Old bikers out of hand
Newcastle Herald
Thursday March 24, 2011
THEY seem to be everywhere in the Lower Hunter, fat old people trying too hard to be something other than fat old people. No, not our own fat old people, because they're generally resigned to being merely fat and old, but Ulysses Club bike riders and their boilers.Estimates of their numbers for the Ulysses AGM in Newcastle this week range from a couple of thousand to 5000, but the difference is no matter since just a couple of hundred would fill the space.They fill your windscreen, your rear-vision mirror, the road, and they're an eyeful still when they're off their matching bikes or out of the sidecar.Have you, too, wondered how the couples fit into the dome tents that have sprung up like an outbreak of hives throughout Newcastle? Be careful, though, because dwelling on the squeeziness can lead to horrific mental images.Growing old disgracefully, their logo announces, but the fact so evident this week in the Lower Hunter is that they've grown old distastefully. They are living kitsch, concrete gnomes that move, the sort of thing that appears on ABC TV's The Collectors as a crackpot collection.There's the colour-matched bikes, his and the smaller hers, the badges and stickers, the corny one-liners on the rear end of the bike, the cute plastic adornments.But the most cringe-worthy kitsch is the holding hands. It seems to be compulsory for Ulysses geriatrics to hold hands off the bike, as if their message to the world is that couples who ride together are happy together. As if! Maybe their message is that there's a partner somewhere for people who have teeth that appear to have been bought individually in charity shops and positioned by the old biddies behind the counter.The hand holding is the second thing they do after the groaning struggle to get a leg over to dismount. The first is to remove their helmet, usually matching, then they grip each other's hand as if acceptance by the other fat old bikers depends on it. The bickering, the screeching, the detestation will resume next week at home.Usually hand holding by people decades too old is confined to cafe strips on Sundays, an exhibition that is meant to establish that the old fools are vital enough to be yuppies and rich enough to afford Viagra. Oops, I just had a flash of one of those horrific images.An eye-popping difference between the hand holding Sunday set and the Ulysses set is size. The cafe set are reasonably slender, and those who aren't spare us the shock of the hand holding, but Ulysses couples are almost all waddlers who hold hands despite the obvious mechanical difficulty of maintaining a grip when the waddling falls out of sync.I have a theory, by the way, that it is the vibration of a motorbike that breaks down connective tissue in the rider's and pillion's body to cause the collapse that creates the Ulysses shape.We should be effusively grateful that they don't wear lycra. Oh, another flash.Even the leather shows too much, and the Ulysses patch on the back is not the bit of fun you'd assume. No. You won't be chatting with a Ulysses hand holder for long before he'll tell you that he's seen by other bikies as a bikie, that Ulysses riders were required to remove their colours when the Rebels gang reminded them of the convention on the outskirts of Canberra six years ago. Their proudest moment.You'll see them on Saturday morning between nine and 10 on the look-at-me motorbikes with look-at-me exhaust noise doing the grand parade from Dixon Park to the harbour foreshore, and if you'd like a closer look at them and perhaps their bikes they're on display at Newcastle Harness Racing Club, next to the International Sports Centre, between 10am and 2pm on Saturday.Check out the hand holding, mention my theory about disintegrating connective tissue, and look for the 89-year-old who's ridden his Russian motorbike from Queensland for the event. It might be, err, wise to find out exactly when he's going to be riding back.jcorbett@theherald.com.auBlog with Jeff at theherald.com.auHas the Ulysses week shown that we need atougher licence review for fat old bikers?
© 2011 Newcastle Herald
