Hello

23/06/2007 by Lee.

My God, people are reading this! Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I can see that I’ve had visitors from as far afield as Japan, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Thanks for dropping in. I suspect that thanks to Pedro Moontan getting the link out on www.singletrackword.com, that some of you are cyclists.

I’ve never been one for cycling myself. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with cycling, it’s just something I’ve never really got in to as an adult. Yet, as a child the bike made the world my oyster.

There was nowhere we couldn’t go on our bikes. Hours would be spent with various polishes trying to bring up the chrome work (Duraglit seemed to work well), different methods for getting the grips on were tested, although they always ended up with trying to ignite the hairspray in the follies of youth. I lost count of the number of school trousers lost to my chain and somehow my limbs never ached, no matter how far we’d gone. Without a bike you were nothing, as you simply couldn’t get to where we were going. Where I grew up, there was no school run in the car. The back wall of my primary school was lined with bikes, often 2 deep. Yet the last time I passed my old school was a sad occassion, the days of taking the bike to school seem to have gone as there were only 2 bikes against that same wall. Today, you are more likely to run into a 4×4 around your local primary school than you are to come across a child on a bike.

As a youngster, I would leave home in the morning (by bike) and not return home until it was dark. We made up our own games, pedalled for miles and miles, and generally kept ourselves fairly fit. So rare was it to see an overweight child that I can still remember the fat kids name 24 years after I left primary school. I often came home cut and bruised, and on more than one occassion pretty bloody from having come off the bike. But I’d still be out there the next day and doing it all again. Todays children simply do not get the exercise and freedoms that they should do. Overweight kids are common place, and for many their idea of exercise is to roll down a hill with weels in their heels rather than to go and play somewhere.

So to those of you that have retained that youthful feeling of riding a bike just because you can and not because you have to, I tip my hat. Keep the youth alive inside you as long as you can.

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