June 1968 – I was sixteen on the eighth – and though the first wave of Mod had been around in the south for several years and was starting to wane, in the southern suburbs of Manchester it was a strong as could be. Thanks to the fact that I had no problems getting up really early in those days (how times have changed) and had a weekend job working on a milk round, I had already saved up as much as I needed for a really good scooter. I knew just what I wanted; it had to be either a TV or an SX. No question. No point getting something from the second division; my mate, who only had a paper round (which paid far less well) only had an Li, and by the late Sixties that simply wasn’t good enough. Everyone I knew had a Lambretta, by the by; Vespas weren’t thought to be as cool, and were seen as a bit ‘southern’.

It took me just days to find it. A TV175 with an SX150 engine – I saw it in the small ads in The Manchester Evening News, and got a mate to take me up to the badlands of north Manchester on the back of his scooter. It was perfect; ivory in colour and with just a few accessories – front crash bars, rear spare wheel rack (vertical, not horizontal!), and red and white striped seat. Plenty of scope for adding more. And more.

He was asking fifty quid and we settled on forty-five. I’d never ridden a scooter before, just my dad’s old two-stroke commuting motorcycle, but nothing daunted, I jumped on and rode it home. No insurance – I got round to that eventually; cost me £3 as I remember – and certainly no L-plates and no helmet. The latter bit wasn’t an offence; you didn’t need to wear a helmet until, I think, ’72. I passed my test in November ’68 bare-headed.

It was one of the most glorious moments of my life. No two ways about it. I was no longer limited by how far I could cycle or where the bus when; I had my own wheels I could go anywhere. Freedom. Glorious freedom. Plus, of course, I was suddenly on the inside. I was one of the guys.

I think there was a hard core of about twenty of us, though if you rode a few miles in any directions you’d find scores more. We all had Lambrettas and they all looked terrific. Getting the bits was never a problem – whether you haggled with mates for a set of second hand Florida bars or mirror stalks, or went to Ron’s scooter shop for mirror lenses or a pair of lovely, long-trumpet scarlet air horns. If you had to, if you wanted something really special like a megaphone exhaust you could always go into Manchester, where there were any number of accessory shops down the south end of Deansgate.

Then there were the clothes of course. No problems there. I was tall and skinny, and to be honest I looked pretty good in Mod clothes – my only problem was that I wore glasses, and I hated that. I got a pair with big black rims, like Manfred Mann’s, and that was the best I could do. A mate spent a wet Sunday afternoon teaching my how to dance – God bless him – and I never looked back.