That is, they watched until my sheer velocity took me toward the horizon and out of their view. If I had stopped and thought about anything for more than a nanosecond, I may have realised that the farmhouse was in fact on the hill above the road, so my cnot-very-delighted parents sat and watched in horror as the whole event unfolded in front of them.

And the tears from my young, innocent eyes were streaming backwards into the hair above my ears, making it all cold and wet. The wind blast was so strong, I had to squint which also had the interesting effect of making it almost impossible to see where I was going. And I don’t even want to think what would have happened if a cop had caught me. As for a helmet, and registration? Absolutely not. 30 seconds later, there’s me doing 90 km/h (55 mph) on a 60 km/h (40 mph) public road in a t-shirt, shorts and thongs and with five more years to go before I could even think about getting a licence. Then in a moment of childhood inspiration, I’d decided to take to the nearby public road ‘to see how fast the bike could go’. All I knew was that I’d been riding up and down some dirt roads on a friend’s farm in country New South Wales, north west of Sydney, having the time of my life. One minute I’d been fooling around on a Honda CT110 ‘Postie’ bike, and the next I was being screamed at for risking my own death and breaking the law. It’s the early ’80s and 12-year-old me is in deep trouble.

Australian postie bikes