Lovely childhood bicycle story courtesy of the Saturday Rage.
absolutely gorgeous
*****************************
Spinning life's pedal delights
http://www.theage.com.au/news/books...1148524866871.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
May 27, 2006
Stephen Lacey's love affair with bicycles started aged four with a blue Cyclops complete with handlebar streamers.
Be it a Speedwell Dragster, Cyclops, English Raleigh racer or mountain bike, the two-wheeled escape to independence has punctuated life, writes Stephen Lacey.
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets - Christopher Morley
MY FIRST MODE OF transport wasn't actually a bicycle at all. It was a little red fire engine that you sat on and propelled with your feet. I rode it until the black plastic wheels were worn down to the size of cotton reels, allowing the bottom of the engine to scrape along the footpath, making a sound akin to two skeletons having a shag on a tin roof (as my grandfather liked to say).
We lived in Umina, near Gosford, in the 1960s. In a tiny fibro house attached to the rear of a pharmacy. My world was the house, its yard and the few shops around the corner where I would occasionally venture.
The last of these shops was Hare's Bicycle Shop. From the first time I saw them, I was enamoured with the gleaming speed machines. And so was the proprietor, Tom Hare, who would display his cycles proudly on the footpath out the front, polishing them with Mr Sheen and lining them up, side by side, for all to admire.
One morning I came chafing along that path in West Street on my little red fire engine and realised for the first time the significance of brakes. I was heading for Mr Hare's impressive display of bicycles, with no way of stopping (OK, so I probably could have put my foot down but I didn't want to stub my toe).
It was strange the way they fell; almost in slow motion. This was the era when the term domino effect was in parlance, and that was a pretty apt way to describe the manner in which every one of Mr Hare's machines clattered to the ground.
I seem to recall Mr Hare sprinting from his shop, putting his hands up to his face like Munch's The Scream, then bellowing something about me being a ******* of a kid and that my parents should have more control over me.
I didn't know it then, but this was to be the harbinger of many accidents involving bicycles and brakes.
Several years would pass until I would have a bicycle of my own (in the interim I had a sky blue Dinky. I still have it, waiting for the day I have bastards of kids of my own).
It was Christmas morning 1967. I'd just turned four years old. By that time we had moved back with my Nanna and Pop at Point Clare, near Gosford. I loved Christmas. As the only child in an extended working class family of veranda dwellers, it meant plenty of presents.
This particular year my grandparents bought me a drum set. When I awoke Christmas morning it was sitting there under the tree (a scrub oak covered in tinsel). How deceptively peaceful that drum set looked in the pink light of dawn. How stupid were my grandparents to believe it would remain so serene.
However, the main present was still waiting for me. There it was, covered by a blanket in the far corner of the room. I removed the blanket and gasped. It was a blue Cyclops bicycle with white bar grips, from which sprouted coloured streamers.
Thankfully, it also had training wheels. My father carried it out to the backyard and I rode it gingerly around on the concrete slab beneath the Hills hoist. As the day wore on and my uncles became louder and soaked in Flag Ale, they egged me on to ride further field.
I felt the push in my back, as Uncle Les launched me off. It was a terrifying experience. Unable to stop, I shot across the yard, bouncing over the lawn into the backyard of our neighbour, Miss Turton. My uncles roared laughing. My father also laughed, then seeing my predicament, started screaming something about a back pedal brake. Huh?
My journey was abruptly terminated by Miss Turton's dunny wall. The front wheel ploughed right through the fibro. I rather like to imagine I left behind a hole in the wall, shaped exactly like me on a bike. But, as that only happened in Looney Tunes cartoons, that's probably not the case.
However, the reality was no less amusing. You see, Miss Turton happened to be using her dunny at the moment of impact. And although the shock almost killed the poor woman, I suppose it was an effective cure for her chronic constipation.
Despite the fact that my life as a cyclist didn't start all too well, I came to love that bicycle. It was my freedom. The first rite of passage was the day the training wheels came off and I discovered the magic that is balance.
By this time my world had expanded to include the entire villages of Point Clare, and Tascott, which the bike allowed me to explore at length. Once I even packed a Vegemite sandwich and, with my best friend Richard Clayton Perry, cycled all the way to Woy Woy and back, without anybody noticing we were missing.
That bike served me well. And I didn't get another until I was about 12, by which time the old Cyclops was looking a tad small beneath me.
The new bike was a poo-brown Speedwell Dragster. It had a three-speed T-bar gear shift, chrome sissy bar and purple-glitter, banana seat. This was 1976 after all.
That dragster became my mode of getting to high school. By this stage we'd moved back to Umina and my parents had bought their first house.
To try and fit in with the other kids, I joined a local dragster gang. My nickname in the gang was "Brains". It was less to do with my IQ, and more about the fact that I wore ridiculously large, black horn-rimmed glasses, with Coke-bottle lenses.
Our gang's objective was to terrorise the local neighbourhood, which we did by riding around with cardboard pegged in our spokes, making them sound like motorbikes (well, sort of). I'm sure our cunning ruse had old aged pensioners shaking in their Grosbies, behind their venetian blinds.
That dragster was with me when I had my first kiss. The event took place in a stormwater pipe beneath a new housing estate at Woy Woy (I never claimed to be a romantic). The girl told me later that she only kissed me because my bike was really cool. And apparently my mouth had a motion reminiscent of a Victa.
I was sitting on that dragster the afternoon when my parents told me that my grandmother had died. I went on a long, long, ride and didn't come home until nightfall.
When I turned 15, my father gave me a shiny red English Raleigh racing cycle. Unlike their cars, English bicycles had a reputation for being reliable and wellbuilt.
It was the loveliest bike in the district. I pedalled it all over the Central Coast, even venturing out to Avoca and Terrigal.
I was riding through the main street of Umina one morning, when the front brakes locked up and I was flung to the road, shoulder first, snapping my collarbone. Lying there in pain, a mate dragged me out of the way of a bus, just in time.
Twelve months later I broke the same collarbone again. I'd been carrying a beach bag over my arm. It fell into the spokes. The bike stopped dead. I continued sailing over the handlebars. End of story.
I didn't ride a bike again for years. Except for a brief stint at Cornell University in the US, where some friends gave me a stolen bike. I painted it a different colour and used it to get around the campus, feeling rather smug.
Then at 35 I had the first (of many) midlife crisis. Strangely, what triggered it off was a visit to the museum at the MCG. Seeing the memorabilia of all my old heroes; Lillee, Thomson, Doug Walters, I was suddenly hit with the realisation that no matter how good I became at any sport (with the possible exception of darts or lawn bowls), I would never reach the sporting glory of these blokes.
It wasn't even as if sport had played a major part in my life. It was just that suddenly there were doors beginning to close and I was powerless to open them again.
So I did what any 35-year-old man would do in the same situation. I got on a bicycle and cycled 4200 kilometres, from Gosford to Cottesloe Beach, Perth. This only made me more depressed because at the end of my epic all I could think about was what to do with the rest of my meaningless existence.
Somehow I felt sure it would also involve a bicycle. And it has. I now own a beautiful blue mountain bike, which I use to ride the local forest trails. It has also taken me across the heart of Tasmania, and through the Simpson Desert (with former footballer turned actor Ian Roberts, but that's another story). Sure, I'm still crashing and hurting myself, but at least I can pick myself up and smile about it.
And my bikes in the future? Will I be one of those old blokes who cycles down to the corner store on their rattly Malvern Star to get the bread and newspaper?
Maybe I won't even own a bike at all.
Perhaps it will be a motorised buggy with a big orange flag on the back of it?
Or a Zimmer frame with wheels?
Or maybe it will be the bike I ride in heaven.
absolutely gorgeous *****************************
Spinning life's pedal delights
http://www.theage.com.au/news/books...1148524866871.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
May 27, 2006
Stephen Lacey's love affair with bicycles started aged four with a blue Cyclops complete with handlebar streamers.
Be it a Speedwell Dragster, Cyclops, English Raleigh racer or mountain bike, the two-wheeled escape to independence has punctuated life, writes Stephen Lacey.
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets - Christopher Morley
MY FIRST MODE OF transport wasn't actually a bicycle at all. It was a little red fire engine that you sat on and propelled with your feet. I rode it until the black plastic wheels were worn down to the size of cotton reels, allowing the bottom of the engine to scrape along the footpath, making a sound akin to two skeletons having a shag on a tin roof (as my grandfather liked to say).
We lived in Umina, near Gosford, in the 1960s. In a tiny fibro house attached to the rear of a pharmacy. My world was the house, its yard and the few shops around the corner where I would occasionally venture.
The last of these shops was Hare's Bicycle Shop. From the first time I saw them, I was enamoured with the gleaming speed machines. And so was the proprietor, Tom Hare, who would display his cycles proudly on the footpath out the front, polishing them with Mr Sheen and lining them up, side by side, for all to admire.
One morning I came chafing along that path in West Street on my little red fire engine and realised for the first time the significance of brakes. I was heading for Mr Hare's impressive display of bicycles, with no way of stopping (OK, so I probably could have put my foot down but I didn't want to stub my toe).
It was strange the way they fell; almost in slow motion. This was the era when the term domino effect was in parlance, and that was a pretty apt way to describe the manner in which every one of Mr Hare's machines clattered to the ground.
I seem to recall Mr Hare sprinting from his shop, putting his hands up to his face like Munch's The Scream, then bellowing something about me being a ******* of a kid and that my parents should have more control over me.
I didn't know it then, but this was to be the harbinger of many accidents involving bicycles and brakes.
Several years would pass until I would have a bicycle of my own (in the interim I had a sky blue Dinky. I still have it, waiting for the day I have bastards of kids of my own).
It was Christmas morning 1967. I'd just turned four years old. By that time we had moved back with my Nanna and Pop at Point Clare, near Gosford. I loved Christmas. As the only child in an extended working class family of veranda dwellers, it meant plenty of presents.
This particular year my grandparents bought me a drum set. When I awoke Christmas morning it was sitting there under the tree (a scrub oak covered in tinsel). How deceptively peaceful that drum set looked in the pink light of dawn. How stupid were my grandparents to believe it would remain so serene.
However, the main present was still waiting for me. There it was, covered by a blanket in the far corner of the room. I removed the blanket and gasped. It was a blue Cyclops bicycle with white bar grips, from which sprouted coloured streamers.
Thankfully, it also had training wheels. My father carried it out to the backyard and I rode it gingerly around on the concrete slab beneath the Hills hoist. As the day wore on and my uncles became louder and soaked in Flag Ale, they egged me on to ride further field.
I felt the push in my back, as Uncle Les launched me off. It was a terrifying experience. Unable to stop, I shot across the yard, bouncing over the lawn into the backyard of our neighbour, Miss Turton. My uncles roared laughing. My father also laughed, then seeing my predicament, started screaming something about a back pedal brake. Huh?
My journey was abruptly terminated by Miss Turton's dunny wall. The front wheel ploughed right through the fibro. I rather like to imagine I left behind a hole in the wall, shaped exactly like me on a bike. But, as that only happened in Looney Tunes cartoons, that's probably not the case.
However, the reality was no less amusing. You see, Miss Turton happened to be using her dunny at the moment of impact. And although the shock almost killed the poor woman, I suppose it was an effective cure for her chronic constipation.
Despite the fact that my life as a cyclist didn't start all too well, I came to love that bicycle. It was my freedom. The first rite of passage was the day the training wheels came off and I discovered the magic that is balance.
By this time my world had expanded to include the entire villages of Point Clare, and Tascott, which the bike allowed me to explore at length. Once I even packed a Vegemite sandwich and, with my best friend Richard Clayton Perry, cycled all the way to Woy Woy and back, without anybody noticing we were missing.
That bike served me well. And I didn't get another until I was about 12, by which time the old Cyclops was looking a tad small beneath me.
The new bike was a poo-brown Speedwell Dragster. It had a three-speed T-bar gear shift, chrome sissy bar and purple-glitter, banana seat. This was 1976 after all.
That dragster became my mode of getting to high school. By this stage we'd moved back to Umina and my parents had bought their first house.
To try and fit in with the other kids, I joined a local dragster gang. My nickname in the gang was "Brains". It was less to do with my IQ, and more about the fact that I wore ridiculously large, black horn-rimmed glasses, with Coke-bottle lenses.
Our gang's objective was to terrorise the local neighbourhood, which we did by riding around with cardboard pegged in our spokes, making them sound like motorbikes (well, sort of). I'm sure our cunning ruse had old aged pensioners shaking in their Grosbies, behind their venetian blinds.
That dragster was with me when I had my first kiss. The event took place in a stormwater pipe beneath a new housing estate at Woy Woy (I never claimed to be a romantic). The girl told me later that she only kissed me because my bike was really cool. And apparently my mouth had a motion reminiscent of a Victa.
I was sitting on that dragster the afternoon when my parents told me that my grandmother had died. I went on a long, long, ride and didn't come home until nightfall.
When I turned 15, my father gave me a shiny red English Raleigh racing cycle. Unlike their cars, English bicycles had a reputation for being reliable and wellbuilt.
It was the loveliest bike in the district. I pedalled it all over the Central Coast, even venturing out to Avoca and Terrigal.
I was riding through the main street of Umina one morning, when the front brakes locked up and I was flung to the road, shoulder first, snapping my collarbone. Lying there in pain, a mate dragged me out of the way of a bus, just in time.
Twelve months later I broke the same collarbone again. I'd been carrying a beach bag over my arm. It fell into the spokes. The bike stopped dead. I continued sailing over the handlebars. End of story.
I didn't ride a bike again for years. Except for a brief stint at Cornell University in the US, where some friends gave me a stolen bike. I painted it a different colour and used it to get around the campus, feeling rather smug.
Then at 35 I had the first (of many) midlife crisis. Strangely, what triggered it off was a visit to the museum at the MCG. Seeing the memorabilia of all my old heroes; Lillee, Thomson, Doug Walters, I was suddenly hit with the realisation that no matter how good I became at any sport (with the possible exception of darts or lawn bowls), I would never reach the sporting glory of these blokes.
It wasn't even as if sport had played a major part in my life. It was just that suddenly there were doors beginning to close and I was powerless to open them again.
So I did what any 35-year-old man would do in the same situation. I got on a bicycle and cycled 4200 kilometres, from Gosford to Cottesloe Beach, Perth. This only made me more depressed because at the end of my epic all I could think about was what to do with the rest of my meaningless existence.
Somehow I felt sure it would also involve a bicycle. And it has. I now own a beautiful blue mountain bike, which I use to ride the local forest trails. It has also taken me across the heart of Tasmania, and through the Simpson Desert (with former footballer turned actor Ian Roberts, but that's another story). Sure, I'm still crashing and hurting myself, but at least I can pick myself up and smile about it.
And my bikes in the future? Will I be one of those old blokes who cycles down to the corner store on their rattly Malvern Star to get the bread and newspaper?
Maybe I won't even own a bike at all.
Perhaps it will be a motorised buggy with a big orange flag on the back of it?
Or a Zimmer frame with wheels?
Or maybe it will be the bike I ride in heaven.
