Evening all, it's almost 11 years since Star and I joined up (13th Jan 2009), I recall our early visits to the Sally to meet some WBs face to face, and early acquaintances being Thunderbird and Amante (whatever happened to him?), Charlie serving behind the bar, don't recall seeing Loud Pipes in our earlier visits in the winter darkness - surprising really as he only lived a couple of hundred metres up the road, and he was the only dissenter when the club shifted the social night to the Fart & Clown - was that around 2011? Loud Pipes spat his dummy at that point and was never seen again. Think about it, the club were being pretty selfish moving the social night away from his doorstep when they had other members coming from far and wide, a number from outside Wiltshire even...
Back to early memories of WB: finding our way to the Sally in January darkness, getting to know a few more members as the year progressed, bumping into people at George Whites - for all its faults as a bike shop (following the same "pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap" business model that had already seen the likes of Carnells, M&P, Riossi, Motorcycle City, and other big multi-franchise dealerships go to the wall), it was a great social meeting point, many WBs heading there on Saturdays just to meet up, have a (dodgy) burger, look at all the bikes, and bugger off again having bought little or nothing from the shop. I think that our first WB ride-out was the one to Mudeford on 20th Sept that year (I have the photos indexed, I'm like that) - Jaydee was on his modified GSX750, feet-forward pegs to accommodate his freshly mutilated leg, Kev (Last Train) came too, Loud Pipes and Jaydee's mate Jonny Beer, plus it was my first encounter with Rinksy - after watching him (recently passed his test) overtaking cars round blind bends on double whites near Potterne I wasn't impressed and decided to put as much distance between us as possible (not difficult on a ZX-10) - it was a good day out, including the Sandbanks ferry thing. Poor Star was a bit shell-shocked afterwards, it wasn't a slow ride, but she dug in and kept up. Anyway, dinner's ready, happy new year y'all and hopefully see you sometime soon - we're (Chicky and I) moving away (again) for work; Southampton area, so we'll still be around, sort of.
