Welcome letter from the editor
A warm welcome to the April edition of Scootering.
Well, I have to apologise… my usual ‘upbeat’ writing style seems to have eluded me today, in lieu of more serious topics, I promise not to make a habit of it though. Just when the Brexit drama had stopped dominating every bloody TV and newspaper report, and a sense of ‘normality’ had returned, the C-word has now taken over. Yes, coronavirus (COVID-19). As I write this column, it seems that every aspect of our day-to-day lives may well be in for a very sudden and unpleasant jolt. The spectrum of severity will range from a stark impact due to the heart-breaking loss of life, whatever the scale, through to the less important but still very real disruption to our daily working lives and any events we choose to attend in our leisure time. Within our scooter community, we have a full calendar of various events, rides, local club rallies, and national rallies which engage thousands of scooterists across the land. So I’m sure a lot of head-scratching and speculation is rife among both the organisers and potential attendees right now. Hopefully a sensible and balanced approach will prevail. We will keep you informed of the facts via both the magazine and Scootering.com website, as they come to us from event organisers, and quash any knee-jerk/scaremongering rumours which tend to surface and circulate rapidly on social media during these times. Depending how this situation unfolds over the next few weeks, that will probably set the tone for the rest of the year. Not just for scooterists, but for practically every major event where people gather en masse in close quarters. Still, if we can get through the year, come out of this in good shape and ‘live to ride another day’ then any short-term measures which seem level-headed and balanced will most likely be a small price worth paying in the long term.
On a more positive note, let’s move forward and focus on this month’s mag. As always, we’ve crammed a plethora of cool stuff into these colourful pages, from a nostalgia-based column on p23 and previously unseen images of Paul Weller on p80, through to the abundance of stuff coming out of the new Scomadi factory on p33 and the continuation of Darrell Taylor’s quest to run back-to-back dyno tests on as many ‘tuning’ methods as possible on p98. There’s a tonne more stuff besides, but as always, I’ll let you wade through it at your own pace. Anyway that’s enough of my ramblings, it’s another belter this month… enjoy the issue.