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vin_petrolOne slightly scary aspect of my age is that it's now regularly becoming 20 years since I did certain things.
I'll never forget the summer of 1987. I had taken a "gap year" (back when very few people did) from 1986, when I finished school, to 1987, when I started University in York. I had been working during this year, for a local electronics firm, and they were going to sponsor me through University. This meant I hadn't had much free time during this year, but I had earned lots of money!
This money had been used to buy my first motorbike, a Suzuki GS125. I had taken lessons, learnt to ride, and passed my test too, so I was now a fully qualified bike rider. Passing the test meant I could carry passengers, and go on motorways.
So that summer was spent riding around on hot summer nights, visiting people, and going off to English Civil War reenactments at weekends. The sense of freedom when you get your first motor vehicle is wonderful. The GS125 did about 100 miles to the gallon (seriously!) so petrol money was never an issue.
Later that summer I became aware that the local youth theatre (which I had worked with in the past) were taking their production of Animal Farm up to the Edinburgh Fringe for a week. All the various Leicestershire youth and school theatres took over one venue for the whole festival, and took turns to put shows on for a week each. They were staying in a local theological college. It suddenly occurred to me that I could go up there too, and crash on someone's floor for a few days.
And so I decided to take my first trip to Edinburgh ... from Ashby de la Zouch in Leicestershire ... on a 125! That's 300 miles. This is the kind of trip that gets you comments of "you're mad!" To be honest, I didn't see it that way. My trusty 4-stroke could maintain 60mph for long distances, so I knew I would get there ... eventually.
And so painfully early one morning (I'm sure it was still dark) I set off for Edinburgh. It's a long ride at 60mph, or 55mph when going uphill. I think it took about seven hours, and I walked like John Wayne afterwards. When I arrived, I had all sorts of problems locating the venue and the college where people were staying. This is pre-mobile-phones, so unless you run into someone you know you're on the streets, which looked likely for me for an hour or two. Fortunately, I eventually found people, and was able to drop my stuff off and go exploring.
I had a wonderful week! I seemed to have huge amounts of disposable income at this point in time. I hadn't seen that much fringe theatre, so I just seemed to spend all my waking hours in theatres watching stuff. The youth theatre's venue was a lovely church hall, which sold food and acted as a handy meeting place for us all. We could sit around, drink tea and eat chips, and discuss what we had seen. With thirty theatre-mad teenagers running around Edinburgh, all knowing each other's tastes, you got to hear quickly about things you would like.
So I have great memories of:
* The National Theatre of Brent performing The Greatest Story Ever Told (Jim Broadbent!)
* The Mime Theatre Project doing Thunderbirds FAB. It had sold out completely by the time I got there, but a fellow thespian took pity on me and sold me her ticket. She wasn't that interested, and knew I was totally into Thunderbirds, and that I would enjoy it far more than her. I was sat on the very edge of the front row, stage right, and actually got pulled up out of my seat and used as a human shield during a a shoot out! I nearly popped with delight.
* An interesting adaptation of Bester's The Stars My Destination called In The Image Of The Beast. The plot was much the same, but all the names were changed. I hadn't read the book at the time so it wasn't till a few years later I realised how much it had, er, copied...
* Various 'of their time' productions about Nicaragua or life in Thatcher's Britain. Hey, it was the 80s!
* A stage version of the first couple of books of The Ballad of Halo Jones. What was annoying was that the day I went, chatting to the cast afterwards, it turned out Alan Moore himself had popped in to see it the previous day, then hung around afterwards chatting to people. To the young teenage Vin (steeped in 2000AD, V for Vendetta and Watchmen) this was like missing God.
Edinburgh was a lovely city. To this day, the smell of breweries, which hangs over Edinburgh, always cheers me up and makes me feel optimistic. I rode all over the city on my 125, although it's debatable if it was any quicker than walking. A small 125 can be parked in all manner of nooks and crannies, so 'official' parking spaces were rarely required. Edinburgh is nice to motorbikes anyway, and there are plenty of parking spaces. I did enjoy seeing a car parked on the motorbike spaces on George Street being ticketed though. Princes Street is lovely to ride up and down on a hot summer night, and back then bikers used to congregate at the western end to talk, as bikers do, about biker stuff. I joined them on a few nights, safe in the knowledge that although my bike was crap, the fact that I had ridden it up all the way from the Midlands was worthy of respect (or declarations of insanity).
This was also a few years before all day drinking was allowed in England, and decades before the relaxation of the eleven o'clock drinking up time. I spent a happy few days and nights taking advantage of this, to me, unusual aspect of life. I seem to recall drinking regularly in the underground gloom of Bannerman's Bar on Cowgate, which was just round the corner from the Leicestershire venue.
I'll never forget that trip. There's a lovely few years when you're young when you do lots of, to a degree, quite ordinary things for the first time, and the experiences are so much more significant because of it.
I'll never forget the summer of 1987. I had taken a "gap year" (back when very few people did) from 1986, when I finished school, to 1987, when I started University in York. I had been working during this year, for a local electronics firm, and they were going to sponsor me through University. This meant I hadn't had much free time during this year, but I had earned lots of money!
This money had been used to buy my first motorbike, a Suzuki GS125. I had taken lessons, learnt to ride, and passed my test too, so I was now a fully qualified bike rider. Passing the test meant I could carry passengers, and go on motorways.
So that summer was spent riding around on hot summer nights, visiting people, and going off to English Civil War reenactments at weekends. The sense of freedom when you get your first motor vehicle is wonderful. The GS125 did about 100 miles to the gallon (seriously!) so petrol money was never an issue.
Later that summer I became aware that the local youth theatre (which I had worked with in the past) were taking their production of Animal Farm up to the Edinburgh Fringe for a week. All the various Leicestershire youth and school theatres took over one venue for the whole festival, and took turns to put shows on for a week each. They were staying in a local theological college. It suddenly occurred to me that I could go up there too, and crash on someone's floor for a few days.
And so I decided to take my first trip to Edinburgh ... from Ashby de la Zouch in Leicestershire ... on a 125! That's 300 miles. This is the kind of trip that gets you comments of "you're mad!" To be honest, I didn't see it that way. My trusty 4-stroke could maintain 60mph for long distances, so I knew I would get there ... eventually.
And so painfully early one morning (I'm sure it was still dark) I set off for Edinburgh. It's a long ride at 60mph, or 55mph when going uphill. I think it took about seven hours, and I walked like John Wayne afterwards. When I arrived, I had all sorts of problems locating the venue and the college where people were staying. This is pre-mobile-phones, so unless you run into someone you know you're on the streets, which looked likely for me for an hour or two. Fortunately, I eventually found people, and was able to drop my stuff off and go exploring.
I had a wonderful week! I seemed to have huge amounts of disposable income at this point in time. I hadn't seen that much fringe theatre, so I just seemed to spend all my waking hours in theatres watching stuff. The youth theatre's venue was a lovely church hall, which sold food and acted as a handy meeting place for us all. We could sit around, drink tea and eat chips, and discuss what we had seen. With thirty theatre-mad teenagers running around Edinburgh, all knowing each other's tastes, you got to hear quickly about things you would like.
So I have great memories of:
* The National Theatre of Brent performing The Greatest Story Ever Told (Jim Broadbent!)
* The Mime Theatre Project doing Thunderbirds FAB. It had sold out completely by the time I got there, but a fellow thespian took pity on me and sold me her ticket. She wasn't that interested, and knew I was totally into Thunderbirds, and that I would enjoy it far more than her. I was sat on the very edge of the front row, stage right, and actually got pulled up out of my seat and used as a human shield during a a shoot out! I nearly popped with delight.
* An interesting adaptation of Bester's The Stars My Destination called In The Image Of The Beast. The plot was much the same, but all the names were changed. I hadn't read the book at the time so it wasn't till a few years later I realised how much it had, er, copied...
* Various 'of their time' productions about Nicaragua or life in Thatcher's Britain. Hey, it was the 80s!
* A stage version of the first couple of books of The Ballad of Halo Jones. What was annoying was that the day I went, chatting to the cast afterwards, it turned out Alan Moore himself had popped in to see it the previous day, then hung around afterwards chatting to people. To the young teenage Vin (steeped in 2000AD, V for Vendetta and Watchmen) this was like missing God.
Edinburgh was a lovely city. To this day, the smell of breweries, which hangs over Edinburgh, always cheers me up and makes me feel optimistic. I rode all over the city on my 125, although it's debatable if it was any quicker than walking. A small 125 can be parked in all manner of nooks and crannies, so 'official' parking spaces were rarely required. Edinburgh is nice to motorbikes anyway, and there are plenty of parking spaces. I did enjoy seeing a car parked on the motorbike spaces on George Street being ticketed though. Princes Street is lovely to ride up and down on a hot summer night, and back then bikers used to congregate at the western end to talk, as bikers do, about biker stuff. I joined them on a few nights, safe in the knowledge that although my bike was crap, the fact that I had ridden it up all the way from the Midlands was worthy of respect (or declarations of insanity).
This was also a few years before all day drinking was allowed in England, and decades before the relaxation of the eleven o'clock drinking up time. I spent a happy few days and nights taking advantage of this, to me, unusual aspect of life. I seem to recall drinking regularly in the underground gloom of Bannerman's Bar on Cowgate, which was just round the corner from the Leicestershire venue.
I'll never forget that trip. There's a lovely few years when you're young when you do lots of, to a degree, quite ordinary things for the first time, and the experiences are so much more significant because of it.
Re: Now I feel old......
Indeed I did.