23rd April 2021

COMING OUT OF LOCKDOWN LIKE JEHU

The world becomes ever more mysterious – not least for me in the arrival on our streets of an army of vehicles swift enough to excite any modern Jehu. I refer to the emergence on our streets of a great array of electric scooters, built by the Swedish company, Voi Technology. How they are controlled, how they are financed, how they are to be found, how far may they travel, how are they kept secure, and where can I safely deposit them – all are a mystery, though there always seems to be a cluster at the top of our road. They are said to be sanitised every 24 hours, and obviously need to be repowered – but about all such things I am wholly agnostic: I simply see them wizzing down the road at what seems to be a high speed, though I am told they are limited to 15 miles an hour. But they remain the new kid on the block, and doubtless enable many to travel around our city more efficiently – a great aid to movement. And isn’t that the key to modern life? Has not the loss of movement been a hallmark of the lockdown, felt so painfully by all of us, so now the question for us all is: ‘Where do we want to move to?’ That’s what really needs our attention, not the mystery of the technology.

John Briggs