Chez Spud

Looking good, looking fine, looking a leeeetle bit like something out of ZZ Top? [hums] She’s got legs, she knows how to use them [/hums]……come on, join in, singalongaspud.

I used to be a biker, in the very broadest sense of the word. In other words I had a motorbike, well a scooter, oh go on I admit it…it was a moped. She was yellow and white, a Yamaha Pasola, with a nasty white top box (adorned with my ‘Yuck! Your disgusting fur coat’ and anti-vivisection stickers – forgive me, it was the 80s) and a whole 49cc of an engine. Top speed? 38mph, downhill, on a good day and with the wind behind me.

Ah how I loved loved LOVED that moped, Speedy was her name. When I turned 16 I mithered my parents to buy me a moped but they were having none of it. Fast forward a few months and, on my return from a trip, my Dad told me he had a surprise for me in the garden. And it was Speedy! She was second hand and was a heap when he bought her, so he lovingly brought her back to life while I’d been away. Isn’t that the best surprise ever?

Moustache has slipped. Damn, that is ALWAYS happening to me...

Speedy meant FREEDOM. All of a sudden I was able to go where I wanted, when I wanted. To school and back, to the various choirs and orchestras I played with, to friends, to boyfriends…or just out and about on my moped for the sheer joy of being able to do so. Life on the open road, nothing can beat it. My Dad claims he could hear me approaching from about half a mile away from the house, due the the high speed I insisted on riding at and the rather strained note of the 49cc engine as a results. Kind of “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’

When I look back I think my parents must have been so cool to let me on the roads on a moped at the age of 16 – I certainly won’t be letting my boys do the same until they are, oooh, say…48? This was in the Stone Age when there were no mobile phones, so they regularly had no idea where I was or when I was coming back, for hours and hours at a time. No way of calling if I was in trouble or broken down for example.

Me and Speedy sped around Somerset for a couple of years until I went to university, at which point she went to the Big Scrapyard in the Sky. She’d taken to cutting out for no reason after a couple of miles, just sheer laziness I think.

But mostly we had a happy relationship, I fell off her a couple of times but nothing spectacular and I ran out of petrol once. I had to push her home and I stomped in to the house in a rage and shouted at my Dad, “Speedy is BROKEN!”. But, turns out, that needle thing…when it’s on red…that’s when you’re supposed to put petrol in.

How do you like my biker beard, blowing in the wind? Quite natty I think, although it’s given me a hell of rash. Like shaving rash in fact. Note that it has fake lips attached, those are not – I repeat NOT – my own lips. Since I have thin, evil mean lips as previously discussed.

[hums] she’s never begs, she knows how to choose them [/hums]

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