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 have touched on this subject before but events have now moved on a little and the battle lines are drawn. But first, a little personal history.

When I was a kid I used to play outdoors – most often in the forest that we lived beside. In warm weather and when school was out, my friends and I would disappear early in the morning and as long as I touched base at home from time to time it was likely to be sunset before I returned. We had a ‘play’ area that stretched for many miles and on those hot, lazy days, we would get cuts and bruises, eat the blackberries growing in the hedgerows and get dirty and covered in the detritus of the forest floor. The cuts miraculously healed themselves, the blackberries didn’t poison us and the dirt? Well, what was wrong with a bit of dirt. It washed off. Childhood was an experience, slowly pushing the boundaries of our independence and the odd medical emergency was a necessary part of learning to cope. We learned which adults to avoid, which ones we could rely on for help if needed and mourned a wasted day if the weather forced us inside.

As a young teenager I still remember buying my first pair of headphones. I bought them in a local hi-fi shop where the guy behind the counter not only had good product knowledge but was quite happy to impart it because he wanted you to go away happy with your purchase. And he wanted you to come back some day and buy something else. So I got advice. But more importantly I got to handle the goods and try them out for comfort and sound quality. That’s right, they went on my head and I put the earpieces over my ears. My actual ears. I guess many people before me had tried on some of those phones and guess what… I didn’t catch any diseases. My ears didn’t fall off two weeks later and the world as I knew it did not come to an end. This was a truly serious and risky business – my life was at stake. But I survived and, what’s more, ended up with a pair of headphones that were just what I wanted, fit perfectly and eventually gave me years of service.

Wind forward to today and I am in need of a new pair of headphones. You already know what this is about. There they are on a rack in John Lewis, all bubble packed in that stiff plastic you need to take an axe to and no – you can not try them on before you buy. You can not test for comfort, fit and, above all, you can not test the sound quality. So says the evil Health and Safety Executive. So – I naturally ask – what happens if I get them home, manage to prise them out of the packaging and when I get back from the local Accident and Emergency department find they don’t fit? Well – said the guy at John Lewis – you get your money back less 10%. I kid you not – that was what I was told. I bought them – those ones in the picture – whilst making a verbal declaration at the till that I expected a full refund if I had to return them. You know the rest. Got them home – there was much swearing and searching for industrial strength tools to penetrate the packaging which, in the end I managed to do with no blood being spilled and do they fit? Of course they don’t. For a £69 pair of phones from a respected manufacturer like Denon they are bloody useless. If I put them on and someone asks me a question to which I nod my head – they fall right off. When my wife tried them on, the ear cups dangled somewhere around her lobes missing the actual ear altogether. Did it say on the box that they were for people with really big ears and long heads? Did the guy in Lewis’s inform me they were no good to me because my head just wasn’t big enough? How many petty laws might he have broken of he had done?

So – as I said at the top – the battle lines are drawn and these have got to go back. Now forgive me for this but I am about to say something hypocritical. I have ranted enough in the past about petty regulations that strangle our every moment and dictate our every move but sometimes you just have to bite your tongue. What I want to know is who wins between the appalling Health and Safety and the office of Fair Trading who dictate that what I buy has to be fit for the purpose?

I guess I am about to find out.

There was once a time when England’s workforce was so Trade Unionised that a working man would not dare, or would just refuse – with his hands on the union rule book – to perform any part of another mans job. This was even more noticeable if the other job was covered by a different union. I witnessed this crazy attitude for myself when I first cut my employment teeth working in Fleet Street – then the centre of virtually every national newspaper. With multiple and powerful unions virtually in charge of the print rooms it was a wonder any paper ever hit the streets and perhaps even more of a wonder that any profit was ever made with the corruption that was so endemic at the time.

While I am sure there are still many diehard trade unionists who continue to hanker after their glory days most people who lived through those years must surely feel relief that they are behind us and that a little more common sense has filtered into most work environments.

We have, in our house, what can only truthfully be described as a ‘precarious’ electrical supply. The house, over the years, has had so many bits changed, re-worked, removed and extended – including an extra storey – that nobody could ever venture to assume where cables do and do not run. To make it worse the previous, delusional occupant saw himself as a DIY expert. When we moved in and had an electrical check-up two sockets were immediately condemned because they were connected to the lighting circuit. It’s that sort of house. So when we recently started to suffer from random bouts of flickering lights and an uneven supply my heart sank because the thought of finding the bit of cable a mouse has just nearly chewed his way through probably means stripping the whole house back to it’s brick and ripping up all the floorboards.

In the end I phoned the power company to ask if there were any problems with the local supply as we already know the underground cabling in the village to be old and prone to breakage. It was a Sunday evening and to my surprise about an hour later someone called to do some tests. He was a very helpful guy who ended up poking around our fuse box and found some wiring that had worked loose which turned out to be the culprit behind our light show.

Having suitably tightened that that needed tightening he then inspected the rest of the wiring in the box and informed me that my ‘meter tails’ were too short – 16mm instead of 25mm.

“Are you able to fix that?” I asked innocently. No he couldn’t. That, it turned out, was the responsibility of my power supply company.

“But aren’t you from my power supply company?” I asked, confused. No he wasn’t. He was from the power supply company who provided my power supply company with the power supply they supplied to me.

“But you were able to fix that bit” I said, pointing at the little black box where his screwdriver had been just a minute before. Yes, he had. Because that bit happened before the electricity arrived at the meter and the meter is someone else’s problem. He then informed me that the cable between the meter and my consumer box needed to be replaced by bigger, better cable.

“And do I ask my power supply company to fix that as well?” I asked already knowing the answer. No they wont. Apparently I need to hire an electrician for that bit.

All in all between where the cable comes in and is connected to a fuse box and ends up at my consumer box we are talking roughly of about 15 inches of wiring. And to ensure that 15 inches of wiring is functioning correctly I have to deal with three different companies. And by sheer coincidence, the very next morning a man came to read the meter. I told him about the ‘meter tails’. Nothing to do with him. His company just read the meters.

Seems to me that nothing has changed really.

There are almost certainly existing awards I could bestow or vote for but, as I don’t know what they are I am making up my own. So, in honour of one of the finest comic novels of all time – and one that has given the world a now much-used nonsensical expression – the Catch-22 award goes to – RailTrack. Or, if RailTrack are not responsible for ticketing, whatever entity that may be.

As an aside for a moment, I would also like to nominate the National Rail Enquiries website as the commercial site with the most confusing navigation. Not too bad for finding the alleged times of train departures but trying to pin down what it’s going to cost you is quite another matter. This nomination would usually go to Amazon but as I try not to use Amazon any more I have to knock it off the top perch.

So back to RailTrack ticketing. I do not use the rail network that much – not because it’s lousy or because I need a bank loan to pay the ticket price but because since Ernest Marples and Dr. Beeching ripped up all of the interesting track and stations, trains rarely go where I want to. Or if they do I have to go miles out of my way to make various connections. Suffice it to say I am not a weary, seasoned rail user. But last week we went down to London.

Having given up on trying to buy tickets on the aforementioned website of dubious use, I called in at our local station, booked our trains and reserved seats. We dutifully arrived at the station at the appointed time and yes… the train was running late. No surprises there. As so often seems to be the case, scheduled trains going to London after our booked train seemed to be running on time and as ours was now showing as about 40 minutes behind I did the obvious thing and asked in the ticket office if I could transfer our tickets onto one of these earlier running (though later scheduled) trains.

The answer was ‘no’. I could, I was informed, buy new tickets for one of the earlier departures but would get no money back for the original tickets. And I would lose my reservations so seats would not be guaranteed. And then came the catch-22 bombshell that is the basis for my award.

If the train I have reservations and tickets for arrives over one hour late… then I can use those tickets to get on an earlier one! You work it out.

The place I live in is called by most locals a ‘village’. It has a long history pre-dating the Romans and even 30 years ago when I first encountered it I myself classed it as a village. It has one pub, one small general store and sub-post office, a local butcher and a small pharmacy. It also has a primary school and a comprehensive (known as a ‘Village College’ that serves all of the local villages north of the city.

What I don’t know is what a village becomes when it is no longer a village but not yet a town, or, as is more likely for my village, a city suburb. And when is that line drawn? I used to say that the first sign would be double yellow lines to restrict car parking. You neither see or tolerate those in a real village. The next nail in the coffin of ‘villagehood’ is, I figure, traffic lights.

Well we got our first dose of yellow lines a couple of weeks back – up one side of the road shown in the photograph. One minute the people who lived there could park their cars all day and the next it’s ’sorry mate – you can’t park it here’. Not of course that the village ever sees a policeman or a traffic warden who are the only people keen to enforce these rules.

But here is the interesting thing. The road shown is a cul-de-sac so not busy except while the kids arrive and depart school. In total it is probably about 350 yards long. To the right, in the picture, is the school wall. Notice the signs? Most of these are new. Between the end of the road (which you can see) and the school where I took the photo – about 200 yards – there are 24 signs on posts! 24. A couple of weeks back, as far as I can remember, there were 4. Two ‘no through road’ signs at the start of the road, the traditional ’school’ sign and one signifying that the pavement was also a bicycle path. The yellow lines gave birth to 20 new ones saying that we must obey the yellow lines and informing us that we must not stop in the entranceway to the school. We are quite obviously all morons in our village as it was clearly felt that the words ‘Keep Clear’ in three foot letters painted on the side of the road in bright yellow paint were not enough. No, we have to have a sign every 10 yards to remind us to look at the road markings.

Maybe a member of the local council has a brother whose business manufactures metal posts. Or maybe the local planning department is staffed by people even more moronic than they think us villagers are.

I really do object to the yellow lines. But I object far more to the veritable forest of metal posts that have been planted all the way along. Still, local dogs will already be hard at work…