Klunkerz

While everybody's off having fun, on their bikes, and I'm sitting here, waiting to go to work. I started thinking about the first time I got into bikes. Not 1989, when I got my first Mountain Bike, but about 1977, just after the skateboard thing was dying out.

Me and Ste built ourselves a couple of cool bikes. Ste's was his dad's Raleigh Wayfarer with the biggest pair of cow horn handlebars, in the world. Mine was some little 20 inch wheeled thing which i found dumped in the back entry. I took it home and sprayed it Ford Escort Lime Green. I put the rear wheel from my Raleigh Chopper on it and my chopper handlebars. We used to ride them for miles. We took em into Liverpool town centre and had riding in places we shouldn't have. I particularly remember riding down the escalators in Lime Street Station and then through the underpass to St Georges Hall. We rode up and down the famous steps and then proceeded to head for the Pier Head. There was an enclosed footbridge, across The Strand at Brunswick Street. We spent a long time there. . . . . there were escalators at one end and we just rode up and down them, all day.

We were limited to where we could ride them, only because we were 13 and 14 and obviously couldn't travel anywhere by car. But in a way we were mountain bikers, even then.

I remember reading Motocross Action a couple of years later (when I had left school and was working), and there was this piece in it about Mountain Biking the new craze. There was a picture of a bike that looked remarkably like Ste's Wayfarer. Mountain Biking was being born, But now I was "Too Old" to be doing that stuff. It took me another 10 years before I was (im)mature enough , to take the plunge and get myself a bike again. I wish I'd done it earlier.

A couple of nights ago, Ste put me on to this film that has just been released on DVD "Klunkerz" It's a documentary about the birth of the mountain bike in California. But it was happening all-over the world at the same time.

I'm sure we invented the mountain bike in the UK :)