Mick Platts (Digger)
by Dave Tooley
Mick Platts, or Digger as he was affectionately known to his mates, was another of those guys who was never seen riding a bike himself. He always seemed to be someone else’s pillion passenger. He must have owned a bike at sometime though, because the machine I built my 1972 racer from started life as a dilapidated GT 200 which I rescued from Mick’s garage in Gosport a year earlier. (Oh to be able to find machines like that nowadays)
He had a very dry and cynical sense of humour which would keep me in stitches. I remember him mostly for his ex army great coat, and long lank greasy hair billowing in the wind because he never ever to my knowledge wore a helmet.
Mick was quite a happy go lucky bloke, never using a civilised English word when something beginning with an ‘F’ would seem far more appropriate. In fact, the more ‘F’ words he could weave into a single sentence, the more he felt he had contributed to the intellectual level of the conversation.
It’s quite amusing to listen to modern teenagers, all trying to out ‘fuf’ each other like they had just invented the ‘F’ word, when all us ex Solent City Scooter Club members know that it was originally Digger that introduced F*ck into the English language.
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