As slow as a scooter... but still the law- makers can’t catch up

THE DECISION by the City Varieties Theatre in Leeds to reopen its doors from next weekend, if only for film presentations, has been a beacon of hope in an ocean of unhappiness this week. It proved that the glass of life is still half full, no matter how empty the news on TV makes it seem.

I wish the theatre had gone further and invoked the spirit of Leonard Sachs – perhaps making its announcement in the effusive style he used to introduce the acts on The Good Old Days.

But it is nearly 40 years since that was last recorded there and his brand of levity seems out of place at the moment. Besides, we seem to have lost the capacity to take in signature words of his, like plenitudinous, prestidigitation and plumacious. In today’s vernacular “awesome” covers just about everything.

Mrs B and I, to divert ourselves from the vortex of despair around us, have turned our thoughts to retirement, a watershed which will engulf me slightly sooner than her.

I had expected this would present the opportunity of our lives to see far- off places but at a time when even the North Bay at Scarborough seems like a stretch, our dream of sharing a baguette at some rural French idyll is as far off as ever. That being the case, Mrs B has invested in an electric scooter – not a small motorbike but an ordinary, two- wheeled scooter with a small electric motor – on which she can explore the byways of Yorkshire.

These are all the rage in Paris, Copenhagen and around 100 other centres, where they are a more portable alternative to bicycles and where public charging points have been installed to let riders hop on and off.

It’s the type of environmentally friendly vehicle we are being encouraged to take up, yet somehow doing so remains illegal on the roads and pavements of Britain.

It is hard to fathom the logic of this – especially as it became permissible three months ago to ride a scooter you had rented for the purpose. It’s just riding your own that is against the law.

It isn’t actually a crime to buy one in the first place – it’s only when you place it on a useful thoroughfare that you arouse the interest of the police.

Admittedly, they would have to catch up with you, but since scooters have a cruising speed of little more than four miles a fortnight it would hardly take the Sweeney to outrun one.

Sillier still is the law that forbids scooters even without motors to be used on pavements, even though they are legal on roads, where only a kamikaze pilot would want to take one.

This failure to adapt to the changing world is a thread that runs right through British law- making.

If the legislation can’t keep up with something as slow as a scooter, people are going to drive a coach and horses through the rules – in much the same specific and limited way that cyclists use the pavement when it suits them.

That is what we can already see happening to the temporary laws that govern the rest of life. You can have an atomic jetpack, let alone an electric scooter, but you’re currently not supposed to take it any further than the local pub and only then before 10pm.

Giving up late- night entertainment is less of a sacrifice to me than to Behrens Junior, who has his own life in another city. His circle of friends has grown up in the expectation that bars will be open at almost any time of the day or night – whereas I still half expect them to chuck me out at three in the afternoon and again at half past ten.

Telling a young person of today not to socialise at night is like expecting rabbits not to mate. So what they do is move the merriment from the pub to the front room, where social distancing is non- existent. No wonder the infection rate is going up.

More seriously still, the risk to the wellbeing of students away from home for the first time and now under effective house arrest in a strange place is as serious as any virus, if not more so.

That they are still being charged £ 9,200 a year to live like this is adding insult to injury. But that is a consequence of letting statistics, rather than basic human need, determine the legislation. The country is as divided now over the quarantine measures as it was over Brexit.

The rules have one thing in common with the law on scooters and that is a failure on the part of those who drew them up to consider the repercussions.

Leonard Sachs probably had a word for people like that.

This failure to adapt to the changing world is a thread that runs right through British law- making.