The Mogs arrange tours and raids throughout the year , these are some of the Tour notes
Tour Notes
Battlefields of Flanders and Waterloo.
The Tourists.
catweazelNeil “Catweazle” Searle-Jones
Suffering from an identity crisis this tour since “the Cat” has mysteriously morphed into “Catweazle”. Catweazle was of course, an eccentric, dishevelled and smelly (but lovable) old 11th century wizard who accidentally travels through time to the year 1969 and befriends a young red-headed boy, nicknamed Carrot, who spends most of the rest of the time attempting to hide Catweazle from his father and farmhand Sam. Carrot and the Cat remain close friends to this day.
Meanwhile Catweazle searches for a way to return to his own time whilst hiding out in ‘Castle Saburac’, a disused water tower, with his familiar, a toad called Touchwood. Catweazle mistakes all modern technology for powerful magic, particularly ‘elec-trickery’ and the ‘telling bone’ or as we know it, the telephone. I think it is this that explains the close bond that exists between the Cat and Flatbed.
As if this weren’t enough, he appears to have discovered Welsh forebears. With most of us, this would be the sort of thing that we might wish to keep quiet but not him. The Cat claims to be descended from a long line of Celtic princes who, with his Celtic forebears, were pushed into the West into what we now know as Wales by successive waves of Anglo Saxon invaders. He has thus found a focus for his deep sense of injustice and depravation which lurks just beneath the surface like a half tide rock.
A little known fact is the Catweasel was not brought up in Essex but actually born and bred in deepest Wales just outside Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in Anglesey.
He was forced to leave here when he realized that there was very little chance of him ever being able to pronounce it, let alone spell it. It did guarantee him a winning score at Scrabble however particularly when it lands on a triple word square. During his formative years, he became quite used to the climate and was eight before he realised you could take a kagoule off.
A defining feature of the Welsh is that after all these years is that they still suffer from the delusion that Wales is a country where as everyone knows, it is a Principality. Think Monaco without sun, sea, beautiful people and money but instead with rain, sleet, pointy hats and an unintelligible language that they only use when you walk into a shop and more sheep that could be construed as healthy.
dragon The Cat ditches the Hog in favour of a Dragon
The average Welshman is short, swarthy and malevolent with an argumentative nature. Cat demonstrates sufficient of these qualities to pass muster. No wonder in Chester it is still legal to shoot a Welshman with a longbow within the city walls after sunset. The Cat is also probably the only Welsh person in the entire history of Wales who is not a fanatical Rugby fan and doesn’t know who Barry John is.
I cannot do better than quote the words of Dudley Wood who said “The relationship between the Welsh and the English is based on trust and understanding. They don’t trust us and we don’t understand them.” Many times in the course of our travel, we were to learn the essential truth of this dictum. As the Cat is well known for always ensuring that he has exactly the right gear for the job, we were relieved to note that he neither was wearing battle dress nor carrying a cutlass.
billBill “Flatbed” Fraser
The other Celt in the party is Bill “Flatbed” Fraser, clansmen of the well known lowland chieftain Fraser Mc Fraser of that ilk. He wasn’t known as “Flatbed” prior to this tour but earned the soubriquet thanks to his apparently battery powered bike refusing at the last hurdle.
Bill is an expatriate Scot. He was born in 1898 to a poor crofting family in the Highlands and in his youth wore the kilt, not owning a pair of trousers or ‘trews’ as he would have known them until coming south of Hadrian’s wall. His early upbringing left him with a positive distaste for having his legs covered and even now, when bought a pair of trousers, his first instinct is to cut them off below the knee, exposing his calves to the heather.
Bill’s family were very poor and couldn’t even afford to heat their humble abode. In the depths of winter, his father Hamish “Jock Mc Jock” McFraser would suck a hot peppermint and the family would warm themselves around his extended tongue. So poor were they that until the age of 16, Bill believed that knives and forks were jewellery.
To escape this grinding poverty, like so many Scots before and since, he took the low road to the Smoke and quickly fell into bad company. His formative years were spent in a narcotic induced haze as a result of his employment as a meeter/greeter in a Chinese opium den. He was saved, as with so many men, by the intervention of a good looking woman wearing a halter top, hot pants and a winning smile. Despite him being made the subject of a number of restraining orders after following her doggedly to and from work and probably against her better judgement, he persuaded this vision to marry him. This transformed his life; he gave up drugs and rock ’n’ roll and became a model husband.
His experiences have not left him entirely unscathed however. He has developed a resistance to taking medication, a penchant for home sickness literally minutes after leaving home, grabbing unsuspecting friends and neighbours by the throat and hurling then into the street just as the party is getting interesting and an unreasoning hatred of Honda dealers. His name is derived from his reluctance to ride his motorbike other than when it is safely strapped onto the back of a trailer (i) to avoid falling off and (ii) getting the tyres dirty.
maxMax “Shiny Side Up” Hayes
Max had cast himself in the role of tour leader and spiritual guru. Max is a true democrat and encourages discussion as long as everyone agrees with him in the end. To facilitate this process he made an early decision to deny Cat/Catweasel any vote in proceedings. This turned out to be a masterstroke.
For this tour Max left his skin tight leathers at home, equipping himself with a slightly more generously cut pair as befitted his new found status. Perhaps the riding crop, monocle and side arm was overdoing things a tad but it certainly commanded respect from the natives. Max wore a slightly disappointed air about him on this tour. Extensive genealogical research has suggested that rather than descending from an aristocratic lineage as he had long suspected, Max in fact descended from a long line of wasters and unknowingly has carried on the family tradition.
He is a Roman Catholic and remains convinced that it is only a matter of time before he is elected as Pope. His argument is along the lines that whilst he may not be a very good Catholic, at least he wasn’t a member of the Hitler Youth, the Boy Scouts being the limit of his flirting with totalitarianism. Sporting a modified bike for this tour, he has gone for the Stealth/Grim Reaper look. The fact that he had a Teddy Bear in his luggage must never be allowed to leak out if his credibility as a death or glory, chicken head biting, hard drinking biker that he so assiduously effects on tour is to remain intact.
max2Max on his ultimate dream machine combining two of his favourite things: beer and bikes
As an alternative to this image, he did toy with the idea of taking a black Labrador on this tour, pretending to smoke a pipe, effecting a limp and having himself referred to at all times as “The Old Man” When his companions did not go along with this, he had to be forcibly restrained from inflicting “bandana night” on them as revenge and potentially undoing nearly a century of good will between the British and Belgian peoples.
He spent the entire four days of tour looking for Germans so he could ask them whether they had entered Belgium from the North, the traditionally favoured route for Germans in the past. He found the thought of this hilarious but perhaps fortunately, as German tourists were rarer than hen’s teeth the legendary Teutonic sense of humour remained untested Perhaps of even more concern, he has upon his return, purchased a Sat Nav thingie. Look out for the Mongolia tour next year.
andyAndy “ASBO” Poole
Andy, the tour virgin, had an unfortunate childhood. He was stolen by the gipsies as a child but within a fortnight, they had returned him. His early years were unsettled and he found it difficult to settle down and make friends. This was due, at least in part, to constantly moving around. It appears his father thought he was in the Army even though he actually wasn’t.
He was not academic scoring 2 K’s and a Z at “O” level. This crushing disappointment was to set a pattern for the rest of his life. The family fell on hard times and they were forced to enter the workhouse .As if this were not bad enough, his rebellious nature once again got the better of him and he was forced to leave due to an unfortunate incident involving a beadle’s staff, a goat and a bowl of thin gruel. Perhaps, not surprisingly, he prefers to draw a veil over this part of his life. Due to the families poverty he was unable to take up a place at Norwich University to read for a degree in interpretive dance with a credit in underwater demolition and was forced to look for paid work.
He drifted into a life of casual jobs on the fringes of society becoming amongst other things, a bouncer for Mothercare, a stunt double for Ronnie Corbett and a draught excluder to an aristocratic family. Tired of seemingly getting nowhere he decided like so many young men before and since to join the Army.
Sadly, this was less than successful too. He applied to join the SAS but was rejected on the grounds of being too rough. He spent the rest of his career in the Army painting coal white, cutting grass with nail clippers or polishing the parade ground with a toothbrush.
However, his time in the Army was not entirely wasted. It did enable him to develop a very impressive ability to hold a number of coins between clenched buttocks, an ability he was to go on and demonstrate to his brand new and very grand employer the first time they met. It has taken ten years for him to be assimilated back into polite society.
As part of his rehabilitation, he was enlisted to act in the role of support vehicle and part time pillion. Due to the engineering abilities of one of the tour party, he was only to act in the former role on this tour. Hence we were perhaps a little surprised when he insisted henceforth on wearing leathers and a crash helmet at dinner and feeding himself through the open visor.
bearThe Bear
The Bear, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, is a riddle, wrapped in an enigma inside a mystery. No one can remember a time when he wasn’t around though neither can anyone remember buying him or indeed admit to owning him. He appears to consist of the same material as that from which old men’s trousers are made and I seem to recall that every time he was retrieved from the toy box, he was found in compromising positions with the more attractive dolls.
How he became a member of the tour party is a complete mystery.
To paraphrase the faintly ridiculous Jeremy Clarkson “Some say he is an African Fetish Object, some say he is a minor Royal disowned by the family, all we know is he’s called the Bear”. No one knows how he got into the luggage. All that can be said with certainty is that when Max came to unpack, there he was.
The rest of the tour party took to him instantly and he is now a fixture on any future tours. In many ways, he is the ideal travelling companion. He is cheap to look after, he does not burden you with his outrageous opinions, is content to ride pillion and does not suffer from wind.
It is the responsibility of the current Bear Fondler (for thus he is henceforth styled) to ensure his attendance on the pain of suffering huge fines and/or ritual humiliation. Are you listening Bill?
Battlefields of Flanders and Waterloo.
The Tourists.
catweazelNeil “Catweazle” Searle-Jones
Suffering from an identity crisis this tour since “the Cat” has mysteriously morphed into “Catweazle”. Catweazle was of course, an eccentric, dishevelled and smelly (but lovable) old 11th century wizard who accidentally travels through time to the year 1969 and befriends a young red-headed boy, nicknamed Carrot, who spends most of the rest of the time attempting to hide Catweazle from his father and farmhand Sam. Carrot and the Cat remain close friends to this day.
Meanwhile Catweazle searches for a way to return to his own time whilst hiding out in ‘Castle Saburac’, a disused water tower, with his familiar, a toad called Touchwood. Catweazle mistakes all modern technology for powerful magic, particularly ‘elec-trickery’ and the ‘telling bone’ or as we know it, the telephone. I think it is this that explains the close bond that exists between the Cat and Flatbed.
As if this weren’t enough, he appears to have discovered Welsh forebears. With most of us, this would be the sort of thing that we might wish to keep quiet but not him. The Cat claims to be descended from a long line of Celtic princes who, with his Celtic forebears, were pushed into the West into what we now know as Wales by successive waves of Anglo Saxon invaders. He has thus found a focus for his deep sense of injustice and depravation which lurks just beneath the surface like a half tide rock.
A little known fact is the Catweasel was not brought up in Essex but actually born and bred in deepest Wales just outside Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in Anglesey.
He was forced to leave here when he realized that there was very little chance of him ever being able to pronounce it, let alone spell it. It did guarantee him a winning score at Scrabble however particularly when it lands on a triple word square. During his formative years, he became quite used to the climate and was eight before he realised you could take a kagoule off.
A defining feature of the Welsh is that after all these years is that they still suffer from the delusion that Wales is a country where as everyone knows, it is a Principality. Think Monaco without sun, sea, beautiful people and money but instead with rain, sleet, pointy hats and an unintelligible language that they only use when you walk into a shop and more sheep that could be construed as healthy.
dragon The Cat ditches the Hog in favour of a Dragon
The average Welshman is short, swarthy and malevolent with an argumentative nature. Cat demonstrates sufficient of these qualities to pass muster. No wonder in Chester it is still legal to shoot a Welshman with a longbow within the city walls after sunset. The Cat is also probably the only Welsh person in the entire history of Wales who is not a fanatical Rugby fan and doesn’t know who Barry John is.
I cannot do better than quote the words of Dudley Wood who said “The relationship between the Welsh and the English is based on trust and understanding. They don’t trust us and we don’t understand them.” Many times in the course of our travel, we were to learn the essential truth of this dictum. As the Cat is well known for always ensuring that he has exactly the right gear for the job, we were relieved to note that he neither was wearing battle dress nor carrying a cutlass.
billBill “Flatbed” Fraser
The other Celt in the party is Bill “Flatbed” Fraser, clansmen of the well known lowland chieftain Fraser Mc Fraser of that ilk. He wasn’t known as “Flatbed” prior to this tour but earned the soubriquet thanks to his apparently battery powered bike refusing at the last hurdle.
Bill is an expatriate Scot. He was born in 1898 to a poor crofting family in the Highlands and in his youth wore the kilt, not owning a pair of trousers or ‘trews’ as he would have known them until coming south of Hadrian’s wall. His early upbringing left him with a positive distaste for having his legs covered and even now, when bought a pair of trousers, his first instinct is to cut them off below the knee, exposing his calves to the heather.
Bill’s family were very poor and couldn’t even afford to heat their humble abode. In the depths of winter, his father Hamish “Jock Mc Jock” McFraser would suck a hot peppermint and the family would warm themselves around his extended tongue. So poor were they that until the age of 16, Bill believed that knives and forks were jewellery.
To escape this grinding poverty, like so many Scots before and since, he took the low road to the Smoke and quickly fell into bad company. His formative years were spent in a narcotic induced haze as a result of his employment as a meeter/greeter in a Chinese opium den. He was saved, as with so many men, by the intervention of a good looking woman wearing a halter top, hot pants and a winning smile. Despite him being made the subject of a number of restraining orders after following her doggedly to and from work and probably against her better judgement, he persuaded this vision to marry him. This transformed his life; he gave up drugs and rock ’n’ roll and became a model husband.
His experiences have not left him entirely unscathed however. He has developed a resistance to taking medication, a penchant for home sickness literally minutes after leaving home, grabbing unsuspecting friends and neighbours by the throat and hurling then into the street just as the party is getting interesting and an unreasoning hatred of Honda dealers. His name is derived from his reluctance to ride his motorbike other than when it is safely strapped onto the back of a trailer (i) to avoid falling off and (ii) getting the tyres dirty.
maxMax “Shiny Side Up” Hayes
Max had cast himself in the role of tour leader and spiritual guru. Max is a true democrat and encourages discussion as long as everyone agrees with him in the end. To facilitate this process he made an early decision to deny Cat/Catweasel any vote in proceedings. This turned out to be a masterstroke.
For this tour Max left his skin tight leathers at home, equipping himself with a slightly more generously cut pair as befitted his new found status. Perhaps the riding crop, monocle and side arm was overdoing things a tad but it certainly commanded respect from the natives. Max wore a slightly disappointed air about him on this tour. Extensive genealogical research has suggested that rather than descending from an aristocratic lineage as he had long suspected, Max in fact descended from a long line of wasters and unknowingly has carried on the family tradition.
He is a Roman Catholic and remains convinced that it is only a matter of time before he is elected as Pope. His argument is along the lines that whilst he may not be a very good Catholic, at least he wasn’t a member of the Hitler Youth, the Boy Scouts being the limit of his flirting with totalitarianism. Sporting a modified bike for this tour, he has gone for the Stealth/Grim Reaper look. The fact that he had a Teddy Bear in his luggage must never be allowed to leak out if his credibility as a death or glory, chicken head biting, hard drinking biker that he so assiduously effects on tour is to remain intact.
max2Max on his ultimate dream machine combining two of his favourite things: beer and bikes
As an alternative to this image, he did toy with the idea of taking a black Labrador on this tour, pretending to smoke a pipe, effecting a limp and having himself referred to at all times as “The Old Man” When his companions did not go along with this, he had to be forcibly restrained from inflicting “bandana night” on them as revenge and potentially undoing nearly a century of good will between the British and Belgian peoples.
He spent the entire four days of tour looking for Germans so he could ask them whether they had entered Belgium from the North, the traditionally favoured route for Germans in the past. He found the thought of this hilarious but perhaps fortunately, as German tourists were rarer than hen’s teeth the legendary Teutonic sense of humour remained untested Perhaps of even more concern, he has upon his return, purchased a Sat Nav thingie. Look out for the Mongolia tour next year.
andyAndy “ASBO” Poole
Andy, the tour virgin, had an unfortunate childhood. He was stolen by the gipsies as a child but within a fortnight, they had returned him. His early years were unsettled and he found it difficult to settle down and make friends. This was due, at least in part, to constantly moving around. It appears his father thought he was in the Army even though he actually wasn’t.
He was not academic scoring 2 K’s and a Z at “O” level. This crushing disappointment was to set a pattern for the rest of his life. The family fell on hard times and they were forced to enter the workhouse .As if this were not bad enough, his rebellious nature once again got the better of him and he was forced to leave due to an unfortunate incident involving a beadle’s staff, a goat and a bowl of thin gruel. Perhaps, not surprisingly, he prefers to draw a veil over this part of his life. Due to the families poverty he was unable to take up a place at Norwich University to read for a degree in interpretive dance with a credit in underwater demolition and was forced to look for paid work.
He drifted into a life of casual jobs on the fringes of society becoming amongst other things, a bouncer for Mothercare, a stunt double for Ronnie Corbett and a draught excluder to an aristocratic family. Tired of seemingly getting nowhere he decided like so many young men before and since to join the Army.
Sadly, this was less than successful too. He applied to join the SAS but was rejected on the grounds of being too rough. He spent the rest of his career in the Army painting coal white, cutting grass with nail clippers or polishing the parade ground with a toothbrush.
However, his time in the Army was not entirely wasted. It did enable him to develop a very impressive ability to hold a number of coins between clenched buttocks, an ability he was to go on and demonstrate to his brand new and very grand employer the first time they met. It has taken ten years for him to be assimilated back into polite society.
As part of his rehabilitation, he was enlisted to act in the role of support vehicle and part time pillion. Due to the engineering abilities of one of the tour party, he was only to act in the former role on this tour. Hence we were perhaps a little surprised when he insisted henceforth on wearing leathers and a crash helmet at dinner and feeding himself through the open visor.
bearThe Bear
The Bear, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, is a riddle, wrapped in an enigma inside a mystery. No one can remember a time when he wasn’t around though neither can anyone remember buying him or indeed admit to owning him. He appears to consist of the same material as that from which old men’s trousers are made and I seem to recall that every time he was retrieved from the toy box, he was found in compromising positions with the more attractive dolls.
How he became a member of the tour party is a complete mystery.
To paraphrase the faintly ridiculous Jeremy Clarkson “Some say he is an African Fetish Object, some say he is a minor Royal disowned by the family, all we know is he’s called the Bear”. No one knows how he got into the luggage. All that can be said with certainty is that when Max came to unpack, there he was.
The rest of the tour party took to him instantly and he is now a fixture on any future tours. In many ways, he is the ideal travelling companion. He is cheap to look after, he does not burden you with his outrageous opinions, is content to ride pillion and does not suffer from wind.
It is the responsibility of the current Bear Fondler (for thus he is henceforth styled) to ensure his attendance on the pain of suffering huge fines and/or ritual humiliation. Are you listening Bill?