We couldnât afford a chopper.
Indeed, youâd be fairly confident of coming off best in a collision with anything smaller than a mark 2 escort on your grifter or chopper, serious bikes indeed. Just dug out one of my favourite t shirts, pardon the wrinkles
The hipster cunts nowadays wouldnât be able to ride a Grifter bike. It took a serious amout of effort to get going, even with gears. 
I always remember the saddle on the Grifter, serious comfort.
Actually, now that I think about it, I had my brotherâs old triumph. It was stolen from me when I left it outside the snooker club. I think the tinkers took it.
Tinkers were always number 1 suspects in bike thefts.
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Did you lock it?
Course not. Left it leaning against the outer wall of the hall. My own fault really.
My brother had a Chopper stolen from him outside Douglas library in Cork, less than a week old, fuckit that was a bad day, Iâd say he cried the whole way home.
your auld fella sounds like a sound man, he wasnt afraid of a bit of graft anyway.
i remember Charles Mitchel reading the news one night, something on it about some chap who had hijacked a plane above in dublin and was going to blow it up unless the Pope released the third secret of Fatima. i remember thinking dont give it to the dirty little cunt, let him blow the fucking thing up if he wants. we had a black and white at the time. i have very vivid memories. the auld lad and the mother then having a row in the kitchen. the mother was mashing spuds and frying a few eggs. there was holy murder inside there. teapots being fucked across the room and so on. a good bit of damage was done. the older brother closed the door and let them at it. a lot of turmoil for young lads of 10/12 and the auld lad fucked off out the back door with the mother bawling crying as she tidied the place up and put the dinner out.
that was standard back then. marriages were under serious pressure. i rememeber later that evening the auld lad arrived back with a 2 litre bottle of cidona, id never tasted it before it was unreal.
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That wasnât standard back then but it is very telling from what little I know about you.
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You could get locks fitted on the back wheel of a bike. A little metal bar would spring across through the spokes and the job was oxo. Or the plastic combination locks. Infallible.
how do you know it wasnt standard? it was an utterly shit time to be alive
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It was a plastic combination lock he had, was cut with a wire cutter and left on the floor.
But would that not damage the cornflakes reflectors?
When was that. Iâd never known one of those locks to fail
It was a great time to be alive. Mightnât have been as good as the 60s but it was better than the 40s and 50s. And we knew no better. Itâs only looking back you realize how tough it was.
The 80âs were fucking brilliant times to grow up. Loads of new gadgets, new cars, big colour TVs, foreign holidays on planes, money flying around everywhere. The 70âs appear very bleak compared to it.
Most of the above mentioned stuff was 70s gear.
There was some difference between the âhavesâ and the âhave notsâ back in the 70s and 80s.
Young lads going around in proper poverty and other lads had everything, the discrimination in schools and clubs etc that went on back then still maddens me.
The difference is not so apparent nowadays with the emergence of our welfare state.
A family may never work nowadays and still have the best of technology and holidays etc, back in the 70s if you didnât work you had literally fuck all. ( lots of lower paid workers havenât a lot either ).
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If you could afford it. [quote=âMatty_Hislop, post:900, topic:20664, full:trueâ]
The 80âs were fucking brilliant times to grow up. Loads of new gadgets, new cars, big colour TVs, foreign holidays on planes, money flying around everywhere. The 70âs appear very bleak compared to it.
[/quote]
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