custom and (dodgy) practices

The Alba West Bike Show was held over the weekend just gone. It's an annual weekend bike show with the proceeds going to disabled bikers. It's run by the Alba West Association (Scotland) which may or may not be the Blue Angels. The show has a custom bike competition and if the standard of bikes has continued to improve since the last time I was at the show, it must have been fantastic.

I didn't get to it though, as the past few days had offered a plethora of rallies, ride-outs and camping week-ends as well as non-biking activities surrounding Armed Forces Day. I could have been camping in the Campsies, boogieing in Blackpool, drinking in Drymen or swinging the lamp with soldiers either in Glasgow or Edinburgh.

In the end domestic duties held my attention and so I had to forgo mixing with bikers and content myself with solo rides on Friday and Sunday evenings.

While on my way back on Friday I passed more than a few groups of riders heading out to the Drymen Show Ground where Alba West was held. One group stood out because their bikes looked that bit different from the shiny chrome of the Harleys and the plastic sky-rocket Japanese bikes. They were the type of bike I used to ride and love. Well used, road worn, not so shiny and definitely not stock.
Looking back in my mirror I could see why these guys stood out. They were all wearing back patches. Not the clean, tidy "gold-lamé" HOG back patch or the HD corporate logo sported by us week-end bikers. These were the aforementioned Blue Angels.

The Blue Angels are a biker gang. They have been around for years and I have crossed paths with them on quite a few occasions. None of my encounters have been particularly close and I can't count any of them amongst my friends. Though to be honest, on the other hand, none of the meetings have been in any way threatening apart from those feelings brought on by my own fears and prejudices.

I first saw the "Blues" when I was a schoolboy living in a small village and we were "invaded" one summer day in the late sixties by dozens of Blues on their bikes. Truthfully, they were there for an hour or so, went into the local café for a drink and rode up and down the main street a few times then left. A couple of them played an impromptu game with my football which I had left lying but offered to give it back as soon as they noticed me. Another village was not quite so peaceful when a publican tried to eject them from his premises but the word was that the news-paper reports of rioting and mayhem were ever so slightly exaggerated. It did go down in our school-days' mythology as the day the Angels tried to destroy our civilised world.

My next encounter was in my late teens when I was going through my "hippy" stage. I used to drink in a pub in Glasgow which had a real community spirit about it. Our "thing" was trying to revive the sixties "peace and love" and the pub became the southside of Glasgow's place to be. That was until the local gangs decided that they were going to battle to make it "their territory". Fighting became an almost nightly occurrence and the ensuing police presence threatened to upset our easy-going outlook, due in some measure, to a somewhat liberal attitude to drugs and alcohol laws.
It was following a raid by Glasgow's "finest" that a friend got talking to a, previously un-noticed, group of guys who regularly came in for a few pints but on the whole kept to themselves. It turned out they were Blue Angels who drank in that particular pub because it offered them a peaceful haven where they didn't have to defend reputations and the like. They offered to help sort out the bother the next time it happened and gave us a phone number to get in touch should anything kick off again.
A week later and, following a fight, a phone call was made. The next thing we knew shot-guns were being unloaded from the back of a car. By that time the police were already in the pub so the guns were quickly replaced and the occupants of the car (no-one could actually identify them as Blues) disappeared round the corner never to come back, to that pub at least. Gradually the pub returned to normal but it was never quite so exiting again!

Years later, when I had discovered the joys of riding bikes and had decided that I would not make a racer, got into custom bikes and rode a chopped Suzuki, I had my next meeting with the Blue Angels.
That one will have to wait for another post though..........