This is a bike with a story, but I'll try to keep it short! It's a story in three parts: the good, the bad, and the ugly..!

The Good

For Christmas 1996 my present was a '97 Orange P7 LX in nickel - partly a present from my parents, mostly the result of lots of hard work at my Saturday job (I was 16 at the time, and this was a lot of money for me). At the time I lived with my parents in Warwickshire and it came from John Atkins Cycles in Leamington Spa, a shop I spent a lot of time in. I picked it up on the 23rd December 1996 - Christmas '96 was special!

Here's the original receipt:



I don't have any photos of it from the shop for some reason, but it was a stock '97 P7 just like in the Orange catalogue for that year.

Some upgrades followed

A pair of '97 Pace RC36 MXCDs, an RC-50XC suspension hub (polished) with blue anodised rings on a Mavic 517 and a blue Hope ti-glide, also on a 517.

Then one night I left it locked up in the supermarket car park overnight for some reason (you could do this in Warwickshire in the '90s ) and the lacquer fell off! So Orange said I could have it resprayed whatever colour I wanted.

Naturally I went for Team Orange Which I recall wasn't available as a stock colour on the P7 then.

It then got an Orange Flite Titanium - to match the paintwork, of course - some Conti Cross Country tyres and some Scott risers.

I think these pictures were taken in the summer of '97 as there were some later upgrades and it looks warm and sunny.







I wouldn't put on that many stickers if I was building it now (note the extra Pace stickers on the fork, and I stuck one over the original logo on the hub too). Teenagers, huh..! I think the Union Flag sticker is an X-Lite sticker, as it had a blue X-Lite stem cap, from what I remember...

I must have had the frame resprayed after I bought the forks, as the forks were never resprayed, and are still nickel.

It also used to have a very nice pair of Pace/Renthal XC bars in blue when it was nickel, but I had a bad crash (landed on my head!) and cracked these bars as well as my helmet

So, now for the bad!

I took this bike to university with me up to Yorkshire, joined the mountain bike club and enjoyed it a lot on the North Yorks Moors and the Dales.

Unfortunately, just after graduating I left it locked up outside the Job Centre in York where I'd gone to sign on as I hadn't got a job yet...

...and when I came out the forks and front wheel were gone

So they were replaced with the nickel F7 forks and the original front wheel.

I then moved to London in 2002 and took it down with me. At this point it got a bit neglected - I was too busy clubbing and enjoying London to pay it much attention, although I used to it to commute down the canal to work for a bit.

I kept it outside (I know ) in the back garden. I'd stopped riding it as I was working in Soho and at that point was too scared to ride on the busy roads of London - this would change later, I'm now mostly into fixed/road riding! - so it sat in the back garden, unlocked.

You can probably guess the next bit: it was stolen. I didn't even know when exactly, it wasn't insured, it wasn't locked, so I didn't even bother reporting it to the police.

This was about 2004. I never thought I'd see it again.

you can't stop there...........I'm now on the edge of my seat!

Next episode please............

I'm glad the whole story seems to have some sort of happy ending. nice orange, i can tell by the pics that you were a proud owner and enjoyed riding it

just for the record was it monkgate or stonebow jobcentre? both still don't have decent, secure bike lock-up facilities. ironic in a city famed for it's cycle friendly reputation. DWP must get it's act together! At monkgate, visitors just 'stash' their bikes behind the conservatory style entrance next to the church yard.

Well there's more story to go yet, but I won't spoil it...

It was the Stonebow, to be fair I can't have locked the front wheel, but with hindsight I should also have thought about the forks - they were £399 new!

The ugly

Well I forgot an important detail, which is that at some point I'd put yet more stickers on it - my name, for some reason!

But this came in handy. In October last year two friends of mine who are cycle trainers saw a bike at a Doctor Bike/Police bike tagging session in the City. They knew it had been mine because it had my name on!

I'd mentioned the bike before to one of them, but he thought I'd sold it, and didn't know it had been stolen.

The other friend took a picture of it though - you can see my name on the down tube:



I could see from the picture that it was largely as it was, including the wheels and Race Face chainset, but the bars and stem had changed.

So I finally reported it as stolen to the Police that evening via their website, and was slightly surprised to get a phone call at 10am the next morning from a very helpful PC who, it happened, used to be on the Met's Cycle Task Force.

The fact it had been tagged was key, as this meant they would have the address of the current 'owner'. So I was asked to register the bike on Bike Register, then report it stolen. I was warned it could take up to a month for the current 'owners' details to appear on the database, but it should happen in time.

After about three weeks I had a tip off from a friend that his bike tagged on the same day was now on the database.

So I did a search on Bike Register with the frame number - which I had been able to establish without the bike as it was fitted with a Datatag, so I asked the Police to request the frame number from Datatag, which they did, then passed to me - and 'More than one record with this frame number' came back.

This was good, because it meant the details of the current 'owner' were also on the database.

I was warned that because I had reported it stolen so recently the current 'owner' could have a legal claim to it, but the details were passed to the local Safer Neighbourhood Team, who were instructed to visit the 'owner' to find out if he had a legal claim to it or not (I gather this depended on his answers to their questions).

Eventually they called me back and told me he did have a legal claim to it

He'd only bought it a year ago, he paid a hundred quid for it, which they felt was a fair market value, and hadn't bought it anywhere dodgy, as I understand it.

So, I asked them, where do we go from here? The policeman was fortunately another helpful one, and told me that he thought that if I offered him what he'd paid for it, he'd be happy to sell it to me. So I asked him to call the 'owner' and make that offer.

I then got a call which rather surprised me: It was at the local police station, he'd just handed it over the Police, no money was to change hands.

I arranged to pick it up later that week, but I'm afraid this is where the real ugly starts!

this is gripping come on ... what happens next

On the edge of my seat now

Waa? is that it? come on i'm eating my dinner

dont leave us hanging!!

Im on the edge of my seat here

<monty python voice> Get on with it! <\monty python voice>

It's not Agent Picolax!