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That takes a big pair of some real skill...............

Can’t beat the homemade ones, these are courtesy of the current wife ………you can’t get too close to a naked flame with these bad boys

thanks @Saul but pedro deserves it more than me

Pete, stop making this stuff while pre dinner drinks are being consumed and I’m on the phone’s small screen.

I thought they would have minced meat on the inside, but turns out nothing inside those pies is minced? Is the whole food thing in the UK a joke on foreigners?

First time out for 3 weeks.....bike needed a bit of a run after standing.

Crazy day of driving. We left the mountains this morning in the wind and snow and it carried on like that all the way into Brooks, Alberta, where we stopped for the night. So we went from sheltered mountain highways to nothing but fields around us. The wind and blowing snow made for an interesting drive. It's a cool -17c right now. Not much time for smiles and scenery today, so here are a few driving pics.

I'm going to nominate Grasshopper for all her input on here and because she's a genuinely nice gal

OK.....my nomination for TOTY can only be one man. A man that after winning MOTY & TOTY in the same year (which nobody else has ever done), and getting a Mod gig as well.......meets a bird on ButtRider, goes batshit crazy, and then disappears for 15 fucking years! Because she had strawberry ice cream in her freezer! Finally comes back as if nothing ever happened, takes the piss out of Buck's barge, then goes and buys one himself and becomes a Harley FanBoy! All I can say to him is...... Cometh the Hour.....Cometh the Twat! @Marcel is now in the Poll along with @busabeast

You shut up, if you were to have a say you’d be mod. I hereby replace my Bob nomination by now nominating @busabeast

My new steed looking slightly dirty thats better

Plenty of people have high IQ but can't be allowed out in public unaccompanied...

exactly .... im not nominating cause your all twats ..some more so than others especailly the Twat that is @MooN he's a proper twat ...fucking Twat

twat

He was my second choice for MOTY, because nobody new has ever not annoyed me except him. Plus his bike choice, he deserves something positive in his life to offset that.

I still have vivid memories of the first bike trip I organised to the uk with 4 or 5 mates from here. We visited my parents, my mum cooked and we had hours of fun trying to explain "Toad in the Hole" ( Le crapaud dans le trou) before moving on to cheesecake, which is neither cake mor cheese...

Pedro for Drunkass Twat of the Year.

@Pedro for me too, I have loved his ride report.

@Pedro.... he's owns it for his ride report....

Thanks twat. My nomination goes to...... Pete just because he's a twat

No mad keen on mince pies. Will eat them though. Weirdly we were given a food hamper this week with these inside. Quite nice but they were free which puts them in pole position for me

Lea the Terrier waiting while Sofia does a house call.

Rode to Sofia’s today, avoiding dark clouds and rains all the way, I realized I missed being on the bike! Also think I’ll keep the suspension soft and these tires for now, I ride slower like this, while feeling like on an adventure

That is very much like the one we had in the house as kids. Only difference I can remember is our was a totally wood cover. I did some window licking in Bath when Samantha as in Uni. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.3794777,-2.3594188,3a,75y,47.89h,81.09t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sfl0_oYEefCVbtAxKiK4WnQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

Yeah retirement for my generation is pretty much out the window, we have a few successive government fuck ups to pay for, im not saying your generation doesn't but I think we will bear the bigger brunt of it

This is the thread where you can nominate your Member of the Year (MOTY) for 2022. This is not the vote, just the nominations! And you only get ONE nomination! As Admin I cannot be nominated for MOTY, but the Mods can! The nominations will close on Wednesday 21st December 7PM (UK time), and then a new thread for the MOTY vote will start with all the nominees included! The winner then gets announced on Xmas Eve 7PM. Remember that this award is based on who you think has had a positive impact on the forum, written good posts, or generally made a positive contribution to the place. The previous winners were Bruce in 2020, and @Slowlycatchymonkey in 2021. So now it's over to you! Give us your nominations and say WHY you think they are worthy of the title.

Anybody watch this guy, I don't know why but I find his video compulsive viewing. He has made some interesting custom bikes over the years and brought loads of stuff back from the dead.

Don't fall for that Sofia... He's trying to recruit you in his Faith.

A bit?.... Are you serious. The hip pose?

That sounds like a new category. And racist, that’s racist!

I'm going to nominate @Sir Fallsalot. Despite disparaging comments from certain quarters about his camera skills, when he does do a ride report its always good, he does some really sketchy shit on his bike and always writes with humour, be it a ride report or a work anecdote. He also always replies with useful info in the workshop bit.

Funny you should say that Marcel......because @Saul is my nomination. Now I know he's going to say he hasn't been here that long......but this is not a long service award. This is an award for positive contributions on the FORUM......and he's more than done that during his time here. There's been Ride Reports, Dealer Reports, Walk Reports with great pictures, motorcycle vids etc, and he seems a genuinely decent guy that gets on well with everybody. I'm amazed someone like that would even sign up to a shithole like this place really.......I'm sure he was looking for somewhere else and stumbled in here accidentally. So there you have it.......Saul is my MOTY!

I nominate Pete, he provides this place for all of us and just keeps soldiering on despite being ginger and a bit gay.

Our mince pies are a bit light on the alcohol, but our Christmas cake is likely to need a flammable item sticker on it!

You can't recede your nomination it stands, you've nominated him for TOTY....I say it stands

Most supermarkets here have some British stuff in their foreign food aisles, but it's normally limited to extremely expensive jars of marmite and McVities biscuits!

Took the grandkids out......they were impressed with this!

What Is Mince Pie and How Do You Make It?

thats sad ... i feel sorry for her .

My grandmother had a Singer treadle sewing machine that stood in her front room...I never remember her using it for anything other than a table.

-17, I'd stay in the cab too.

That's what surprised me when I got here......I expected Brits here to be fairly upmarket. Instead I found it was like a Council Estate had exploded and the occupants had landed here.

Oh I love stuff like this. My grandma had a beautiful Singer and then my mom had it for awhile. As a kid I was not bad at using it, but I think I would need some practice now. I should think about getting a sewing machine for making some curtains and stuff for my new home. Thanks for sharing.

Good luck to you Rich, it'll be a real struggle for some of you youngsters in the future.

Paris ( which doesn't really count as part of France and the south west mostly

I love Mince Pies.....I picked up 36 from Albox! However I've eaten about half of them already! Wife hasn't noticed yet!

WOW, let's not carried away and take two pictures on a ride! I find more simplicity helps with this, I just took my phone. You don't need stuff complicating the getting on and off the bike, gets tiresome. Thank you for the compliment, but I really need to work on my English, it used to be a quite more elaborate. That's interesting and exactly what I was thinking about myself on most of the ride back. I have found out several things about myself. During the moment it sometimes felt surreal and like it wasn't really me experiencing moments, it felt sort of like reading about someone doing what I was living through. Sort of a weird numb feeling sometimes in which I surprised myself at little I was feeling, but at the same time I fell apart and lost control in other situations. What made me break up emotionally were not feelings of sadness but of reliving events that happened. I still feel like I left Maria there and it still broke my heart to come back and leave her again, that's why I rode straight back home. It'll still be very hard to go back again, similarly hard but with less of the unknown factor, and at the same time I will go back for sure and avoid a few places that didn't show me love. I always have had a relationship with places that I like, some reward me for the relationship some don't, some just take and don't give back and they're like a difficult relationship to which I come back again and again. I really missed the adventure feeling of being somewhere completely not European, and that feeling of riding into a small mountain village with smoke in the air and food smells, I miss that now already. I also learned I can ride better than I thought through some sorts of terrains, and it gave me confidence on the bike, and I was never tired or bored or not feeling like riding in the morning. I enjoyed doing this alone, and that hurts me and makes me feel like I'm betraying a lot of things I can't even pronounce.

It’s a bit now n then so here you go. I love these machines. The skill and effort put into making these gorgeous things mean you can buy a machine that’s 100 years old and it still works perfectly. Saville Row tailors still use these old singer sewing machines because there’s no other machine that comes close to the quality of the neat top stitch. I’ve wanted one for a long time and did buy one in 2019 but when I picked it up the needle plate was missing. It was very frustrating at the time because the guy I bought it from just kept saying it must have fallen off in his garage and he’d post it to me…… grrrr. I’ve poured over hundreds of these machines and it’s extremely rare to find one with the gold paint intact. The gold paint (and it really is gold) used is protected by a thin layer of shellac and is easily damaged usually where your hand would rest to push the fabric through. I’m very excited that this machine is going to be mine. I feel pretty lucky to have bought a piece of history, as if I’ve walked into a museum and bought a gorgeous exhibit. Anyway I know it’s unlikely to be anyone on here’s thing but I’m certain there are a few who appreciate the mechanical beauty of it. It was a choice between one from 1928 and this one from 1955. I wanted the 1928 one just because of it’s age and the lovely domed bentwood case but this one was in significantly better nick and is sold by Singer sewing machine centre who serviced it and demonstrated it’s in good working order. Bit of geek out history- 1858 SINGER brand introduces the first lightweight domestic machine “the Grasshopper” @Grasshopper Expanding fast with nearly a million square feet of space and almost 7,000 employees they produced on average 13,000 machines a week in Scotland, In the First World War sewing machine production gave way to munitions. The Singer Clydebank factory received over 5000 government contracts, and made 303 million artillery shells, shell components, fuses, and aeroplane parts, as well as grenades, rifle parts, and 361,000 horseshoes. It’s labour force of 14,000 was about 70% female at war's end. From its opening in 1884 until 1943, the Kilbowie factory produced approximately 36,000,000 sewing machines At the height of its productiveness in the mid 1960s, Singer employed over 16,000 workers but by the end of that decade, compulsory redundancies were taking place and 10 years later the workforce was down to 5,000. Financial problems and lack of orders forced the world's largest sewing machine factory to close in June 1980, bringing to an end over 100 years of sewing machine production in Scotland. The complex of buildings was demolished in 1998