The bike I found in 2009 was an almost brand new Specialized Roubaix 2006 model, hardly ridden and with the moulding whiskers still on the tyres but a bent rear wheel rim. It was a bit like adopting a lost cat or dog, you wished it could talk so it could tell you what had been happening to it and how it had ended up thrown off a bridge into a river.
When I was 14 my buddy Andy and I fished an old delivery bike out of the river in Thame, Oxfordshire, looking exactly like the bike pictured above. We hacksawed off the basket, which was built as part of the frame, got a hole in the chainstay made by a rubbing crank brazed up by the village blacksmith, fitted ape-hanger bars, a home-made chopper seat, a huge chrome headlight running off a bottle dynamo, a rear wheel with a Sturmey Archer hub and a tiny front wheel off my brother's bike and we had a cracking chopper bike. It got stolen when we moved to Newcastle though.