day this blog post was published, the last event we’d been to was Somersham Carnival.
I’ve been to Somersham Carnival nearly every year of my life, which isn’t so strange considering I grew up in the village!
There’s not a lot to say about the carnival really. It’s exactly what you would expect from a village carnival; classic cars, floats, a parade around the village, Somersham Town Band, an arena in the field in which various displays occur and a generally good day out for adults and children alike!
This year, however, I took along the motorbike for the first time ever. The bike itself has been in the parade and displayed in the field before, perhaps 15 or so years ago, when my Grandad still owned it, but this time it was my turn.
The other thing to mention is that I won the “Best Motorcycle” award, as shown below!
It is important to note, however, that my motorcycle was the only one there, so you could argue that my bike was also the worst bike!
Anyway, as a few people have already said, an award is an award, regardless of how it was won!
Photos of Somersham Carnival can be found here.
