At 17 i said to my dad i want a bike, he said you gotta be kidding if you ride a motorbike the way you ride a pedal bike you'll be dead in 2 weeks..... absolutely not !!! this as someone who had ridden bikes from an early age and been a dispatch rider in the early days of WW2,
Still defiant, i said well i 'm getting one, and he looked at me and said well son, your going to learn properly then, and took me to a riding school, in Ruislip Manor where they had roads all laid out and i got to learn on a KH125 in relative safety, and after only 30 minutes i was zooming about like i'd been doing it for years, apparently the instructor said to my old fella, i was a natural !! funny he never told me that for years and years probably thought it would make me big headed... Yeah as if !!
I then went out and bought an RD125 twin for all of £325 and the rest as they say is history, 33 years later i'm still here and still loving it
Although my mum was never happy about the biking thing, she accepted it was part of who i am... bless her.