Something a little different

Volunteer Riders UK

Not strictly Triumph related, although it was meant to be.

It’s 11.05am on 21 May 2020 and I find myself driving down the M11 with a Qashqai full of scrubs on my way to meet a stranger on a BP forecourt opposite Imperial War Museum Duxford. Not my usual Thursday to say the least, especially as I was expecting to do the run on my Tiger.

At the start of 2020, I signed up for a charity ride  in aid of Macmillan. Called Sunset to Sunrise with Bikers 4 Macmillan, the idea was to ride from Holyhead to Scunthorpe overnight on the shortest night of the year. You will find a link to this above. 

Sadly, some global event got in the way and it’s been postponed until June 2021. I’ll still be participating, but in the current climate, I felt the need to do something else that would still help others.

I came across a group of bikers on Facebook called VolunteerRiders UK and seeing this as an opportunity to put something back into the community, signed up as a volunteer.

This is how I found myself with a car full of bags & boxes full of PPE on its way to be distributed in London. This was just one of approximately 10 runs per week of PPE, mainly scrubs made locally by 40 volunteers, collected by a teacher in Stamford before being sent off to wherever its needed. My cargo of approximately 200 scrubs will be repeated in a couple of days’ time by someone else, to another destination & while I was picking up my load, another car pulled up to pick up another couple of bags of PPE destined to head north.

To give you some idea of the scale of the volunteer operation, there are over 3400 members, around 12 of which do nothing but organise runs across the country, who work from 8.00am to whenever they finish, often pulling 12-hour days to make sure PPE gets from the volunteers who make it to those who are in desperate need. They organise the pick up and drop off points and put volunteer riders and drivers in touch with each other for every run. Including my run, there were also runs today starting in Leicester, Stroud, Inverness, Oxford, Hereford, Wirral, well you get the idea. There was around 30 in total, not including urgent runs that were sent in on the day. A huge ask for all the volunteers, from organisers, many of whom have no logistical experience and riders/drivers some of whom are furloughed, others retired and some, like me are still working but find the time to help NHS staff get the PPE they need.

Who knows when or where my next run will be? I only hope that next time I get to ride my bike.