Welcome letter from the editor
A warm welcome to the August edition of Scootering.
Ihave to admit, I’ve no idea what my kids find so fascinating about these social media platforms. I quite like Facebook for keeping in touch etc., but when it comes to Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and now the latest child zombifying demon… TikTok, I’m lost! When I was a lad, my mother spent hours trying to get me back in the house. I’d be raking about all over the place on my pushbike, often begging for an extra hour down the woods, or at the park or BMX track with my pals. Now, I seem to spend hours trying to get my kids OUT of the house! All I get from them is an occasional teenage grunt from behind a screen which has been stuck to their face for the past 24 hours! Inevitably though, during lockdown, I spent a little more time stuck to a screen than I should have… I tried a few of these Zoom meetings to get together with friends, but it wasn’t for me. One thing that did strike a chord though, is YouTube… I’ve spent endless hours on there, and the bit I love… is learning new skills! I even watched a tutorial on how to fix my dishwasher, top brownie points with the Mrs (she was just pleased; I’m not referring to her as ‘the dishwasher’). In the end, I decided that half these YouTube experts were just people like me, blokes who ‘knew a bit’ about a specific topic, and so they talked about it into a mobile phone-camera… I had a crack, and well, blow me down… now I’m a YouTuber! I told my kids, half-believing ‘dad was now cool’… but I was just met with cringing disdain. Thankfully though, these ungrateful sprogs are not my core audience… scooterists are, and they love it! The channel has had thousands of views, hundreds of comments, and a healthy wedge of subscribers… all in only a few weeks. It’s a great way for me to help out fellow scooterists with tech articles and product reviews, as well as putting forward great offers from the magazine... win-win. So if you need any help calculating the compression ratio of your Vespa, selecting the right ignition timing for your Lambretta, or even jetting your Dell’Orto PHBH carb… be sure to look up The Scooter Factory on YouTube. It’s child’s play... it must be if I can do it!
Anyway that’s enough of my ramblings, it’s another belter this month… stay safe and enjoy the issue.