The house my wife Anne and I first lived in after we were married was in a working-class area of Irvine and people didn’t really complain about long grass, which suited me.
I felt very comfortable there — they were good people.
This was the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I was bordering on the obsessive about cycling. The shed was my favorite room. I kept my bikes there and worked on them all the time.
At first, cycling was my way of escaping Newmilns, where I was brought up — my dad was a cop and my brother and I were bullied a lot.
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I was bullied both at school and in the town.
Newmilns was an awkward size: not quite a village, not quite a town. It was parochial enough to single you out, but large enough to be nasty with it.
I lived there for 12 years, from the age of four, and was still an outsider when I left. I’ve never been invited to present the sports prize at my old primary school. And it’s not that they don’t know who I am.
A bike was the quickest way to get away from all of that.
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When we moved into our first house in Irvine, it needed complete redecoration. My attitude toward decorating is similar to my attitude toward gardening. I am very pragmatic about where you live — it’s a residence, full stop.
It was a 1950s council house that we had bought privately. It had two bedrooms — one for us, the other for the sort of stuff you keep but don’t use for 15 years, then decide you never needed anyway and throw it away.
We did a nice job of doing it up. It was a lot of hard work and when we sold it three years later, we had made enough profit to be able to open our own bike shop.
While we lived there, I was studying economics but ironically without enough cash to keep attending college. So I had to leave the course and started working in a bike shop. At the time, Anne was working as a nurse.
The house was in a terrace. At a practical level, there were no sides to be maintained. And it was solidly built.
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I’ve since lived in a modern house on an estate and not enjoyed it. I don’t like houses where the walls are paper-thin. I prefer a house where you don’t hear the rustle of the loo paper next door.
When I was 16, dad got a new posting in Kilmarnock, which was great for all of us. And I got married at the age of 23. But that first house Anne and I moved into still felt like leaving Newmilns behind.
It wasn’t quite a question of opening the door of our little terraced house for the first time and feeling a tremendous sense of relief, but it was definitely the start of an exciting and happy time.
In 1993 and 1994, Graeme Obree twice set a world record for cycling the farthest distance in an hour. In 1993 and 1995, he was also world champion in the 4000m pursuit. His autobiography, the Flying Scotsman, is about to be translated into French.
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Interview by Mike Wilson