It’s summer in Surbiton, and, so far, quite a nice summer. Long-ish cloudless-ish days, temperatures the Met Office describes as “warm” and The Girlfriend describes as “why is the fan not on”, the birds doing their thing, the pavement cafés doing theirs. Surbiton is a fine place to live. Twenty-five minutes from Waterloo, a river at the bottom of the road, a station so Art Deco it should be listed as a cocktail, and enough decent coffee within walking distance that I have almost stopped complaining about London shutting at 11pm. Almost.
Twelve years ago, on this very blog, I laid down a RepressedBritRule™. You may remember it. I certainly do, because it is about to be read back to me in court.
The Rule stated that no grown man, and specifically no man capable of growing a beard, should ever be seen in public on a scooter or a skateboard. Kids’ toys. Manhood let down. There was, I said, only one way round it: strap an engine on the damned thing. A proper engine. One that burns hydrocarbons and upsets greenists. And then, in a flourish I now regret more than the mushrooms in that Montmartre brasserie, I said that if the engine were big enough, I might even pay to watch.
Well. They did it.
Not one of them. Several thousand of them. And they didn’t come to the skatepark, as instructed, they came to Surbiton, and they brought a delivery bag.
I want to be fair to them, so let me itemise precisely what has happened to my pavement. There are the scooters, which now go 20mph with no discernible effort from the rider, who stands on them in the posture of a man waiting for a bus that has already arrived. There are the bicycles that are not bicycles, being roughly the weight of a small motorbike, with a battery the size of a car battery, a throttle, and pedals that are purely decorative in the manner of a ship’s figurehead. There are the ones with a second battery strapped to the frame with gaffer tape because the first one wasn’t upsetting enough. There are the beards, which are universal, and which I note with some bitterness are frequently better than mine. There is the insulated cube on the back, bearing the name of one of three apps, out of which, if the rider hits the kerb at the right angle, will emerge a fully aerosolised chicken korma. There is the phone mounted on the handlebar, which is where the rider’s eyes are, at all times, including the times when I am in front of him. There is the silence, that’s the worst bit, the total absence of any noise whatsoever, so that the first you know of a hundred kilos of man, machine and masala coming at you at 20mph is the breeze on the back of your neck (and the faint smell of korma, which I’ll admit is not the worst thing to smell moments before death, but I’d still rather have had some warning). There is the fact that they ride on the pavement when the road is empty and on the road when the pavement is empty, on the principle, I assume, that wherever I am, that’s where they need to be. There is the fact that they do it in the bus lane, the bike lane, the pedestrian crossing, the pedestrianised bit outside Waitrose and, on one occasion which I still can’t quite believe, the platform at the station. And there is the fact that every single one of them, if you catch his eye, which you won’t, because of the phone, looks at you with an expression of mild reproach, as though you were the one who’d strapped an engine to a child’s toy and gone hurtling down a footpath on it.
Which, in a sense, I suppose I was.
The Girlfriend, who has stayed with me for twelve years with a patience that should be studied by the medical profession, has pointed out that I did in fact ask for this. I have pointed out, in return, that I specifically excluded, and I quote myself, “some poxy electric motor with the output of a clockwork mainspring.” She has pointed out that these are considerably more than a clockwork mainspring, and that the last one nearly had me into the flower bed outside the Co-op, which is not a place a man of my years should be found on a Tuesday. She has, annoyingly, a point. When I said I wanted an engine, I meant something that sounded like an engine. Something that announced itself. Something that a man could hear coming and step aside for with the dignity of a matador. I did not mean a Chinese lithium battery with a death wish and a bag of poppadoms.
There’s a broader principle here, and it’s this: be careful what you legislate for. I made a rule, I put a ™ on it, I thought I was being funny, and the universe, which has no sense of humour whatsoever but a magnificent sense of timing, took me at my word. Twelve years later I am the man on the pavement, flattened against a hedge, watching my own Rule go past at 20mph with a beard and a burrito.
So, in the interests of public safety and my own, I am issuing an amendment. Read it carefully. The last one had consequences.
I still don’t want to pay to watch. Although I suspect, having ordered the korma, I already have.
RepressedBritRule™ Amendment No. 1 (the “Surbiton Correction”). The provisions of the original Rule, to wit that no male person capable of growing facial hair shall operate a scooter, skateboard, deck, board or other juvenile conveyance in a public place save where an engine has been affixed thereto, are hereby amended as follows: (a) “engine” shall mean an engine, i.e. a device that makes a noise and burns something, and shall not include batteries, however many of them are gaffer-taped on; (b) “public place” shall in all circumstances exclude the pavement, the station platform and the bit outside Waitrose; (c) nothing in the original Rule shall be construed as an invitation, a request, a dare or a purchase order. The author apologises for any ambiguity in the original drafting. Well, not really. It was perfectly clear. You just weren’t listening, because of the phone.
