Don't Let Go!

My brother, three years my junior, was sometimes the worst thing that ever happened to me and sometimes the best. Either way, having a younger sibling certainly gave me access to several amusing anecdotes that I could use in my writing! (Provided, of course, that he doesn't find out about it.)

One of these was the much-aired family dinner-party story, which my dad hauls out every time we have a meal with someone outside the immediate family ring. It concerns one of those generic childhood moments: learning to ride a bike.

I'm told, although don't remember, that I learnt to ride at about 5 years old, in a park in the north of Scotland (bizarre kind of place since we live in England). My brother, however, was more logical and his first forays into green transportation methods was in the local park where we lived until he was about eight.

I do remember those trips to the park. We would load up the car with our bikes (no mean feat with four people, two bikes and a Peugeot 205) and drive to the park, then unload everything with a pop and a clang of metal, and I would be set loose to trundle round the pathways and try to avoid little old ladies with their dogs.

At some point while this was happening, my parents were busy trying to teach my brother to ride my cast-off unisex bike.

Somewhat irrelevant point: until I was fifteen, my bikes were all French, and without exception blue. The latter was to ensure that Xander would accept them when I outgrew them, and the former seemingly to confuse me when I finally got a British bike and discovered the brakes were backwards.

I'm very disappointed that I wasn't there to witness this historical moment, but I've heard about it many times. My dad has dinner guests in hoots of laughter (or at the very least with polite smiles fixed firmly in place) as he tells them of how he stood and watched his small son careering down the grass slope pedalling furiously, shouting "Don't let go, Dad, don't let go!", much to the amusement of the spectators.

When said small son looked round and saw that his dad had indeed let go, he promptly fell off the bike and refused to try again for several months.

Thankfully (or perhaps not, actually) he did try again and we now regularly load the significantly larger bikes onto the back of our van and drive to the Lakes, to Whitby or to some similarly water-endowed town to spend a week pootling around with polystyrene colanders on our heads and holding up traffic as we turn right at the traffic lights while everyone else is trying to go left.

Ah well, it's a clean and enjoyable way of getting places and there's one thing that certainly and very luckily is true: you never forget.