7. ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME...SKATEBOARD

The absolute very first time I tried to skateboard was in the early 80s, several years after the craze had fizzled out. I knew I’d be crap at it. I’ve got an appalling sense of balance and struggle to walk in a straight line (as I’ve tried to explain to several police officers over the years) let alone do it standing on a plank of wood.

I gave it a go outside my house while I was still at school. This was a time when all kids used to play on the street without fear of being run over or molested (well, OK, run over at least). Playing outside was nothing to do with fresh air or exercise but because a) there was nothing to do indoors after 'Why Don’t You' finished and b) You could hear Mr Softee coming more clearly if you were outside (that’s the ice cream van not the next door neighbour).

We lived on a road which commuters tended to use as a cut-through and my father, who had to back out onto it every morning on his way to work, constantly complained that it was ‘like Piccadilly Circus out there’. I’m not sure if Dad had been to Piccadilly Circus (he wasn’t a big theatre fan) let alone drive round it but it didn’t seem a fair comparison with a sleepy market town with equally sleepy car drivers who didn't need speed cameras, sleeping policemen or radar guns to persuade them to pootle along at least 15 mph below the speed limit.

It wasn’t as though there was much of a school run either. Normally, the only kids who travelled to school in a car were ones who’d passed their test and were driving themselves. All the local kids were made to walk or cycle. It’s just what you did in the 70s and 80s unless you lived at least 10 miles away, didn’t own a bicycle or had lost the use of your legs. Both of them.

I lived a mile away from my primary school and had walked there from the age of 7. My mum took me outside one morning, strapped my satchel onto my back, showed me the lamppost where it was safe to cross the road and pointed in the vague direction of the creepy passageway I was supposed to negotiate every morning and night (“you might want to run at night”). If I made it through, it was simply a case of "following my nose" after that. And, if I had an uncle (which I didn’t), he would be called Bob according to my mother, which hinted at murkier family mysteries than I had imagined up until then.

Over the next 4 years, I had to run the gauntlet of that creepy passageway twice a day, 5 days a week through pouring rain (“put your hood up”), blazing sunshine (“take your hood down”) and snowstorms (“don't worry about your hood but wear something bright in case we have to dig you out”). If my parents knew what paedophiles were, they certainly thought they didn’t exist outside Leicester or Nottingham and, when it came to child abductions, these must have been entirely the fault of kids who foolishly failed to follow their noses once they’d emerged from creepy passageways, regardless of the name of their uncle.

My secondary school was a further mile away so, at the age of 11, I was given the option to walk or take my brother’s old bike, the one with the dodgy front brakes. I'd have preferred a Raleigh Chopper but buying new stuff in the 70s and 80s was such a lengthy ordeal - local shops holding no stock and order times of several months - that most people didn't bother. Certainly my parents didn't. Electric guitar? No. Leather jacket? No. Some fuzzy felt and another airfix model kit? Only if it was my birthday and I'd asked for them 6 months earlier to allow the toy shop to order them in time. The guy who'd go on to found Amazon is the same age as me so I can only assume lead times in the States in those days were much the same as the UK.

So, I opted for my brother's bike and Mum watched me strap my satchel onto my back, pointed in the vague direction of the main road and waved me goodbye. At that stage, I hadn’t learned to ride a bike so the first few journeys were a little hairy. This lack of experience was made worse by the steep hill down to the main road where I had to turn left and merge into the traffic converging on the town from the dual carriageway. I was usually doing 80-100 mph by the time I reached the bottom, despite frantically squeezing the front brakes which were proving stubbornly ineffective.

Although I only had to manoeuvre past the odd vehicle as I hurtled down the hill, it was a different story when I swerved into the constant flow of cars at the bottom, praying (and I was a budding atheist so you'll get a sense of how bad the situation was) that I’d be lucky enough to slot into one of the wafer-thin gaps in the traffic.

With a bit of practice and once I realised that the front brakes made little to no difference, I used to take the bend without holding onto the handlebars. I’m not kidding. Why on earth I worried about my kids getting hurt on their way up the school steps once I’d dropped them off 10 feet away is beyond me. Different times.

Anyway, I’ve gone on such a lengthy tangent that I thought I was supposed to be writing about hitchhiking but I’ll leave that for a later story and return, slightly reluctantly, to skateboarding instead.

To be honest, there’s not much more to say. I borrowed someone’s board (no one my age was using them anymore by the time I plucked up the courage to give it a go) and tried to stand up on it four or five times, failing miserably on each occasion. The last I saw of it was as it hurtled, rider-less, down the hill and, missing a wafer-thin gap in the traffic by a whisker, disappeared under the wheels of a Vauxhall Viva heading into town.

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Next: ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME......A PROPER JOB (NOT A PAPER ROUND)