SILSDEN SEWER RATS RALLY 2007

You know, sometimes, you know things aren’t gonna go right as soon as you get up in the morning, well, the Friday was one of those days! Due to work commitments, I had to get up, load the bike & be on the road to work to be there for 04.00, just so as I could go on this rally, it was so much of a laugh last year that no-one wanted to miss it.
So, there was I, bungeeing my kit onto the bike at ten past three, in intermittent murky drizzle, wondering if it would improve any! I rode to work (30mls south) did my shift & then headed off from site at about 12 in a thunderstorm to meet up with the rest of the club who couldn’t get the full day off & were travelling at around dinner time.
The recce party made up of, Ajey, No-Nails, Rob & Tammy, (Team Atherstone) had met up with Bungle, Claude, Max & last but not least, Shazza at Jn 22 on the M1 at 09.00, with the “cunning plan” in mind to get up there & set up “before the rain set in.”
Well, Just as I got to Steely’s lo & behold, it stopped raining (yippee) & I received a phone call from ‘er indoors, to inform me that, after a showery ride up, they had successfully found Silsden, (well, the first pub, at any rate!)
As we were supposed to roll at 14.00, Nick & Helen turned up at about 14.15, (they’re gettin’ as bad as Bungle) bringing with them a fecking downpour! So, off we set, riding along under a perpetual rain cloud like the spooky mobile out of the wacky races! The ride along the M69 was eventful, what with 3inches of standing water & “white van man” trying to swap paint with Donna, I was being quite philosophical at this point, thinking to myself “it will be better when we get onto the M1”, WRONG, WRONG, TOTALLY F*@KIN’ WRONG !
We were making reasonable progress, but unfortunately had to pull over at the Donington services as Donna could smell burning rubber. After a quick inspection, (nothing major, new tyre catching slightly on the mudguard) & a refuel off we set again, and rode into the worst traffic snarl up in possibly the worst weather  ever experienced by anyone who was there! We were filtering in a torrential downpour at 10 -15mph, not able to see at the very most, more than 30 feet!
(Not fun, not fun at all, especially as we had the usual collection of jealous self abusing sons of bitches, who, as per usual, tried to stop us filtering through! Though it is possible that they didn’t see us, so, just to be helpful, like the nice guys we are, a well placed bit of luggage “adjusted” their mirrors for them, hee-hee-hee!)
Eventually it got past a joke, so we pulled in at Trowell services for a brew etc. Whereupon we had a good laugh at the state we were in, Donna decided not to go for a “hover” as, in her words “these jeans are that wet, I’ll never get the bleedin’ things back up!” It was here I received a rather interesting phone call from the Tartan Terror enquiring in her unique & caring way, “What the feck are you playing at we have been here ages, hic!” (I take it you’re still in the fuckin’ pub then, eh dear?) 
Whilst I was explaining at great length & extreme depth, in my own unique style (much to the amusement of Steely, who, whilst in a fit of the giggles, dropped the roll up he was trying to build) just what the feck we were actually dealing with, to my semi-sozzled other half,( we spoke to one bloke, who told us he had only managed to move 12mls in 3hours) Witty Joined us, with a rather soggy & unhappy looking Sandy on the back, having done a bit of the “speed filtering” himself, (he probably just followed the path we had cleared, deftly avoiding all the broken glass & plastic!)
Once we had had a brew, & wrung out our gloves & Sandy had dried her hair under the hand dryer (talk about futile gestures, it was about as effective trying to plait fog!)  We got back onto the road (river) again, where the traffic was still moving about as swiftly & predictably as a herd of morphine dosed wildebeest!
(it turned out that, just to compound the problems with the weather, some wanker had caused a smash in the roadworks!)
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Once we had got to JN38 we baled out & headed cross-country into the wilds of “Ooop North” making good progress as we took in the scenery, (Well, what we could see of it through the incessant piss-eyed rain anyway) dodging speed cameras, cow shit, dead badgers, a tractor driving local who looked like an extra from the film “deliverance” etc & blasting past a load of unhappy looking scooter boys who were also en route to a rally in the area. It was somewhere around there that Steely once again, proved himself to be a master of understatement, when he pulled up next to his missus Donna, blew the water away that was running down the inside of his visor & said “Lovely day for a ride eh, dear” (she nearly fell off laughing, I would have said pissed herself but she did that just short of Jn 38 on the M1, well, she couldn’t get any wetter & as she said “at least I was warm for a little while!”)
We wafted through Huddersfield & had a quick lap of Halifax! (Ahem, well, Jugsters being Jugsters we just had to fuck up somewhere didn’t we?  So, why not there, in a strange city centre, during the Friday rush hour, in a bleedin’ hurricane!)
Once we were back on the right track it was a piece of piss to find Keighly, where we stopped for more fuel & a fag break then back on the road for the last leg of the journey.

Upon arrival on site after booking in, things (for me anyway) took a dramatic turn for the worse! To be quite honest, I was looking forward to changing into some dry clothes in a nice dry tent then getting myself a well earned pint after that 5 ½ hour epic of a journey. FAT FUCKING CHANCE!
Where the dozy bint had pitched the tent was beyond belief! It couldn’t have been in a lower spot in the field if she had dug a fucker specially! There was virtually a river running past & under the bastard thing, it looked like an upturned life boat from the Titanic!
Whilst I was stood there in total disbelief & everyone else was having a fuckin’ good laugh about it, she was inside the 1st tent in Jugsters history, to have its own running water supply, snoring like a good un’ sleeping off the 6 pints & one or two of Robs “special herbal” cigarettes!
Needless to say, once I had attracted her attention, (by grabbing her by the ankles & plonking her arse in our own private pond!) and got her involved in unpacking Air bed, sleeping bags, dry clothes etc, whilst I eventually managed to get changed into something dry, Donna took Steely of up to the stalls to get him a change of clothes.
He came back with a rather natty looking two piece waterproof over suit, the bottoms of which he had to wear for the evening too as he had nothing else dry!  Once Steely had treated us to an impromptu strip show & fashion parade, we buggered off up to the marquee in search of a well deserved beer! Just in time to see Tom & a very bedraggled Nikki turn up!
Tom was all right though, in his brand new, waterproof “romper suit” having palmed off his 2nd hand, knackered, manky, smelly, leaky, old stuff onto his long suffering wife, who was perched on the back of his FireBlade as he bounced & slid his way down the muddy track, with a look of sheer terror/shock/exposure on her face!

The rest of the evening pretty much went down a storm, (Quite literally, seeing as the supposed smoking area gazebos took off for Scotland at about 7p.m!) The bands were good, the beer was cheap & plentiful & much fun was had watching the drunken idiots falling or intentionally diving headlong (oh yes, o illustrious chairman, the drunken idiot & diving bits refer to you!) into the mud wrestling pit cum marquee floor that most ingeniously, doubled up as a dance zone!
God alone knows what time we eventually made our way back to “waterworld” (I mean the tent, which was quite hard to find, seeing as it was being blown virtually flat by the gale force wind) but it was pretty much light, the end of a damn good evening after a feck-awful day!

 

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I awoke in the morning, checked that my feet hadn’t started growing webs, (captured my socks, which were taking it in turns to dive off the top of the chair into the helmets) gave up trying to dry out my sleeping bag and, seeing as I was feeling fit & needed to warm up, swam seven lengths of the tent porch to build up an appetite!
 Seeing as the stove wasn’t functioning (rusted shut!) I went in search of a cuppa in the main field. Well, what a site to behold, the arena looked like the Somme battlefield! I tell you, it was as if we had our own mini-glastonbury! It was that bad, I heard someone complaining that he thought he might be in danger of getting “trench foot”.
(Due to the amount of water in our “not so des-res”, I was more worried about getting “trench-bum” after sleeping in a puddle of diluted cow piss for half of the night!)
Little by little, in ones & twos the rest of the team arose, & stomped off in search of refreshment/hangover remedies, Surprisingly, Claude was one of the 1st   ones up & about!
It turns out that his long suffering missus (Max) had thrown him out, for the cardinal sin of pissing on her sleeping bag! Strangely, they had been sharing said bag at the time because the fuckwit had forgotten to bring his! (You would have thought he would have noticed it was missing wouldn’t you? Let’s face it; it’s not as if that old BSA of his exactly overflows with storage space!)

Once everyone was up & about it was decided to take advantage of the bus service into town for a beer or seven. After a quick roll call, it was noticed that “TEAM ATHERSTONE” was missing. A quick phone call established that in their desperate search for ale, they had decided to walk down there rather than wait for the bus & they had found a pub open at about 10am! We soon found them, lounging around in the sun, pint in one hand, burger in the other, at virtually the 1st pub you see when you alight from the mini-bus!
After a quick pint with the boys, myself, Shazza, Steely,(still wearing nothing but his new waterproof suit bottoms & his leather) & Donna went in search of the launderette that we had been told about.
Sure enough, we found said establishment, Bundled all of our grotty old wet stuff (no, not Steely) plus what seemed like the rest of the clubs gloves in a tumble dryer. Then sat about in the sun with a picnic of Pringles, Strongbow & Stella Artois (“Oooh,” I hear you say, “How cosmopolitan & cultured”. Yup, we know how to live the high life, do we not?)