I have been asking myself this question of late, mostly I suppose because I am pleased with (and proud of) the way things have gone in our new Club, GoldWings North West, this year.

We have a great bunch of people and we are really enjoying what we are doing, so as we come towards the end of our first biking season and look forward to the Birthday Party we’re organising for ourselves (and guests, all Winger welcome) it’s been a time to count our blessings.

So what are the essentials of a friendly motorcycle club?  And how do you capture this essence and then hang on to it, so your club doesn’t encounter unnecessary difficulties, become prone to arguments, suffer declining membership or even start falling apart?

We had a Club Meeting a week or so before the Blackpool Light Parade when we were trying to pull the practical arrangements for the Event together.  Almost the whole Meeting was spent going through what needed to be done and mostly also seeking volunteers to make it happen.   It could have been boring and it could have been hard going – it’s often said that all clubs are a mixture of givers and takers, and when it comes time to ask for volunteers to do things, like stand out in the wind and rain to welcome arrivals at Pontin’s, there might not be such a rush.

But our business was conducted in good humour and there was no shortage at all of volunteers.  There were none of those awkward silences which can happen when everyone is hoping that someone else will put their hand up.  There was plenty of leg-pulling and wisecracks but no tension or awkwardness; we were a bunch of good friends working something out constructively together.  As the Lead Organiser, trying to get the considerable list of items ticked off, I was extremely pleased and grateful.  I’m not crowing or taking anything for granted or taking any credit for any of this, I’m simply grateful and happy to be part of it.  A happy club is a source of pleasure for all and I was feeling that pleasure.

Nor was I the only one.  Thankfully the occasion didn’t develop into a mass hug-in, we are British after all, but after the Meeting, as I was limping off down the stairs a lady Member whom I knew but not well stopped me and made a point of telling me how much she enjoyed coming to our meetings.  She’s right I thought to myself, we all do.  Our new Club has bonded as a really happy and willing bunch of friends.  Her taking the trouble to tell me that she was enjoying it gave me quite a lift.

So the abundant presence of ‘grin factor’ in what we are doing together as Club Members is clearly an important element of the friendliness we have captured. And the absence from our Club, at least so far, of what might be called the ‘friction factors’ must be also be important.

It’s no use if some members have fun some of the time, even if it’s a lot of fun, unless there is also sustained freedom in the Club as a whole from discord or arguments.  No club can hope to avoid tensions or discord of some sort developing unless they actively guard against it so as well as counting our blessings and celebrating our success, it’s also been sensible for to take stock of what could go wrong and how best to avoid it.

Avoid Cliquishness and Involve Newcomers

Our Club is a mixture of a founding core of Wingers who are established friends and who have worked together well over a long period within a GoldWing Club before the new Club formed, and newcomers – and happily there have been plenty of these; the Club has increased its membership every month and continues to do so as I write.  Some of the newcomers are new to GoldWings and/or to the GoldWing Club Scene, but some are long-standing Wingers who dropped of the Club Scene some time ago.  They see our new Club as worth giving a GoldWing Club a try again.

Even though it’s early days for any real tension to develop, there is, as in any club, the potential for difficulties at some stage in the future.

These might stem from some individual’s proneness to discord (i.e. a difficult person might emerge as such and might need calming down or fending off) or risk factors for tension might arise in the group as a whole.

For example unless the founding members, who by virtue of the turbulence which led to the split from Lancs & Lakes became a really close bunch of friends, make the an effort to involve and include the newcomers, there will be a risk that they might come to be seen as a bit of a clique.

Likewise if they were to be seen as giving themselves favourable treatment of any sort as the founding members it could lead to disquiet.  So the “old guard” have to work at ensuring that these things don’t happen – which we are, and so far they aren’t.

Including new Members in the development and running of the Club as well as its activities is always an important thing to try to do – so those who are running clubs should always try to create opportunities for newcomers to be involved, while at the same time avoiding giving any impression that they are being used as dogsbodies just because they are newcomers.

Making an effort to recognise and respect what newcomers are capable of bringing to the party can also lead to some nice surprises.  For example one of our new members, brand new to GoldWings, turned out to have lots of advanced riding and continental touring experience, so we gained an extra experienced rider and ride leader – always useful because most of us starting with GoldWings are pretty terrified of them and need time to gain confidence and experience, I certainly did.  Another recruit has a special interest in cooking barbecues  – proper meat, not just burgers and sausage –now is that useful or what?

Perhaps most surprising of all, one member, who’d been quietly making himself useful over a period of months and becoming known as likeable and willing Club Member without being in any way pushy, amazed us all at the end of the pre-BLP Meeting.  We’d all but finished and Bob, our Chairman, was asking around the room for any other business.  Up goes a hand and he asked whether we knew that use of the image of Blackpool Tower (which we have on our Club’s Badge as well as on the BLP’s) requires permission because it is a trademark (or some such) – but not to worry because he had secured the necessary permission.

There was a pause as we all wondered where this had come from when he added, in way of explanation, because we all looked a bit baffled, that his Dad owns the Tower, so he asked him for us.  He then added that although it was too late for this year, there might therefore be scope for incorporating some features or benefits linked to the Tower and his Dad’s other Attractions in Blackpool next year.  The look on everyone’s face as this came out was hilarious; everyone’s jaw literally dropped in astonishment.

So you see unless you give your new members an opportunity to air their ideas and reveal their talents and resources you could easily miss out on something really unusual.  (And what a cracking bloke, and wife, for keeping it quiet until we had got to know them well enough to value his personal qualities; if we ever had to choose between this couple and their connections there would be no contest.)

Nip Friction or Discord in the bud

Every club, and maybe every family, is likely to encounter tensions and fallings-out about something or other sooner or later.  Among my visitors while I’m convalescing after hip surgery has been a relative who told me about what’s been going on in her Bridge Club for elderly and mostly well-heeled retire people, which made my hair curl.  As a biker I seem to have led a sheltered life, even though I did manage to become infamous within GWOCGB and thrown out last year!

Clubs aren’t all hotbeds of potentially festering contentiousness of course even if some might be.  So there’s no need to be continually analysing everything and everybody in your Club in case you need to call in the shrinks.  The time to start wondering whether something is brewing in our Club might be if any of us stops taking the mickey out of each other more or less continuously.

And hopefully most clubs will be blessed with a tact among the membership who can  exercise a calming influence as necessary.  It might be someone who has acquired some stature in the Club and feels able to deploy wisdom and tact in a paternalistic way or it might be the natural peacemaking urges of the ladies which nips tensions in the bud.  Not that all ladies are benign peacemakers by nature of course but as a general rule they are more even tempered and less inclined to being opinionated than us chaps – its in the genes and the hormones you know.

Anyway, if there are people who can sense and act upon opportunities to calm tensions and sooth egos it can be a valuable contribution to the club’s well-being and viability.  That’s what friends do for each other in time of looming difficulty isn’t it, tactfully intervene to nip tensions in the bud?

And as it happens, in our Club we also have an ex-Hells Angel (nowadays he’s older and almost house-trained) so if the time for subtly ever evaporates I suppose we can always whistle him up!

Friendliness by example

And of course it helps to avoid fallings-out if you avoid doing anything to pick arguments, especially  as a Club with Wingers outside your own Club or of course with other GoldWing clubs.

Our founding members made a decision as the Club was forming, after our split from the Lancs & Lakes Region of GWOGB, that there would be no looking backwards, no re-living and especially no resurrecting of old difficulties or battles.  We were building a new Club and that’s what we should concentrate on.   No matter whether others might try to perpetuate old arguments or start new ones with us, we would put all that behind us.

From time to time inevitably someone would however mention some item of news or gossip about our old Region or about GWOCGB’s National Committee, or something else would trigger a comment reflecting incident or individual from our past.  But whenever this happens someone or other will always interject fairly quickly and suggest the subject was changed to concentrate on the future and the positive.  That’s history they would say, we should be putting it behind us.

We have all benefited from this mutual help to ensure we keep moving on.  Accepting reminders from your friends that you should do so when necessary is useful and no one takes offence.

It seemed particularly important, as our Club rapidly gathered new members who had not been part of Lancs & Lakes, even though some had been in GWOCGB at some stage in their past, not to impose anything about our Club’s turbulent origins on them.  We didn’t want to go through the whole business again to explain the background to them anyway – and why on earth should they be interested in old difficulties.  Our new Club was up and running and there was plenty to look forward to and plenty to do.  There was no value to our Club in going backwards at all, we wished those who had decided to stay in Lancs & Lakes no harm; we would do our thing and hopefully they would do theirs.

Some of our Members still are (at least during the current year) still members of GWOCGB and/or Lancs & Lakes.  This was and still is perfectly OK by those of us who aren’t.  We respect their right to choose for themselves as we have done.  And we certainly didn’t expect anyone to join our Club  “to the exclusion of all others” as if they were marrying us or joining some weird sect.  There’s no Club “cause” or “mission” other than to enjoy our GoldWings together.

We’ve joined with other GoldWings Clubs to form the Federation, which will build to become a useful national umbrella organisation for Wingers (as distinct from a ruling national club) but that’s not on a mission either, it’s just a way of sharing things and building liaison with other clubs.  We’re not interested in developing influence over other Wingers beyond creating opportunities and choices for them and we want to see all UK GoldWing clubs flourish, whether or not they want to do things our way or use what we offer.  Their club, their choice.

Don’t descend to anyone else’s level

So we also resolved before the start of this biking season not to adopt any challenging or contentious or even competitive positions in relation to other GoldWing club and not to “bite back” even if someone else seemed to be having a go at us.

We are comfortable with what we are doing and we had no plans to create difficulties for anyone else, so as long as we weren’t being faced with sacrificing our own freedoms to do our thing, we would try to avoid taking issue, even if provoked.  There has been belligerence and there has been provocation during this season of course but we’ve ignored it.  Their belligerence, their friction factor, so sooner or later their problem.

Of course it was difficult to resist a private chuckle if some news or gossip emerged that our tormentors of the previous year had brought difficulties upon themselves, especially if it was down to last year’s chickens coming home to roost.  But even then there was a concerted effort not to crow or show any satisfaction or smugness about it, even in private among those who had been most closely engaged the previous year.   And generally speaking we succeeded.  We’re none of us Saints but we haven’t been dwelling in the past; we’ve been much more interested moving forwards and enjoying ourselves in the process.

So if anyone else seemed to be having a go at us we did our best to ignore it and we did nothing ourselves to undermine or spoil anything which any other GoldWing Club or Region was doing.

For example the Scarborough Light Parade was promoted on our websites.  There was no point in us pretending it didn’t exist, even if it had seemed to us to have been invented at the rush in 2008 as part of a deliberate attempt to spoil the BLP.  Or at least the 2009 SLP was promoted on our websites until the Organisers asked us to stop doing so, with which of course we complied.

Nor did we complain or react when one of the SLP Organisers tried to put it about that our Parade wasn’t a proper Parade any more.  Nor even when the GWOCGB Chairman, Chris Hinds, announced at a GWOCGB National Meeting that our Parade wasn’t running this year.  Nor when a nasty letter was published in Wingspan implying past financial abuse and discouraging attendance at this year’s BLP.  There can be no doubt that the word was being put out this year within GWOCGB that going to the Blackpool Light Parade in 2009 was considered an act of disloyalty to that Club.  Now is that sort of thing sad or what?

Of course I have to own up to taking an opportunity to poke fun myself on this Blog early this year at Tony Walton, one of the instigators of the SLP, but hopefully it wasn’t in a nasty way, just a bit of light-hearted fun when he took his bat home temporarily after a public falling out with his fellow organiser.  Since then readers of this Blog will hopefully have noticed that I’ve steered clear of poking fun at Tony or anyone else in GWOCGB, even though there have been lots of funny things happening which would have been newsworthy and entertaining.

Hopefully the day will soon come when I can write humorously about GWOCGB Wingers again (just as I do about our own) without someone being paranoid and outraged.  But for the time being at least I’m trying to be especially unprovocative in the interests of peaceful coexistence.  Let’s hope the penny drops with others that it is now time to live and let live.

Friendly chance encounters

Whenever our Club’s path has crossed that of Lancs & Lakes or any other GWOCGB Region during this season we’ve greeted them as fellow Wingers in a friendly way – and to give the GWOCGB Regions their due that’s mostly been roundly reciprocated, as of course it should have been.

Appleyards Open Day was the first time GoldWing North West regalia was worn at a gathering where there was plenty of GWOCGB regalia about and that passed without incident, or at least nothing worse that the odd person carefully avoiding bumping into people they didn’t want to have to greet.

Just occasionally there was a blunt rejection of interpersonal contact by individuals and maybe that’s understandable if those individuals felt strongly about something in the past.  As I said, we’re not all Saints.

So we did encounter situations of awkwardness or guardedness which were either amusing, irritating disappointing – and the odd occurrence which was hurtful and sad.  A long established member of Lancs & Lakes, who’d been almost the Region’s mascot in recent years and had never fallen out with anyone at any stage, had been really devastated to have to witness the break-up of the Region which he loved – as indeed all of us who had been part of that Region during the previous four or five years when we had enjoyed a friendly and successful time must have regretted the loss.

This old guy didn’t want to lose any of his friends when the split happened.  He went to Lancs & Lakes meetings as well as ours and we didn’t see all that much of him during the early season.  But after a few months he was coming to us regularly and he had clearly made his mind up to abandon going to Lancs & Lakes.  It was some time later that he confided that he had been subjected to open criticism and snubbing within Lancs & Lakes for having anything to do with us:  “I’ll not be treated like that again” he said.  Their friction factor, their loss of a member – and unnecessary it was too.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that demanding of your friends that they join you in bigoted hostility to former mutual friends is a recipe for losing even more friends.

And who wants to stay in a club where you are given a hard time for also belonging to another one anyway, whether or not there have been disagreements?

Institutionalised unfriendliness drives people away

And of course that’s the great sadness of what keeps happening within GWOCGB;  allowing and sometimes even encouraging belligerence toward others or even trying to organise it’s members to be hostile aand belligerent to other Wingers.

A friend loaned me his copies of Wingspan to read while I have been convalescing from my operation.  There is the usual healthy indication that the Regions enjoy themselves riding their bikes and in lots of other ways; as local “clubs” they generally do quite well.  And they generally get on well with other Regions when they share camping weekends too.  Likewise when they share an open event like Stars & Stripes they get on with other Wingers, GWOCGB or not.  That’s what GWOCGB Regions do well.

But there is also the familiar pattern in GWOCGB of “bitching, back-biting and complaining” as one member called it recently in Wingspan’s Postbag.  It crops up time and again in GWOCGB and has done so since long before 2008.  As in this recent example, someone else also usually pops up to call for an end to it all but that never seems to stop it happening again.

Perhaps saddest of all of what I read in Wingspan, there’s a letter in a recent edition reporting appalling insensitivity and rudeness by a National Committee Member to a guest on arrival at the Treffen – the recipient was a former member and therefore a potentially returning member.  Odd that this should have been published, or at least odd that steps were not taken to publish an explanation or apology to accompany it.   Publishing a letter about a shameful episode like this without additional comment is almost like saying behaviour like that is OK – and we don’t even care if you all know about it either.

And of course it wouldn’t be in his interests for me to name the Winger who lent me his Wingspans; he would be almost be bound to be given a hard time for doing so.   GWOCGB members at large are probably inhibited about putting their name to comments on this Blog for the same reason too.  Fraternising with the enemy in any way shape or form is more than frowned upon, it risks being pilloried or worse.

And the pursuit of opportunities to pick arguments continues.  Most recently of all, an Officer of GWOCGB tried to orchestrate the Regions into demanding that links to their websites be removed the Federation’s List of UK GoldWing Clubs, i.e. we don’t want them advertising our Region’s websites, we don’t want anything to do with them, we want to pretend that they don’t even exist.   Their Club, their friction factors I suppose.  But isn’t it all a bit shameful for a Club which, according to its own Constitution, holds the promotion of friendliness to be its principle aim? Nothing much wrong with GWOCGB at Regional level apart from the odd lumpy patch here and there, but centrally that Club is seriously dysfunctional.

GWOCGB might still be a friendly club in some respects but the selfish complaining, the conspiring, bitching, back-biting, intimidation and bullying which clearly goes on and on and on is hardly doing the Club’s prospects of recovery from declining membership any good.

There is perhaps hope of better, eventually.  Members do regularly object in Postbag to the recurring manifestations of unfriendliness, so not everyone accepts it meekly.  And the silent majority in the GWOCGB Regions are capable of quietly withholding their approval of the unfriendly antics which go on in their name, even if they aren’t inclined to take issue with them openly.  For example currently only a small handful of Regions have taken this latest call to arms (about removing Regions’ website links from the Federation’s List of UK GoldWing Clubs)  seriously.   Likewise when it comes to encountering other GoldWings and groups of them out and about, it’s only the odd one who isn’t at the very least civil.

It’s no business of mine how GWOCGB conducts its own affairs these days of course – and indeed it is potentially helpful to what we are trying to build nationally if GWOCGB continues to operate centrally in what can only be described as self-destruct mode, so why should I be concerned?  Well I’m not really, because the the hostility and deliberate spoiling actions which have been directed at our Club and our Federation during 2009, although shameful to GWOCGB’s credibility as a friendly Club, haven’t done us any serious harm.  For example the drop in BLP numbers this year was significant, but it was a small fraction of the 300 odd GWOCGB memberships which were not renewed in 2009, nearly a third of the total.

We in GoldWings North West and the Federation will have no difficulty getting on with our lives and getting with enjoying our thriving Club by continuing to ignore the spoiling tactics.   But wouldn’t it be better for the UK GoldWing Community, and especially for the prospects of GWOCGB’s  membership numbers, if the unnecessary, counter-productive unfriendliness stopped?

Summary

So there we are, some thoughts on the things which help and hinder friendliness in a GoldWing Club and in the GoldWing Community as a whole.

It isn’t rocket science.  It boils down to being friendly yourself, i.e being considerate of others in your own actions and respectful of their preferences when they don’t coincide with yours.

And surely this means being considerate to Wingers outside your own club as well as within it – or at least not picking petty and unnecessary arguments with them or trying to spoil what they are trying to do.

If we, the UK GoldWing Community, didn’t quite manage to put the turbulence of 2008 behind us in 2009, let’s at least hope that it won’t continue into 2010.

Postscript

In case this Article has got a bit too pseudo–psychological or, God forbid, too political, let me assure you that I don’t spend my time notching up black marks against GWOCGB, nor continuously analysing everything or anybody in my own Club in case they or we or I need sending to a shrink.  I don’t have to do that, I know we’re all slightly potty, we’re bikers for goodness  sake.

As I was writing this Article, pondering on this grin factor or that friction source, I kept thinking of what I have come to call The Wisdom of Dennis Green. I think it’s almost worthy of being adopted as a Winger’s motto so I’ll share it with you.

Dennis and I were on tour with a group in Germany a few years ago and three of us were playing truant from a civic reception we were supposed to go to in City Hall as, believe it or not, honorary ambassadors of Wickersley, a Parish of Rotherham in Yorkshire, which happens to be Twinned with the German town where we were staying.   We truants had been riding for an hour or so on nice roads and must have pulled over for some reason, probably so that I could work out how we’d got lost.   Dennis, relishing the moment,  suddenly piped up with “ This is a lot better than sipping champagne and talking bollocks”.

And he was right wasn’t he?  Owning a GoldWing is a real privilege, so we should make best use of that privilege by enjoying our GoldWings and  dealing with other Wingers in a friendly way.

Our GoldWing clubs must be a means to that end or they are worth nothing at all.  Imagine a Winger spotting a GoldWing stopped by the roadside and looking for his own club’s badges or pennant on the bike or riding gear before deciding whether to stop and help.  Wouldn’t that be awful?

Finally, at the end of my 2009 biking season and as part of my expression of personal gratitude for the friendliness and friendships which I have enjoyed riding my bike this year, I would like to add a personal thank you to Bob Summers.  Bob has led GoldWings North West extremely well during it’s first season.  We’ve all worked at it and we’ve all really enjoyed it too, but Bob has worked exceptionally hard and his leadership has been exemplary.  He has given our Club an excellent foundation year, based upon which we can be confident of many happy biking seasons to come.

Roll on 2010!