By coincidence, on the day that one of my small handful of readers left a comment describing the Millennium Dome as an ‘Upturned Tupperware Dish’ I was planning to write about it in this, my next post. And that is because, now called the O2 Arena, I had just been there for the very first time.

Back in what were affectionately known as the ‘Swinging Sixties’ I spent a lot of my time in London having been raised at the nice end of the Central Line. Weekends were often spent travelling up to various points due west of Holborn and during those years, and my first two working years in Fleet Street, I grew to both love the city and to loathe it. Loved it for it’s vibrant undercurrents, it’s endless choices, it’s history – loathed it for it’s grubbiness, it’s decay and it’s overcrowded streets. London was a city that could charm one moment and appal the next and since those days trips to London have been more or less limited to necessity and have been planned as an incisive strike. Get in fast, do what is needed and no more, get out again as quickly as possible.

And then Mrs Swordfish bought me a delightful birthday present of tickets to see Eddie Izzard at the O2 Arena and we decided to stay a couple of nights in Leicester Square, take the Thames Clipper from Waterloo to Greenwich instead of using the tube and pay a visit to Harrods for some shopping.

And it was great. Well on the whole it was great. I did forget the rule that says if they describe a hotel as ’boutique’ and charge you £300 a night then you really do end up with a room that is crowded when there is more than one person in it. I mean you couldn’t have swung a cat in this room because the cat wouldn’t have been able to get in. But apart from that it was great. And to my great surprise, London – or at least that part of London – seems to have re-invented and re-invigorated itself. It’s looking really pretty good.

So – back to the O2 Arena. I too was one of those who grumbled at the building of the dome. It seemed to me ill-conceived and – as history shows – indeed it was. But what a truly magnificent structure it is. Stunningly beautiful as you edge around the bend in the river and you catch the first sight of it dominating the landscape, all lit up against the night sky. Same goes for the London Eye. A long, long time ago we could have built something like this and then there seemed to be a long period spanning a large part of the twentieth century where we lost our way. The old ‘Centre Point’ building was about as good as it got! It’s good to see that we have that vision back and have the will to undertake such projects.

And finally, we nipped in to St. Pancras Station to look at the renovations and were pleasantly surprised by what a great job has been done. Sadly, our train home meant using Kings Cross next door – a grim reminder of the ugly, dirty and neglected marriage of Victorian grandeur with mid to late twentieth century budget building.

Oh – and Eddie Izzard was great fun.

Yes it’s a Segway. Or – to give it it’s full title, a Segway Personal Transporter. A relatively common sight in many US cities and, I am told, European ones as well. Unless you happen to live in England that is, where I doubt very many people have seen one at all.

Probably, like me, you noticed the launch back in 2001, the hype surrounding the first video clips of it in use and, if I recall correctly, pictures of George Bush using one. And then, as far as us Brits go… nothing. I suspect most of us old enough to remember probably placed it in the same category as the Sinclair C5 and promptly forgot about it again. If you still don’t know what I am talking about then wikipedia as always, offers a quick memory refresh.

I have to admit that I had forgotten all about them. But that changed back in October when, encouraged by my son who had tried one, Mrs Swordfish and I booked a Segway tour of Washington DC and for me at least it was an instant ‘poop poop’¹ moment. I was in love with a machine.

With a top speed of around 12 miles an hour and a range of about 24 miles per battery charge, the Segway is truly a remarkable ‘vehicle’, perfect for those quick, short trips where you know you shouldn’t take your car but always do. They are amazingly easy to master and control and are incredibly manoeuvrable. And they are, simply, great fun!

And they are also illegal.

Our beloved government – the ones who promote using public transport over the car, who want us all to be ‘greener’ and care about the environment, who steal more cash from us for driving higher CO2 emission vehicles in the thinly veiled fight against global warming – invoked the Highway Act of 1835 – yes you read that correctly – confining the Segway to private land use only.

The 1835 Highway Act – to put it simply – bans wheeled vehicles from public pavements. In 1835 this meant a horse and cart. The Segway is not allowed on public roads because it is neither a car or a motorbike and therefore can not be taxed or have a license plate. And in a country where the building of cycle pathways has actually been pretty good you can’t use a Segway because it is motorised.

The 1835 Highway Act did not, of course, envisage the rise of the automobile or the motor bike. It did not envisage the bicycle either. Curiously, all three date from about 1885 a full 50 years after the Act arrived on the statute books. Steam powered vehicles might have been a small problem but in 1835 I doubt many people had seen one and Traction Engines were not really developed until around 1850-1860. Invoking such an archaic law in the year 2002 is ludicrous, short-sighted and beyond belief. If I didn’t know better I would suspect the ulterior motive of tax revenue. Nah… couldn’t be.

There is an active but sadly ill-supported campaign to get the humble Segway legalised in the UK – even if only on cycle pathways. This would simply require a small change to legislation such as happened for the ’scooters’ used by the handicapped that are allowed to go just about anywhere their owners want them to go. Well cycle ways, pavements, and minor roads at least.

I implore anyone reading this – whether you like the idea of the Segway or not – to sign the petition at the campaign website. Do it because it is the right thing to do. Do it because we have had enough of stupid, archaic laws being used to strip away our freedoms. Do it because technology like the Segway needs to be championed if we are ever to move beyond petrol driven vehicles.

But most of all – please do it because I want one.

(¹ In case you don’t know, ‘poop poop’ comes from Kenneth Graham’s children’s novel The Wind in the Willows and was the sound made by the first motor car seen by Mr Toad (the horn of course) who was instantly bewitched and sat, on the side of the road in a daze intoning the mantra ‘poop poop’.)

I don’t usually do travel tips but one or two here and there will do no harm.

I do not, generally speaking, like hotels that much. I have spent time in too many and while I have been lucky enough to stay in some really up-market places they are still impersonal and usually without much personality. There have been exceptions here and there but on the whole, I have found that inns or even guest houses suit me best – as long as they are good ones of course.

I have become quite a fan of the town of St. George in the south-western corner of Utah and have spent my visits there at the Seven Wives B&B which is not only a comfortable and friendly place but is also a historic site. To quote shamelessly from their website:

Seven Wives Inn consists of two neighboring homes and a cottage in St. George’s historical district. Edwin G. Woolley, who built the larger house in 1873, hid polygamists in the attic via a secret door, after polygamy was outlawed, by the U.S. government in 1882. One of these polygamists was Benjamin F. Johnson, an ancestor of the innkeepers, who really did have seven wives, hence the name Seven Wives Inn.
The house next door, built by George Whitehead in 1883, is called the President’s House because it hosted some of the early presidents of the LDS (Mormon) Church. Who could blame them for staying there? Esther, George’s wife, was said to be the best cook in town!
Both homes were built out of Adobe in the late 1800’s. The Woolley-Foster home was built in 1873 and is both a historical & federal landmark. The Whitehead home also holds a historical plaque.

It is also a little eccentric. On my last visit in October, I stayed in a different set of rooms than I had seen before that included one containing the Model T Ford shown in the photograph. It is, in fact, a whirlpool bath built into a Model T.

And you don’t get much more eccentric than that.

88 year old Heinrich Boere, a Dutchman of Dutch-German origins, is currently on trial in Germany for the murder of three Dutchmen during the Second World War. Boere clearly sided with the German side of his family and joined the SS serving in occupied Holland. When the war was over, he admitted the killings to Dutch authorities but escaped to Germany before he was tried – presumably for war crimes. Now – an old man and 65 years after the event he finds himself in the dock.

Please let me make it clear. Boere sounds, from the newspaper reports, like a thoroughly distasteful man. He is reported to have said in an interview with Focus magazine – “Yes, I got rid of them. It was not difficult. You just had to bend a finger”. Clearly there is no remorse in this mans soul and my sympathies lie entirely with the families of those three men. They certainly do not lie with Herr Boere. And the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime are abhorrent and a lingering stain upon modern Germany.

But I am still somewhat puzzled by this. Whether Germany now likes it or not, the SS was a legitimate and government sponsored paramilitary organisation that carried out the will of the incumbent regime of the time. They were also in the middle of a war. And, it is claimed, the three Dutchman that caused Heinrich Boere to “bend his finger” were active members of the Dutch Resistance and, as such, enemies of the State. To Boere, his SS cohorts and the German regime, these men were terrorists.

And their execution is no different to thousands of other executions that have taken place throughout history. Wars are littered with the bodies of such people.

Now I am not unhappy to see Boere put on trial. One wonders why it took so long. But for me it raises a serious question. If 65 years after the event the current government can decide that Boere’s actions that day constitute a crime then what of every other soldier in every other war that has – or may – face the order to execute an individual for their activities against the state? Do they need to stop and think to themselves that one day, their own country may turn against them?

The top picture here is of a 1952 Vauxhall Velox that I recently encountered at a local town show. It bought back memories for me because my father had one of these when I was a kid and his, too, was black. A few years before I could legally do so, he even let me once have a drive although decided this was a bad idea when I nearly put it through our neighbours hedge. He loved this car just like he loved all of his cars from his very first owned ’30s Wolseley Hornet convertible in which he courted my mother through to the Cavalier he cherished when he died.

Saturdays for him were often spent with his head under the bonnet, or lying underneath the thing, tools spread everywhere, tinkering with this or adjusting that. And Sundays, of course, they were off for a drive. His family were the first people to own a car in the village I grew up in and he was so used to the mechanical workings that he bemoaned the rise of electrical components and would have hated my computer controlled Audi. No – he would have loved to have driven it but hated the fact that he couldn’t repair it. Except, of course, it doesn’t really go wrong. A Sunday drive in the late ’50s often ended up counting the cars pulled up on the side of the road, bonnets up, refusing to go any further. How often do you see that now?

And that’s my problem. Because I have always had a hankering to get a ’40s or early ’50s Jaguar. Whenever I see one I just want to buy the thing. But then I remember my Dad and all the cars on the side of the road and I realise that I haven’t got a clue. I can usually manage to get the bonnet open and I can do the oil and water thing and the rest is just… lots of bits of odd shaped metal and pipes all joined together in some chaotic, mystic fashion. I know the names of some of the components as well – but I wouldn’t be able to identify or find them. So rather than having some motoring fun I play it safe and don’t remember the last time a car of mine actually broke down.

The Ford Consul is vintage 1962 (the last year this model was made). In 1959. my eldest brother worked as a test driver for Ford and took me in one of these up the M1 the day it opened. I was 8 years old and still remember being awestruck by this huge road that just went on and on and the speed that we ate up the miles.

They might not be real vintage – but it was fun to see them both again.