And the noise?
It was created by a trio of empty 2 litre soft drinks bottles. Each of the lads had squashed a bottle almost flat and then mounted it behind and below the saddle with the neck of the plastic bottle resting on the rear tyre. The faster they pedalled, the greater the friction between tyre and bottle and - due to the semi-flattened bottle acting as a sound chamber - the greater the noise.
I was very impressed with their inventiveness as I watched them race past and my mind flashed back to my own wondrous purple chopper (careful now ...). Yes, the Raleigh Chopper was the cool bike to have if you were a barely pubescent teenager in 1974 and I rode mine around Penzance like I was the King of Cornwall.
Or I would have if I'd had one.
The purple Chopper was my fantasy bike but I never got to own one of those gleaming chrome dream machines. So I had to pimp the rather more mundane bike that I had. And in those days that meant spokey dokeys (those weird bead things that clipped to your wheel spokes and made a strange chattering, tinkling sound as you rode along - of course, us boys had to pick all of the pink ones out and throw them away), rubber streamers that plugged into the grips of your handlebars, and stickers taken from magazines. To top it all, it was de rigeuer to use a couple of old clothes pegs to hold a brace of playing cards to the bicycle frame in such a way that they caught the spokes as the wheels turned, creating a sound almost but not completely unlike that of a motorbike.
This new trick with the plastic bottles is obviously the modern equivalent - the evolutionary offspring of the spokey dokey and card and peg assembly.
Some things never go out of fashion - they just get upgraded.
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