Where can I buy a post office bike?

I've got a really old PO bike which my father liberated when he worked there. When I was a kid I used to sit on a dinky little seat on the crossbar with feet resting on a bracket. You had to grab hold of the handlebars, remembering not to get fingers trapped between the bars and the rod brake linkages - it hurt.

Well, the old man's long gone but the bike lives on, just. I've been meaning to restore it for ages but never get round to it. Big issue with spares - I bumped into an old boy in a small bike shop who confirmed that these bikes used non-standard parts to discourage theft, even to the extent that the tyre gauges are odd. And don't think about fitting "nearest will do". You'll spend half your life fixing flats, which is a bugger in itself because getting the wheels off these old boilers is no easy task.

Same deal with the chain, which uses a vicious spring link to join up the ends. I guarantee that when you prise this off it'll end up in the undergrowth and then you'll spend the rest of the day looking for it. And you'll need some arcane tools, like the thing shaped like the numeral 5 for getting at the bottom bracket.

Still, they were built like battleships, so if the rust hasn't got to it too badly it can be done. There are specialist shops that stock the bits, but not in your average bike shop and as for Halfords etc, forget it!

So you do all that, and you end up with a bike that weighs about 4 times as much as a modern machine, steers like a drunken pig on a skateboard and has the braking response of an oil tanker. And if you try to drive it up a hill you'll be emitting industrial quantities of CO2.

I have to say it would look cool parked outside a country pub on a summer's day, but unless you have a specific sentimental attachment to it, for everyday use there are more sensible solutions.

There, I've talked myself out of doing anything about it for another year...