I've waxed lyrical and furious about bike shows in the past couple of years - often in one and the same column - and after visiting the grandly tagged Welsh National Motorcycle Show over the recent Spring Bank Holiday I'm sorely tempted to repeat the process. Only in this case it would be exclusively and relentlessly bilious because it was absolute crap and, at £10 for a day ticket, a total rip to boot. (Why anyone would want to cop a discount by spending two or even three day's there, I can't actually imagine).Time was, and it was actually only five or six years ago, when the annual two-wheeled jamboree at Builth Wells was actually quite good. The competition element drew a goodly slew of both classics and marque stands, but on this year's showing last summer's club event held in my local village hall had a uniformly more interesting and better presented collection of old crocks - and I kid you not. What we got here was a motley assemblage of weary '80s UJMs, a disparate trickle of nicely restored British iron, some ludicrously customised modern Jap cruisers... oh, and a load of trikes.
I won't go on about the multitude of vaguely seedy emporia flogging goth gear and cut-price biking clobber, the snake oil and tat jewellery mongers or the madly over-priced and exclusively high-cholesterol fast-food stalls other than to say I've seen a far wider variety of retailing efforts at local motocross events. But I will go on about trikes.
And why, you may ask, is that?
Well, as my senior executive assistante, Bunny Le Grande was heard to pout as we entered one of the (appropriately designated) cattle sheds that comprise the Royal Welsh Show ground where the event was held: 'What on earth are those things all about ?' And, although I am rarely stumped when wee winsome Bunny opens her perfectly lipsticked gob, stumped I was. I mean, what ARE trikes for ?
So the only enduring benefit of riding (or, perhaps more accurately, driving) a three-wheeler is that you aren't obliged to wear a helmet. Ah yes, the wind (and rain and diesel fumes and birdshit) in your hair. It all comes back to me now... the vivid if very occasional sightings of big, bloated, bearded blokes -and they always are big, bloated, bearded blokes wilfully risking the loss of one or both eyes as they strain against the elements minus crash-hats and goggles at about half the speed they could manage if they were wearing them on a motorcycle. Bloody nuisance when you're stuck behind them in your Mondeo and they insist on owning the middle of a flowing A-road.
Well if that's somebody's idea of fun and freedom I suppose I shouldn't begrudge them their fantasies. ..for as Ms. Le Grande tartly points out (and she does a very good tartly), she never begrudges me mine. But fun and freedom are one thing - or rather two things - absurd bad taste and abominable engineering are another. Alright, two others. And the many trikes that littered the Builth Wells show site were uniformly bereft of taste or engineering merit. I suppose because it has three wheels as opposed to two, normal considerations of stability, handling and roadholding fly out of the window of opportunity that smites the doughty (if deranged) trike builder. And what the hell if it looks barmy ? Hey ma-a-a-aan, it's a lifestyle statement.
So most of the trikes on show were of the Mad Max School of Automotive Design, i.e. bolt anything onto anything else, put an engine into it and throw a coupla litres of matt black paint over it. Luvverly.
True, there were a couple of trade exhibitors offering professionally built (if not designed) chassis kits into which you could throw a big, modern Jap engine but fully-built, these cost more that the price of a new Micra or small Skoda with about 1/10th of the practicality and I imagine half the performance. Most of the new-age business tycoons inviting punters to take out small mortgages in order to contract pneumonia and annoy the rest of us road-users aboard a purpose-built trike sat on their stalls chugging warm beer and shouting loudly at their glum looking wives and/ or girlfriends and frankly I didn't feel like interfering in their strange little world by firing damn fool questions at them like 'Who buys these abominations, how many have you sold or, more to the point, why ?'
So I kept my counsel and just gently shook my head in quiet disbelief before wandering on to the next purveyor of Clothing Time Forgot and it wasn't until long after I'd watched Ms. Bunnikins consume her third Mr Whippy of the afternoon and left this sad apology for a motorcycle show that it occurred to me why this once decent event now remained memorable only for its improbably large assemblage of irrelevant machinery, namely that there was nowhere else left for them to go but a lacklustre clan-gathering a long way from civilisation.
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