I fancy myself as Peter Fonda in Easy Rider....knuckles clenched round handle-bars, fists punching the air along the freedom of the highway. King of the Road! Captain America!
I look good: sunglasses, open shirt, trainers - no socks, shoe laces undone - too fiddely. I am every young man's envy - or at least every young man under the age of five! Scooting through the supermarket I am followed by a wake of cries. "Mum look the man." And certainly to a child I am a man. But I'm 27, and it's rare to see someone of that age on a scooter.
Some of the mothers look away, others look twice. Some even ask questions. "What did you do? Did you have an accident?" Electric scooters are familiar now on pavements, in supermarkets parked outside pubs. But they are the property of the elderly. A friend's grandfather refuses to use a pavement scooter as he doesn't want to look like an old man!
What brought us together - man and machine - was itself a mechanical failure of sorts. My own wiring started to fail. The complex of nerves which string my body together began to disintegrate. I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis when I was 24. Now the sparks that drive my legs hesitate and falter, and instead I rely on the wiring of this machine.
A friend of mine once said that we love the members of our family the way we love our limbs. When you lose the ability to use your legs it is like losing someone you love. What then replaces them itself become the object of affection. And I have found love again - I'm in love with my scooter!
Sometimes I'm too hard, I ask to much. I take too many risks... I have wrapped my scooter around a lamp post. I hurt the thing I loved.
I am more careful now, I am learning. I am making the effort to show I care. And I do really care. It is better, I tell myself, to have loved and lost, and learned to love again than never to have lost at all. I'm a lucky man.
