A short history of my bikes – part 2 (Iain)

Identical twins — perhaps as many as one in five according to the unreliable internet article I read — claim to share a special psychic connection.

Do Andrew and I share a psychic bond? No – the only time I’ve felt pain the same time as Andrew, is when we’ve accidentally crashed into each other.

The first time I noticed this lack of a special bond was in Secondary School. We both had an after school job as Paper Boys. I used Bike 2 for my round. It was a mountain bike.

We’d hang the bag of newspapers from the handlebars of our bikes. The more papers we had to deliver the harder it was to balance the bags on the bar. Monday was the worst day as we had all the large Sunday papers to deliver as well as Monday’s.

From my paper boy perspective – there should be  a special place in hell reserved for anyone who asked me to deliver The Sunday Times. It was massive and caused me problems every week!

One of my deliveries was to my primary school P.E. teacher. She was a horrible woman. In a 30 minute classes she would let the girls play for 20 minutes whilst making the boys wait against a wall. She would then let the boys on for a few minutes before stopping the class. We got virtually no exercise.

She hated the Daily Record so I made sure that whenever her first choice of paper wasn’t there that’s what she would get instead.

Unfortunately during one of Andrew’s rounds his bag caught in his wheel throwing him off the bike. He ended up lying on the street, blood everywhere.

At the moment I did feel something. It was a pang…of hunger. It was late and I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. Andrew went to hospital and I went home for my dinner.