Scooter

Walking three kilometres one way, and then back is easy. It takes about half an hour for me. If I walk fast then it takes less time. For me, walking is easy. Using the foot scooter is more of an effort too because it requires the use of different muscle groups, than walking, cycling, and running.

I find that when I go a certain distance on the scooter my hip muscles get more tired. With one leg you’re pushing forward, so it feels normal. With the second leg, on the scooter, you can feel the strain. That’s why I like to swap from one leg to the other.

I write this as a joke, rather than as a serious post. I have access to two EVs. The first is a Fiat 500 that has a potential range of 180-200 kilometres although in Switzerland with the hills and more the range is theoretical, rather than practical. The second option is much smaller and can be taken in a lift or on a train. That is an e-scooter. By e-scooter I mean one of those that you can stand on.

Over the years I have enjoyed driving to the shops with a petrol driven scooter for daily shops. I liked that it was small, light and convenient. I only got rid of it, after sixteen years of use because of the cost for a service. Usually it was about 500 but I was quoted 500 CHF, so that’s when I decided to be done with it.

For a while I had no scooter, until I found an Ocean Drive E9 or similar e-scooter. This isn’t a sit down scooter. This is a standing one. Before ownning this one I had tremendous fun with a foot scooter, using it to get to the bus, and train, and then heading to work, and sometimes riding down from Grand Saconnex to Cornavin for fun. It was really enjoyable to use.

Decades ago, by now, someone decided that they needed to make something like a scooter that could stand by itself, and that people could ride. they created the segway and for several thousand francs you could buy one. Some people did, but many did not. Several decades later someone else decided “Let’s put the wheels one behind the other like with a foot scooter. From then on the human being on the scooter would balance it.

I don’t often spend two hours on a scooter driving from Geneva to Nyon and back, especially not when it’s about 1°c. In such conditions, I’d drive to the closest train station and be done with it. I waited until ten or eleven in the morning to drive. Any earlier and it would have been really cold.

It’s one of those situations when you’re happy that there are roadworks and slow drivers. If there were no road works and no slow drivers I would be going at up to 80 kilometres an hour and trying to keep as much out of the wind as possible.

Everyone’s always sitting in an office or at least in cities. I’m breaking away from that to stream the countryside. Remind people that it also exists.

Too much academic research and concentrating on dissertations has cut me off from world news to such an extent that apart from tech goings on I had no clue. I hardly followed the French elections, hardly noticed the death of Yeltsin, hardly noticed the regional elections. There are three reasons for this. England is a hard news vacuum with it’s slightly islandish mentality (don’t yell at me for this view, I’ve been here a fifth of my life), online news resources, (finding the news I want) and thirdly researching and writing my dissertation. It’s been a break from the world and it’s coming to an end and I need to resynchronise with the Hard News world once more. It’s going to take a few days of reading news once the disso and work experience folders are handed but I’ll do it. I also need to decide what to do, whether I stay in London, whether I go travelling and scuba diving to become an underwater cameraman or whether I go back to the beautiful landscapes of Switzerland where my social life is lived through a computer because I am so tired of the motorway to and from Geneva these days. Another option is getting a motorbike license, getting the scooter and driving as far as I feel like on a daily basis and seeing place after place. Time will decide of course.