I was quite saddened to see the news recently that SAAB are likely to disappear as a major car maker. Of course, they have not been the SAAB of old since they joined the General Motors stable but I still have very fond memories of my old 99. It was one of the best second-hand cars I ever owned – a real pleasure to drive and lot of fun. When I bought it, the roof had some minor damage from some sort of chemical spillage that had eaten into the paint but I got it for a good price and took it to a specialist for a respray. The guy was a big SAAB fan. I asked if the chemical damage was likely to continue to eat away at the roof. He gave me a withering look and opened up the bonnet. “Feel that” he said, indicating the thickness of the bonnet. I put the edge between my fingers and had to agree that this was indeed a fairly solid chunk of metal. He seemed pleased and then said: “There’s more metal in that bonnet than in a whole Ford Fiesta”! And he might well have been right.

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“Microsoft has reached agreement with European Union anti-trust regulators to allow European users a choice of web browsers. The accord ends 10 years of dispute between the two sides.” That’s what it said on the BBC news website last week. Who exactly are these guys? Did we elect them? I don’t think so. But we have paid out of our taxes to fund this petty and ill-conceived war – first over the bundling of the Media Player In Windows and then later the bundling of Internet Explorer. And guess what? I am, whether I like it or not , a European – and for as long as I can remember now I have had a choice of web browser. It’s not rocket science. I really do not need some puffed up creep full of his self-imposed sense of importance to tell me that I can download Firefox any tme I want to. Or Opera. Or Chromium. Or Safari. I have never been forced to use either Microsoft’s Media Player or Internet Explorer. And nor have any other Europeans. And how come Apple are not being hounded by these idiots? Do they not bundle Quick Time and Safari in exactly the same way?

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On a personal note, I recently discovered – or perhaps a better word would be realised – that I was wasting a lot of shampoo and conditioner washing where my hair used to be but no longer is. The hairline has moved a couple of inches or so backwards but my method of hair washing had not kept up with the times.

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.

I fully realise that I am setting myself up for ridicule here but what the hell – I’m used to that. So yes – these are my socks. Well they are one half of a weeks supply of socks.

I found them last autumn in Marks and Spencer, bought three weeks worth – which is more or less my clothing washing cycle – and they are great. They are soft, warm, comfortable and no matter where I am, if I forget what day of the week it is I can quickly whip off a shoe and find out. Great eh?

It has been known for my other half to ask me if I could get out a pair of her socks from her sock drawer. This is a bit of a nightmare. The first hurdle is getting the drawer open because socks of all shapes, sizes and colours have been crammed in to overflowing. And when the drawer is finally prised out chaos reigns. You know there are matching pairs in there somewhere…

Being a fairly organised chap I don’t have this problem. And having socks that just cry out to be stacked in day order makes the whole task easier. Then in the morning I can just open the drawer and take the next two off the top. Easy.

A little while back I wrote an item called “Where is that secret place that cutlery goes?‘ and socks, as everyone knows, are just as cunning as cutlery. Maybe even more so. Yesterday was the last day of my three weeks worth of socks and when I opened the drawer and fished out the last two you can imagine my surprise when there was just the one Saturday sock. And one Wednesday sock.

And I have no idea how they did that.

It seems that I now most definitely live in ‘grey time’.

This is the kind of time where someone reminds you that it is Christmas in five weeks and your first reaction is to say ‘hang on a moment there… didn’t I just put the box of decorations away in the attic a few days ago?’

If you, too, live in grey time then you will recognise this condition. Someone might ask if you have had a good vacation this year and you start to enthuse about where you have just come back from only to see that look in your other halfs eyes forcing a quick recalculation of just which year that vacation actually happened.

It’s like the last post I made here on Yellow Swordfish – the one with the humorous photo of the apologetic bus. I could have sworn that was just last week yet the date clearly shows it was four months. And that’s four months of grey time I can not, totally account for.

When you are a young kid and the world is new, shiny and infinitely exciting a day seems like a month and a month a year. School summer holidays went on and on and school terms felt like a lifetime. By the time you reach grey time – having traversed all kinds of different timeframes along the way – days vanish like snow on water. And I am not sure why, although I assume it is not some perverse, personalised attack by the universe on just me. I suspect it is really that the little switches in my brain are getting a little stiff and rusty and are slower to move.

At the far end of the age spectrum we once knew a charming old man in his 90’s who would periodically wander around his house in search of his younger wife to ask her if he had had his tea yet. He had clearly moved beyond the Grey and was deeply entrenched in White Time.

So it’s not that I have been ignoring my blog as such. It’s just that I decided to take a few days off. Well – it does say Random and Irregular at the top.

(If you read the blog of Mrs Swordfish – and plenty of people do – then I pinched the photograph of the back of my head from there)