chapter 5: BICYCLES I HAVE KNOWN No 1.

A short break here to build tension and all that stuff as I lack the ability to suspend myself from a tall building (or similar) in this entirely text based format.

What is it about kids (and I assume that this holds true today), that whenever you provide them with something that rolls, they have a drive over which they have seemingly no control, to build a jump and direct their wheeled conveyance over it.

My first bike that I actually count as a bike, was one of those you buy your kid thinking it’s going to last them for years but that they then grow out of in about 6 months (which admittedly at the age I’m talking about often seems like years...). It was made out of solid steel and really unsolid plastic and it rusted like absolute magic if it was even on the same continental plate as any kind of moisture. Its cranks were attached directly to the front wheel tricycle style which meant if you got up any speed at all (like, say, if you were screaming down our 45 degree driveway) your legs pumped up and down like pistons. To be more precise - totally MENTAL pistons attached by crappily made linkages to an engine totally unsuitable for the kind of work being asked of it and therefore likely to explode at any moment. That, or you held them out to the side, which was handy really because if you were going that fast you were going to need your feet as brakes anyway (I love the smell of burning sandshoe in the morning. Smells like, childhood). It never got a flat tire on account of them being made of solid rubber. Or possibly asbestos. It was the 70’s.

I’m pretty sure I brutally murdered that bike by repeatedly throwing it over one of those jumps I mentioned earlier.

That, or it met a sad end in one of the dumpsters the Council used to put on street corners every couple of months in order to boost the immune systems of the nation’s children by exposing them to the various rubbish based pathogens and 50 different types of tetanus that lurked within their enticing, treasure filled depths.

I prefer to think it was the former. Better a glorious death in battle than the slow rot of the landfill. Or a glorious death in battle and THEN the slow rot of the landfill......Sucks to be the property of a primary school kid.

Ungrateful ingrates the lot of them.

NEXT: You don't have to be crazy to work here....