Steve Parrish

I'm fresh back from the South African Classic TT races and Christ, it's still bloody raining over here.

I thought it might have stopped by now, but we're still underwater and it's snowing as I'm writing this. I was fortunate enough to spend the last three weeks in South Africa and the weather was fantastic; it's a shame it wasn't two months, to be honest, but hey-ho. The first week was spent holidaying and acclimatising (of course) and catching up with a very good.

friend over there. We had a day out on his boat, and then we drove through the Kruger National Park to take a look at the elephants and giraffes and all those kind of things - we didn't have any close encounters with lions, so that was a perk.

We then headed over to the first racetrack, which was called East London, and that all went to plan and ran very smoothly. I was riding Steve Wheatman's Suzuki RG500 in the F4 class, which is supposed to be a demonstration class, in fairness, but it ended up turning into racing, as I'm sure you can imagine.