15. E-Bikes & Old Bikes

Apart from the usual dogs and walkers, there was something else that claimed my attention as I set out this morning. Half blocking the path up ahead of me were some electric scooters. They were impossible to miss. Lately, many of these are parked close to the pier or left on the side of the road. Others can be found in strange places in the centre of Sandgate. In fact, as the photo at the end of this story shows, I noticed one on the rocks in the Bay.

For what it’s worth, I am not likely to want to try riding on one any time soon. I just don’t want to risk having a fall. A year or so ago I fell on the concrete edge of our pool while painting a fence and I had to be treated by a physiotherapist for several months. The worst part of that was that I had to stop walking for a while. So, no heroics for O.P. I’ll leave the e-scooters for the young ones.

When Mark, my son, came over from Holland to visit us earlier this year, he and Adele, his partner, and Lars, my grandson, decided to give them a go, riding them all the way from the pier to Brighton. They were only allowed to use them on the path, not on the road, and they all had to wear helmets. The maximum legal speed limit was 25 km/h.

Mark, who is in his late fifties, did not find them a very comfortable ride. With the e-scooter’s small wheels, he felt even the slightest unevenness in the path. He was telling me that in Holland, which is the land of millions of bicycles, it is the “e-bike”, rather than the e-scooter, which is very popular. They have an electric motor to assist riders when pedalling and to classify as an e-bike, the motor should only be there to help, rather than to propel the bike on its own. Most of the e-bikes here have been made in China and are quite expensive.

In my youth, in Holland, my family and I used to ride bikes almost every day, regardless of the weather. We became used to it from a very young age. The bicycles were, of course, not electric and if the wind was against you, as it very often was, it took a lot of energy to pedal your way forward.

The nature of my father’s employment meant that he was always out “on the road”, in the elements. He worked for a health insurance fund, one of a number of private institutions which collected premiums from members who lived in our village. This meant that he had to visit lots of people, which he always did on his bike. Even when it rained or snowed or was icy, he had to go out on his bicycle and deal with whatever the weather conditions happened to be. Very few people owned cars in those days. My mother did all the family shopping on her bike and I can’t help but wonder how she managed it with such a large family. There were seats both on the front and the back of our parents’ bikes, where some of us children had to sit when we went out. Sometimes this would be to visit relatives.

I remember that I sometimes offered to take my little brother Max out on Sunday mornings, for a ride to the rural villages around us. Max would sit perched on the seat on the back of my bike and we both thoroughly enjoyed these excursions. We spent hours exploring the countryside, always wanting to find out what was beyond the horizon. My parents attended the local church each Sunday and we children were meant to accompany them to the morning services. Taking my brother for a ride in the country offered, to my mind, a much more pleasant alternative to having to sit on uncomfortable, hard church benches, for what seemed to me to be a very long time.

My family and I lived through the 5-year long Nazi occupation of Holland during the Second World War. In the last year of that war all bicycles were requisitioned by the Germans. There is a story about my grandfather (known to us as “Opa”) who was once stopped by German soldiers in the busy street leading towards the bridge across the river Rhine. He was told to get off his bicycle and leave it against the bridgeman’s little cabin, from where it, and dozens of other bikes, would be picked up by trucks, never to be seen again. While the Germans were busy stopping other people and were not looking at him, Opa quickly grabbed his bike and raced off. If the soldiers had noticed him doing this, he would have been shot. This story demonstrates just how important bicycles were to people at that time.

When I was 12 years old, I began attending a high school which was close to the railway station in the city of Leiden, 5 km from our own village. Every day, no matter what the weather was, I had to ride to school with all my books in a bag strapped to the baggage rack on the back of my bike. All students were required to park their bikes in very large bicycle sheds, then they were expected to remember the exact spot of their own bike and to find it again after school. There were many hundreds of students and all of us had bikes. At that time (in 1948) almost all the bicycles had the same shape and colour (black!). Sometimes I had great difficulty finding my own bike again, all the while hoping that no-one else had taken it. For many years afterwards, even when I lived in Australia later on, I continued to have occasional nightmares in which I was searching for my bicycle.

I know that this story began with me noticing some e-scooters on the path to the pier and that I then got somewhat sidetracked. That’s what happens to me from time to time now. I suppose that when you’re my age you have lots of memories and it’s easy to find your mind moving from one thought to other associations from your past.

Let me therefore finish by noting that e-scooters are not cheap and that, for us older citizens, they’re probably best avoided. We don’t want to fall! In my humble opinion it’s better to leave them to the young ones.

Personally, I now much prefer walking to riding any type of scooter or bicycle, even if it’s electric. I think it’s cheaper and healthier to walk and it gives me more time and greater opportunity to be in sync with my environment.

O.P.

P.S. Next Sunday my memories will be about Sri Lanka and the beautiful Galle Face Hotel in Colombo.