Giggling as I hedge my bets

I’VE never been much good at stifling inappropriate laughter.

Something about knowing you really shouldn’t laugh just makes a situation so much funnier.

I was reminded of how bad I am at suppressing the giggles the other day when a drunk man rode his yellow electric scooter straight into a hedge.

It was like real-life You’ve Been Framed, played out in front of my eyes.

I was walking along the pavement in the middle of the afternoon, and the clearly intoxicated man was riding on the opposite pavement to me, about 20 yards away on a quiet street, and clearly in earshot.

Draped on one of the handlebars of the scooter was a large plastic bag filled with clinking glass bottles.

The man had clearly lost his balance – not for the first or last time that day, I’m guessing – and the handlebar caught on the hedge, spinning it and himself suddenly to the left, and causing his head and shoulder to enter the greenery at considerable velocity.

Before I’d even had half a chance to compose myself, I let out a belly laugh that filled the otherwise deserted street.

Quickly realising this almost certainly made me a terrible person, I stopped to check he was OK, but seeing he was still drunkenly slurring while picking chunks of hedge out of his hair and then riding off made me realise the only thing damaged was his ego.

Schadenfreude aside, it’s not the first run-in I’ve seen with one of those yellow scooters that are all over town these days.

You’ll probably know the scooters I’m on about, either because you’ve almost been mowed down by one, or because you’ve seen them dotted about around the city, waiting for someone to hire one so they can try to mow you down.

It’s easy to see why they get a bad rep and, while it would be tempting to blame them, it’s not exactly that yellow scooter’s fault that someone got drunk and crashed it into a hedge.

Ridden badly, they’re an absolute menace, and there are plenty of people who do ride them very badly indeed.

But then the same would apply to bicycles if people treated them the same.

If they’re ridden sensibly, and not by people who are extremely inebriated, they’re a great way to get from one side of the city to the other quickly and cheaply.

Perhaps more importantly, if they mean people are getting out of their cars and using these instead, that’s good to be a good thing.

Just so long as they’re not drunk when they do so, and steer clear of the hedges.