I may have asked this before, but can't find it on a forum search.
This morning I was following another car on a single-carriageway road when we were both overtaken by a biker on a fairly big machine. There was plenty of room and seemed to be no problems but after he had completed the manoeuvre he waved his left (offside, this is France) leg before accelerating away.
I've seen this quite often and can't explain it. Is it an acknowledgement or a complaint?
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I seem to remember reading in these forums that it is a gesture of thanks.
Or cramp...:-)
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or perhaps not (sorry I don't know how to make this a tinyurl thing)
www.viewfromthecloud.com/2006/08/secret-motorcycle...l
{it's not long enough to warrant being shortened to a tinyurl link. If you click the sticky a the top of the page, the info is there on how to use tinyurl, as well as also being available on their homepage}
Edited by Dynamic Dave on 17/05/2008 at 18:22
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it's an acknowledgement/thanks wave.
In .uk you use your left hand (clutch) and the right hand stays on the handlebars on the throttle.
But we drive on the left.
In France you are on the other side of the road and so moving the right hand means slowing down... Rather than use the other hand (for whatever reason) the Continental bikers decided a foot flick is the way to say thanks.
//alien
pedestrian, cyclist, motorcyclist and car driver.
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thanks for that - next time i'll acknowledge as well. :-)
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Apologies for posting this again - it is an extract from an unpublished and so far unfinished piece - but it seemed relevant somehow. The biker in question spent a fair amount of time waving both legs at once, when not standing in the saddle on one of them and waving the other. Every word of this account is true. The musician is dead now, and I still miss the old boy (same age as me actually).
'....Driving back into Lagos from Ibadan one early evening rush hour in 1973, a famous musician's?s Opel Kapitan estate, eight up, slowing reluctantly to the shunting, irritable 30 mph pace of the traffic, was overtaken by a uniformed motorcyclist on a gleaming white-painted Triumph 650. Falling in ahead of the car, the rider looked over his shoulder and made a vigorous beckoning gesture, then shot forward between two cars snaking violently back and forth to force one out into the traffic and the other onto the verge, so that the musician could accelerate through the gap. As he did so the motorcyclist was repeating the manoeuvre on the next two cars, this time with both hands above his head, steering with hip movements only. At 50 or 60 miles an hour he led the musician in this way, to a rolling chorus of blaring horns and enraged cries from the upstaged traffic, a couple of miles to the musician?s house at Moshalashi roundabout. On the way he relieved the boredom of merely intimidating the traffic, which he did with practised ease, by doing things like standing on one leg in the saddle and riding hands off, even at the closest quarters: a whole circus repertoire, but riskily done in the real world. It looked dangerous, because it was.
At the musician?s house the biker was identified as an off-duty member of the elite squad of performing outriders kept, as a harmless and rather charming conceit, by the then head of state General Gowon who went in for two-mile-long motorcades. He shook hands with the musician, a bit stiff and shy, a military man pleased to have done a service for someone he admired. There may well have been the Lagos convention of a financial bung, but it wouldn?t have been enormous and wasn?t the real point. Along with the opportunistic, hooligan aspect typical of Lagos and of the musician, the encounter embodied something equally typical of both, but deeper and finer: an individual?s generous and spontaneous tribute to a certain generosity of mind and spirit that people saw in the musician. That public declaration of elective allegiance could have been risky in itself, for the army hierarchy was already looking at the musician somewhat askance.
I witnessed the entire episode with what had by then become rather jaded amazement, having done many miles in that all-too-noticeable car bearing the band's logo whose other passengers, including the musician himself, often embarrassed me by bawling ?MATTRESS!? at woman passers-by... '
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Lud,
When you're sat in your bath chair thinking back on your life...you'll have a lot more to think about than I will. I'm slightly envious.
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Bits of it amaze me too sometimes Wp. I'm still wondering what to do with it all, and time keeps passing... Oh well.
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Oh write it up Lud - serialize it here, would make an interesting diversion from the awfully repetitive petrol price thread, some of us come in here for escapism ! That sort of posting was awfully popular when GRowler was around.
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Must be a French thing this leg waving - only time I've ever done it is when I've had cramp! If someone has moved over for me I used to acknowledge by waving with my fingers as I went past - as did a biker who overtook me recently when I moved over for him (or her!)....
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Several hundred Harley Davidson riders came across to the UK from Norway via the ferry at Tynemouth a couple of years back.
The procession, including a police escort, attracted quite a crowd along the A19 as they headed south.
Many of the riders waved back using a reversed V sign - two fingers, but with the palm pointed forwards.
It's clearly a greeting among Norse bikers.
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So thats where Winston got it from....!
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It's clearly a greeting among Norse bikers.
how do you know that...it might mean 'lock up your women, we're on the rampage'
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'lock up your women we're on the rampage'
If we had a thread on stereotyping, I think you would be its author, Mr Pig.
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Would that be stereotyping of Norsemen or bikers?
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forgot to put a smiley in..... for the record it was intended as HUMOUR...and said humour attempt was directed at presumed descendants of Vikings
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Actually, Mr P, I'd rather enjoy a thread about sterotypes, just haven't got the nerve to start it.
Oh, go on then, just a quick couple: all Volvo estate drivers are antiques dealers, and all Suzuki jeep drivers are blonde hairdressers.
And to satisfy the biking nature of this thread, all Honda Pan-European riders are fortysomething middle management born again bikers who can't wait for the next club ride to Poland.
They all have wives in matching helmet and leathers and they will all bore you rigid about their latest oh so interesting tour of somewhere you've probably been to lots of times already, or have no desire to go to/hear about.
Edited by ifithelps on 18/05/2008 at 20:44
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Meanwhile, stereotypically, I'll say back on topic !
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Many of the riders waved back using a reversed V sign - two fingers but with the palm pointed forwards. It's clearly a greeting among Norse bikers.
Or V for Victory, as per Winston Churchill.
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These explanations are all rubbish, it is to relieve the pain of haemorrhoids, a well known affliction of motorcyclists. It also affects folk who read for too long on the toilet, so only take the Sun in with you, not the Telegraph (or War and Peace!).
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I suspect that is a rumour put about by people who want the facilities for themselves and their pocket edition of Proust, dc... The priests who ran the last school I went to used to say the same thing about sitting on the radiators in the freezing winters we used to have in the fifties...
Actually reading and keeping warm aren't the only culprits here. Owing to the bohemian nature of the musician's (see my post above) very large household, the locks had all been smashed on the lavatory doors and it was impossible to sit there for two minutes without a dancing girl or bodyguard crashing in and retreating with a casual apology. I had the same problem giving a urine sample the first time I was breathalysed. Some copper seemed to want to watch, and I just couldn't.
Be that as it may, for my first four days in Africa I did not defile the continent with my bodily products. Fortunately the musician's brother, a doctor, gave me the key to his patients' facility, an oven-like corrugated iron box in the yard containing a chemical or earth device and with, oh joy, a padlock on the outside and a bolt on the inside of the door. And too dark to read in there too.
There were, er, a couple of cars parked nearby (will this do PU? :o})
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Probably - if only to brighten the place up a bit.
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LUD..... how did you manage to get the urine into the breathyliser bag?
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It's to shake out the doo doo. ;-D
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