Chair's Chatter

Hi All,

I trust this copy of the chair’s chatter finds you all well and safe and that you are coming to terms with longer hair, your roots showing through and all the gels on your nails growing out; it’s tough being a male in LAM, but we will get through this and as soon as those Nail Bars open, Steve Davis is handling group bookings.

So, apart from playing the fortnightly game of what will be missing from your Ocado/Tesco/Sainsbury’s food delivery and then crying to a stranger because the 10 bottles of wine you need to get through your online dinner party on Saturday night have been replaced with three chilled vanilla lattes and a bag of sprouts, what else has been going on?

Well, actually there has been a lot going on behind the scenes at LAM and whilst we won’t be going near our motorcycles for any LAM based activities, we have a team of very talented people who have been putting together some online training activities which we have started to Zoom into people’s lives on a Sunday morning. I would like to say a huge thank you to the Training Team and in particular Norton Hawes and Simon Matthews who provided us with the first presentation on 3rd May which was followed up with a more social discussion on the presentation on 10th May.

Not only are the videos an excellent alternative to live training, I hope you are all seeing a side of LAM which is not so formal and a little less intimidating than walking into the Horseshoe for the first time. I cannot vouch for the quality of this humour/banter, but it is a good way of seeing what the group is like on a personal level and indicative of the sort of serious/comedic balance of all our events - and the day the humour leaves the group, well it would be a sad day – I mean who would have considered doing that with a Mars Bar – eh, Charles?

A further big thank you to Mark Clarke who gave us a GDPR compliant forum which sadly died over the weekend (the excitement of VE celebrations or a cyber-attack by Wey Valley, we may never know) but we have a new forum thanks to Charles, and I would encourage all of you to register and use it.

We intend to post further training ideas and links to videos etc. on the Forum, and whilst not necessarily IAM or LAM sanctioned, we hope they might colour in some of the black and white areas of all our learning and if not, at least show us what we DEFINITELY should not be doing.

There is so much good stuff in this month’s Progress including a very good article on “progress” written by Huw (thanks Huw) and it explains one of the biggest misconceptions of advanced riding the difference between “speed and progress” and I would ask you all read it and make me a happy person (I’ve had to drink blended sprout and Vanilla Latte for weeks now so cut me a break) and when we all return to our motorcycles everyone is the perfect “Thinking” rider.

If you are going out on your bikes, stay safe and stay alert; if it’s the first time in a while, carry out thorough POWDERs checks and have a good look over everything before clearing the cobwebs from the mirrors but the most important thing to check is you. It is possible that the heaviest congestion you’ve encountered over the last six weeks is the cat or dog going for the same floor tile space as you make your tea, so be careful, take a little time to familiarise yourself with you, your bike and other road users.

Finally, thanks to all the key workers out there who have kept us all safe, well and fed, you are all heroes even if you did confuse Pinot with sprouts.

As society begins to find its feet over the next weeks or months, think of the people in LAM who have struggling businesses, builders, mechanics, electricians - you name it, we have it and if you need to change your brake pads or have decided to press go on that new extension why not jump on the forum and see if someone local might be able to help you.

Stay well,

Paul