It's funny how things come together sometimes, isn't it. Last week I tried several times to start a piece on bike-riding, but it just wouldn't work. Eventually, of course, I settled on the subject of hair, but between abandoning the bike and turning to hair (in fact, pretty much while I was still at the 'pulling the hair out' stage) I did briefly consider writing about the fact that we had just bought a new TV. This, by the way, arrived last Saturday morning (not of its own accord, obviously, it was delivered by two men in a very big van) and we are paying for it in instalments, interest free. Which is nice. Somewhat less pleasant is the fact that we haven't had our old TV all that long - but after less than five years the tube is on its way out, and we had in fact been forced into squinting at the picture for several months now. Maybe the manufacturers were aspiring to Reggie Perrin's dream of built-in obsolescence, I don't know. Anyway, the two separate issues of bicycles and TVs, neither of which worked on their own last week, have now somehow merged into a single gestalt entity, at least as far as introductions and openings are concerned. Whether the resulting column is any good, I can't say, but at least you only have the one piece to struggle through now instead of two! (And with that in mind, apologies in advance for the appallingly weak ending to this week's column - I'm sure Mrs Barrow would have been singularly unimpressed!) So here we go...

Years ago now, I bought Dad (for Christmas or birthday I'm not sure - it's not beyond the realms of possibility that it might actually have been Father's Day) a script-book of "Hancock's Half Hour" scripts, culling certain particularly fine examples from the radio series. The first one heralded from either the first or second series, somewhen in the early to mid-1950s when the lad 'imself had a regular girlfriend character (or in fact two I believe, a different one in each series) rather than the more familiar Griselda Pugh of later years. And the subject of the first script in the book was a TV set - bear in mind it heralded from a time when televisions were by no means common, nor readily-affordable by everybody. The opening line goes, although I grant this may not be a Galton & Simpson original, "There comes a time in the life of man... when he must make the final decision, which eventually we all must make..." at which point we switch to Mr H-H-Hancock pronouncing, "So that's it, I'm going to buy a television set." It's treated, in context, as almost a rite of passage, as one of those defining 'life' moments. And the same could be said (writes Andrew, valiantly striving to make the link in the manner of a regional TV continuity announcer) of learning to ride a bike. Phew, got there at last!

I can ride a bike, but I have to say (and this may well weaken, if not totally destroy, my argument that it is an important turning-point in one's life) that I can't actually remember ever learning to ride, nor who it was that taught me to do so. I can't honestly imagine that I had some kind of uncanny natural aptitude and picked it up all by myself - physical exertion isn't really my bag, and I can count the number of times I actually caught the ball while playing cricket and/or rounders at school on the fingers of one hand. (On the fingers of two fingers, actually.) I did once win the sack race in my Primary School sports day, but the very fact that my mother still occasionally mentions this in tones of amazement some twenty-five years later is a clear indication of just how much of an exception to the general rule this was.

I have two particularly vivid memories of the early days of my cycling career, albeit neither of them relates to learning to ride. The first, chronologically speaking, is of coming home from Primary school one day and finding a bike. My memory places this as somewhere in the first half of 1976. Thankfully logic also places it there, so we don't just have my sometimes shaky recollections to work from. This event took place while we were living in a bungalow in Cornwall, and I only went to school while living there from Easter through to July of 1976. QED. Incidentally, and of absolutely no relevance at all, many years later my Great Uncle & Great Aunt retired, to that very bungalow. After literally months of thinking what an extraordinary coincidence this was, and how interesting life is, and all that sort of stuff, I learned that in fact they had owned the bungalow all along, and we had been renting it from them. Ah dear.

But, regardless of whose bungalow it was (and my other over-riding memory of that place is of looking out the kitchen window one morning and seeing a load of cows in the back garden - sorry, being a country boy I suppose I should really have said a HERD of cows, shouldn't I, so that it at least sounds as if I know what I'm talking about, oo ar, oo ar, etc, etc); regardless of whose bungalow it was, though, I recall that my brother and I came home from school one day and found that Mum and Dad had bought us a bike each. Mine had big chunky wheels (there's probably a technical term for this sort of tyre, but I think I've exhausted my technical vocabulary with 'herd' above so, apologies) and it also had stabilisers. Those were the days of course when bikes were really the thing, and the Chopper and the Tomahawk were both clear status symbols. I'm afraid I never was, nor ever have been, tainted with the 'designer label' curse, so I wasn't bothered about what make or model I had. It certainly wasn't either a Chopper or a Tomahawk. It was, erm, a red one.

As I say, I don't remember when or how I learned to ride, or when I was officially released from my stabilisers, but on the other hand I do clearly remember (vivid memory number two coming up) being in the sitting-room one afternoon and hearing a very loud bang from outside. And it was more or less at the same moment that my brother learnt why it is that you should never concentrate the sun's rays onto a bike tyre using a magnifying glass. He had of course blown up one of the tyres from my, erm, red bike. He may not have known that this crazy experiment would blow up in his face - on the other hand it may have been sibling revenge; for a third memory of that bungalow has suddenly come to mind. Namely that there was a river at the bottom of the garden into which I slung at least one of his toys, which then drifted downstream never to be seen again. (Actually to be fair to my brother I'm sure it wasn't really revenge that made him blow up my tyre because I don't think I've ever admitted to throwing his toys away. Let's hope he never finds out, eh.)

(D'oh!)

Some two and a half (crikey, nearly three in fact!) decades later, and my daughter has a bike - it's Barbie pink (as opposed to, erm, red) albeit it doesn't have a Barbie logo, and therefore didn't cost a small designer label-based fortune. My daughter isn't too bad in that respect at the moment, although I do fear that she has definite leanings towards that sort of 'named brand' mentality. Fortunately neither my bank manager nor I suffer from it. My daughter's bike still has its stabilisers too. She's quite nippy on it, but it has to be said that she's now at the age where the stabilisers are, well, a little bit 'babyish' for her. I did try and teach her how to ride on just the two wheels last Summer. We went down to the local park, on a sunny day, and put her on the bike on the soft, grassy field; the theory being that if and when she fell off it wouldn't hurt very much, and therefore wouldn't be a discouragement.

So much for the theory.

She fell off once, and that, as they say, was that. The enthusiasm she had previously displayed for learning to ride properly, evaporated in an instant. Whether I displayed a similar reticence and lack of resilience when I was learning I can't say, because as has already been established I don't remember a thing about it - perhaps it was so traumatic that I've blanked it from my memory. Now there's a thought.

Nine months on, and my father-in-law has offered to teach her, or at least attempt it, as and when the weather improves. My instinctive reaction, intriguingly, was a sense of umbrage, a feeling of part duty, part honour, that I ought to be the one to do it. However, upon calmer reflection I do have to admit a certain sense to it. For one thing, my father-in-law is far more patient than I am (would it be terribly rude of me to add that he has to be, living with my mother-in-law? Mm, probably...) and for another my daughter is more likely to stick with it with him than she is with me; by which I mean that she tends to moan and complain a lot more with her parents than with her grandparents (and she's not even in her teens yet). Hardly very flattering, but that's kids for you!

More beneficially, it also allows her a degree of non-parental independence, as opined in my 'Sleepover' column of a few weeks ago, whilst at the same time allowing my wife and I to be completely at ease. My daughter will be undoubtedly safe with my father-in-law. I think he has visions of the two of them spending hazy Summer days going on bike rides together. It's certainly not impossible. About half a mile along the road from where we live is a cycle track, which follows the route of the now long-gone railway over the viaduct into the main town. It's a pleasant little route, one which I've cycled, and indeed walked, many times.

Of course, when she's a little bit older, and in the interests of allowing her independence, and of course only once she's learned to ride on two wheels safely, my wife and I could send our daughter into town to do the shopping for us, couldn't we. It would save us a job, and allow us both to get a lie-in of a Saturday morning. Yes, I think we could be onto a winner there. Well, maybe - at the very least we could suggest it.

But then, she'll probably answer - on yer bike!!!