There is almost nothing as unsettling as seeing a fat man riding a moped. Except of course seeing lots of fat men riding mopeds. So I had to pull into a lay-by a couple of Sundays ago and overcome a nasty bout of hyperventilation after witnessing a steady stream of large male mopedists riding through a nearby village. And I do mean mopeds, not those Honda and Yamaha step-thrus beloved of kamikaze pizza delivery boys and trainee London taxi-drivers, but real old-fashioned motorcycles with pedals: Fizzies, Puchs and all manner of hopped-up Italian jobs that briefly made me ashamed to call myself a motorcycle magazine editor back in the late '70s. This was clearly some weird kind of retro moped mob off on a Sunday outing... and without a police escort.
Had I not been late for a lunch, and so very disturbed, I should've turned around and followed them, brought their leader to a halt and made a citizen's arrest on the grounds of causing a disturbance of the peace and aggravated mental cruelty, but of course I didn't. I just picked up my mobile, dialled my new personal assistant Imelda Parkin-Thompason, told her what I just seen and how rattled I was by it. She didn't understand what the hell I was on about and told me to stop pestering her whilst she was in the middle of peeling a grape.
"I'm peeling a grape, you bastard," she said, "so don't bother me with your vicious small talk about mopeds."
"But listen up bitch," I riposted, ever the diplomatic employer and part-time rap superstar, "mopeds were responsible for my first nervous breakdown way back in the nineteen-somethings, and now they are back to haunt and taunt me. Why, Imelda, why?"
I then elaborated on the hideous ordeal of having to compile monthly buyers guides of seventy-two - or was it three-hundred and seventy-two? - sports mopeds, trail-bike mopeds and even a few granny-goes-shopping mopeds from manufacturers and importers who gave the term fly-by-night a new dignity. Endless evenings spent in the Which Bike? bunker, assisted only by copious quantities of Newcastle Brown Ale, liquorice all-sorts and my then personal assistant, Wendy House (now a respectable mother-of-nine and Anne Summers product designer), trying to write encouraging, or even accurate things to say about each new two-wheeled death trap with pedals launched in the U.K. every 10 minutes, pushed me into a slough of despond it took years for me to extricate myself from. (A new personal assistant, Yvonne Wantsmoore, now a Presbyterian minister, helped).
Imelda glurped dismissively down the phone line, and I discerned a slight sigh of contentment in her glurp. Very odd. After a moment's pause, and another little sigh, Imelda composed herself and then remarked, "Calm yourself boss, I think you'll find that mopeds are still around... so get used to it."
Which I later discovered was true, and in the sense that they were the ubiquitous stepping-stone to grown-up motorcycldom, mopeds were once what scooters are now. Or scooters are the new mopeds. But I digress into common sense...
Actually the whole thing about mopeds is and always was that they should provide bog-basic motorised transport for poor people - literally bicycles with tiny wee engines. That's OK. That makes sense in third world countries, or even in grim northern industrial towns where the trams no longer run, and neither does the industry for that matter.
Sometime after my long and agreeable (and ultimately comatose) Sunday lunch, I endeavoured to find out exactly what these machines might be, and exhaustive research ascertained that there is currently only one genuine Old Skool-style moped mported here (from Slovenia), the Tomos (remember them?) Flexor. With admirable candour, the name presumably refers to its chassis, but even though attractively priced at £845 retail, I'm damned if I've seen one of these little varmints wobbling around our roads this year, let alone 2,308 of them.
So when she'd returned from a night spent pickling herring in Soho (don't ask), I put Imelda on the case and soon she breathlessly reported back on some revealing conversations with an MCI spokesman (revealing for him I imagine, anyway). "They are not mopeds as we know them," she gurgled, clamping my feet into the stirrups, "but machines that have been registered with an incomplete form" (a term that certainly doesn't apply to Imelda). "Some of them may be scooters," she went on, idly plugging in the electric cattle-prod, "or indeed step-thrus. And some of these figures are for battery-powered mopeds that do over 14mph." "Battery-powered mopeds that do over 14mph," I shrieked in alarm, "what new madness is this? And what about battery-powered mopeds that do under 14mph? Am I to be assailed by hordes of like-minded barmpots silently roaming the rural roads of a Sunday lunchtime?"
"Nurse, the screens," was Imelda's anxious response as she turned up the wick on the cattle prod... and applied the gag.