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’.)

The young man in the local 3 shop said “it will just work”.
“Are you sure about that?” I asked. “That’s what T-Mobile said and that never worked”.
And neither did 3. Well – that’s not strictly true. It didn’t work in Washington DC and it didn’t work in Denver or anywhere else in Colorado. Didn’t work anywhere in Utah either. Or Arizona. Or Nevada.

But it DID work in Delaware.

So – when we arrived in Denver I emailed 3 customer support and said “The young man in the local 3 shop said it will just work. But it doesn’t. Although it DID work in Delaware. I can’t make or receive calls to the UK or to friends in the USA. But I CAN send and receive text messages. So what am I missing” How do I get this to work outside of Delaware?”

Next thing I am woken at around 3:30 in the morning by my phone announcing a text message. It’s from 3 customer support to tell me that they couldn’t get through to me and have left a message on the voice mail. Which, of course, I couldn’t call. Well – not without taking a flight back to Delaware which seemed a bit over the top.

And they did this three nights running! The stupid person at 3 didn’t think to themselves – “There’s no point in leaving voice mail because he CAN’T MAKE CALLS”. Not even “hey – this guy is in Denver which is 6 hours behind us so I wont text him at 9 in the morning in case he’s asleep”.

So – International Roaming. As long as you are in Delaware.

You watch the movies and the English guy get’s off the plane in New York and immediately makes a phone call home on his mobile. How does he do that? James Bond never has this problem. And I bet he’s never even been to Delaware. I use all the right codes. The +44 for the UK. 001 for the States. I connect to the local ‘partner’ network with no problem. Then nothing. Try and make a call and up it comes “Connection Error – Please go to Delaware and Try Again”.

If anyone comes visiting this sad and neglected corner of the web and knows how to make this work then please let me in on the secret. Unless, of course, the only place you ever visit in the USA is Delaware.

(When we got back home I accessed my voice mail to find three calls from 3 asking me to phone them to talk about why I couldn’t make calls. They weren’t laughing either).

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.

I have made no secret over the years of the twin facts that I am a smoker and that I use a MacBook Pro. What I have probably not mentioned is that most of the time I roll my own ciggies.

This means I can be endlessly entertained as stray bits of tobacco and ash disappear without trace between the keys on my laptop. They have even managed to work their way down the side of the trackpad. But, amazingly, things still work. Which is not the case for the MacBook belonging to my other half. She doesn’t smoke and probably the worse thing to get lost between her keys are small particles of Green and Blacks. And I do mean ’small’ as any Green and Blacks that might get lost would automatically register as a tragedy and I would have heard about it. Her MacBook, despite being newer than mine and not subject to tobacco abuse, had sticking keys and the odd one that had to be hit firmly with a small mallet to function.

So – always helpful and thoughtful – my eldest son came over to Swordfish Towers at the weekend armed with his compressor and airbrush to gently blow – at round 50 psi – the muck from our Macs. That’s him in the first picture doing just that and the second is an enlarged area of my screen where you can see some of the stuff that was being blown out.

Great fun was had by all as we watched hairs, fluff and other unidentifiable particles coming back out from their resting place. The good news is that my wife now has a fully functional keyboard. We did not, however, retrieve enough tobacco out of mine to give me a smoke.

I could probably find all kinds of research into the ‘mobile phone effect’ if I cared to spend time looking but like a child contemplating the existence of Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy, I’m not sure I really want to know. Give a particular form of human behaviour a name and class it as a disorder and you are expected to stop poking fun at those who show signs of having it.

I am referring, of course, to that strange behaviour some people exhibit when they are talking to someone on their mobile phone. If they were having the conversation with someone sitting beside them they would just talk normally. Put a mobile into their hand and suddenly they are an actor on a stage delivering a soliloquy for everyone to hear.

Myself and my dear wife travelled a few miles yesterday on a bus bursting at the seams with passengers making it’s way into the centre of Lincoln. There was the usual low murmur of various conversations taking place and if you listened carefully you might pick up a word here or a short phrase there as is usual. People tend not to bellow when simply conversing with a companion. But then, suddenly cutting through the background hum like a knife, came this one, youngish, female voice who appeared to want to inform everyone within a fifty yard radius all about her recent trip to the dentist.

Without going into boring detail we were treated to the whole saga from the pain to what the dentist told her – to the treatment she underwent in the dental chair right through to the antibiotics he prescribed for her. We even learnt that this was only the second time in her life she had been prescribed drugs, the first being her doctor prescribing her oral contraception.

Did I and my fellow travellers want to know all this? Of course we didn’t. Was this a rare event? We all know it isn’t because we experience this phenomena regularly. And yes – it annoys the hell out of the majority of people.

When the young lady finally finished her conversation and an eerie hush fell over the audience, I was very tempted to stand up and tell them all about my recent hospital experience with a delicate orifice, a small camera and a tube of KY but sadly for them we pulled into the bus station where were all to disembark so now they will never know.