Boy On a Bike

These went through the scanner a bit ago too. Taken in 1967 these show me as a spotty 13 year old, voice just breaking, eyes starting to go blurred but still before I admitted I needed glasses at age 15.

Here I'm showing fine sporting form with my racing bike with Sturmey Archer 3-speed gearing. I think the bike had gears too... My jeans are far too long for my legs but Mum hadn't mastered the art of cutting them off and ripped jeans were still a fashion faux-pas so there are horrendously large turn-ups in evidence here!

I'm standing outside our house (which is behind the camera so you can't see it). We lived then in a village called Milnrow, between Rochdale and Shaw which, at the time of this photo, were still officially in Lancashire rather than some post 1974 made-up area called Greater Manchester.

The chap who lived opposite was called Norman and drove a ten-year-old Ford Anglia with a stick on anti-mist panel on the rear window. This worked on the double glazing theory except that if the glue was missing from any point around the edge of the panel then the panel used to mist up on the inside where you couldn't wipe it...

This one shows me standing in the local park, Stanney Brook park, named after Stanney Brook, the small gurgling stream that flowed through this part of the park on the right of the photo. We would go down trying to entice tiddlers into empty jam jars.

Sometimes we would play at rolling down the slope behind me in the photo until we felt sick, in some cases unfortunately meaning that we would feed the fish in the stream... 13... Such an awkward age for a lad in those days...

The park is seen in the distance in this shot which was taken from the back of the houses at the top of the road. We were on the edge of this little estate of bungalows and therefore had lots of spare rough ground we could play on.

I sent a couple of the photos to the Ladies-Over-The-Water via one of our regular emails.

The other two must have been too busy laughing but I got a comment back from Evy that said "I just love your photos John. You were really quite a handsome guy."

Sigh... "were"... past tense... and is that a note of surprise I read into it? Even bigger sigh...

Large versions of the photos: Oh come on, give over... Apart from anything else they were taken on a Kodak Instamatic so are not exactly great quality!