On the Run

I keep meeting former scooterboys in Sideburn world. Dyed in the wool 'bikers' sneer at the scooterist, screw them. Some of the most hardcore riders I've ever met went everywhere on 10in wheels. My time doing the scooter runs in the late-80s and early 90s were some of the most memorable trips I ever did, because they were the first ones.

Friday off work, meet Col at Ferrybridge at 6am and ride, at 58mph, up to 350 miles away. Put up the tent, go to the 'do', back in the tent, fettle the scooter on Saturday (in a sometimes vain attempt to ensure it would get me home), mooch around the site, pub, tent, home on Sunday morning. Some of my mates from then are still doing it now, 25 years later. As many as 5000 would turn up some weekends. Inter-club fights, the Calverton Hornets taking on the nazi skins, would add spice.
I was talking to my mate Dave the other night, another former scooter rider, and it reminded me of a weird period when some of the hardest young nutcases in Britain would turn up on rallies on scooters. It was a time when a lanky lunk in a grass skirt and flat top, riding a 125cc hairdryer on L plates was a genuinely scary geezer (to the outside world, anyway).
Some scooter clubs seemed to be made up almost solely of football hooligans (the Cardiff Cougars). It seems barely believable now, because the scooter is used in coffee adverts and all sorts of other 'media' and it's seen as either a design classic, commuter tool (something it always was) or urban prop.
Good times. Nothing like that will ever happen again. Below, a song for all the 1980s scooter boys. G