Monday 14 December 2015

It's all fun, until someone loses a bollock.......

Wee cheerful post this.

Growing up in Belfast in the early 80s, was actually pretty cool, sure you got frisked in town, even a kid like me, but in general it was actually all right, mainly because when you're seven years old, you can't really comprehend what all the crap on the telly is all about.  Personally I just wanted to grow up to be a truck driver, albeit one who went to work looking like Adam Ant. Back then, the only people who had computers were banks and offices and only very posh kids had Atari games consoles, for the rest of us, our entertainment was our bicycles.

Back in '82, nearly everybody  round my way rode Raleighs, mainly because there was a Raleigh dealer round the corner, quite a few came from a Littlewoods book, 26 weeks at so much per week. And the main two bikes were the Chopper and the Grifter. The Chopper was, and still is, a design classic, but I never really liked them that much, mainly although in 1982 I was a bigger 7yo, I was still 7yo, and the Chopper was a bit on the big side, there was a smaller version, called a Tomahawk that wasn't as well equipped and IIRC came in a horrendous orange colour. I was firmly in the Grifter camp, Grifters were probably the beginning of my love affair with heavy machinery, the tubing of the frame seemed to come from decommissioned naval gun barrels, it had 3 gears, mudguards, a strange foam seat and tyre that sounded like an army Saracen.  Light and agile, they were not, but, they had been in production for 6 years and were showing their age, the Chopper had been about from the late 60s and by 1982 was practically antique.

About this time, BMX bikes started being sold over here, Eddie Kidd was jumping stuff on a motorbike and The Fall Guy was on telly every Thursday night and in every young boy is a daredevil waiting to get out, and eventually one of our little clique got a BMX. Soon we were building ramps and jumping off them, fine on a BMX but not so good for the rest of us. The ramps got higher and higher and the jumps got longer and longer, eventually we were getting up to about the height of a car, ok for the BMX kiddies, less so on a Grifter! A BMX would fly off the end of the ramp, a Grifter just plummets. Eventually the curvy forks on the Grifter started curving more and more and pretty soon, it was decreed that she was dead.

My £100 bike was knackered, but fortunately, Mother dearest shelled out for a BMX for me, but that's another story....

 And the title of this piece? There was a chap, we'll call him DJ, who was the big brother of one of the guys in our group, who could wheelie a Chopper, one day he has happily wheelieing away when the front wheel fell out. There has never been a mightier struggle than DJ trying to keep the wheel from coming down, but gravity won and he was hurled over the bars, catching his undercarriage in the process.

We don't know if he actually lost a bollock, but that was the story, although he was known and "One Hung Lo" from that moment on.

Poor sod!

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