A vestige of the 1980s youth subculture revolved around hotting up and
cutting down Italian motorscooters as a reaction to the Italian and US fashion styled Mod revivalists.
Today'
s scooterboy is now middle aged, married with children and with the same labouring
job he has had for the past 30 years. He wears combat trousers and shoehorns himself in the same Levi denim jacket covered in
ratty rally patches and sewn-on bar towels he had in 1983 to show you his legitimacy. Attends scooter rallies to drink himself into
oblivion in solidarity with other scooterboys, partially because that's what he did when he was 17 but mostly to forget his current sad existence. Can'
t stand any scooter that isn't a manual two
stroke Vespa or Lambretta. Loves to
get verbally abusive and threatening towards anyone in the scooter scene but
outside his narrow social group.
Repeats the same stories about getting drunk at rallies in the 1980s, riding mates' scooters unlicenced with no lights throughout the night before crashing. Often he will write these stupid stories down and send them into Scootering magazine to be published. Also, after having been shown how to operate a computer recently by their kids, they have discovered that getting on the internet while drunk and abusing other scooter riders, mods, or
blow-ins (someone who bought a scooter after they did and therefore have illegitimate views or
rights to go to rallies or other scooter events) gives meaning to their existence.
I was going to attend the scooter
rally but there will be
far too many drunk, fat and balding scooterboys
dancing to Dexys Midnight Runners.
