It’s hard to believe that we have arrived at October already. The year just seems to have flown by and I hope that you have all had the chance to get to experience some of the many Club activities that have been running throughout the riding season.
As October marks the end of the TVAM financial year, the committee’s attention turns
to drafting the Annual Report that goes out to Club members over the winter, ready for the AGM in January. This takes a huge effort from many members, as well as the Committee, as it has to be sent to the Charities Commission to ensure that we meet the aims and objectives of the charity that is TVAM. I thought that I would share a few thoughts with you all for my piece this month.
It’s been another challenging year, in our attempts to get back to the Club’s full package of activities post-Covid. That said, it is in a good position with membership continuing to grow at a sustainable rate and activities for members are building back to pre-Covid levels and higher. The Club’s finances are also in good shape.
We’re continuing to invest in training, as the bedrock of what we do, and developing the Club to provide the social and riding activities for all of our members.
The number of social rides has continued to grow and we now see a huge range of rides that have as few as 2-3 riders and as many as mid 20s. There are many of the old favourite routes being re-introduced as well as many new ones that incorporate new stops for coffee or lunch to cafés and farm shops all over the southern end of the country. Welsh Wanders has once again headed for Wales for their end of summer social riding.
For those that wish to develop their skills, 7Ws, the principal Associate training weekend, ran in April and the relaunch of the 3Rs as a training weekend for Full Members ran in May. The Autumn edition of 7Ws will be taking place as this issue of Slipstream goes to print and will be the final training weekend of the TVAM year. Hopefully more on that in November’s edition.
For our Full Members our Advanced Plus, with an extension into Yorkshire, is working well with lots of Full Members taking advantage of ongoing coaching on their riding. Full Members now have the opportunity to do an Advanced Plus with Hull & East Riding Advanced Motorcyclist (HERAM). Nigel Taylor, HERAM Chief Observer and long-standing member of TVAM is very happy to introduce TVAM Members to the delights of the Yorkshire roads. Have you done one? When was the last time you received some positive input into your riding? It’s as easy as emailing advancedplus@tvam.org to arrange a day in the TVAM area or maybe a couple of days with Nigel in Yorkshire.
I am particularly pleased to see that all of our courses have been able to run at least once this year. Some have clearly been easier to make happen than others, however it is great to see that we have finally been able to re-instate Look Lean Roll to members and we kept going with Advanced Bike Control. BikeCraft made a comeback to a classroom environment, after several successful online versions of the course, and the ‘full’ Observer Core Skills Days returned to enable us to ramp up the number of Observers within the Club. If you’re a Full Member and are interested in becoming an Observer, please email observerinterest@tvam.org and we can arrange a chat with a member of the Training Team and start you on your next journey within TVAM.
We’re progressing well on the project to build a new database function for the Club and this is likely to cost a lot less than we had originally budgeted for.
So that’s a taster of what we’ve been doing and you’ll see more when the Annual Report is issued at the end of the calendar year.
I hope that you all enjoy reading this month’s Slipstream and don’t forget that if you take part in a course, social ride, training event or anything else of a motorcycling nature that you feel you would like to share with your fellow members, please put a short article together and send it to Salli at slipstream@tvam.org so she can include it in a future edition of our excellent monthly magazine.
Barrie Smith
Chairman
