The scooter looms large in my imaginings of my parents' early years. Dad had a little green and white number, with an electric start he'd paid extra for. With his blond quiff and brothel creepers, it completed a look even Shakin' Stevens would have been impressed by. My mother certainly was. However, that scooter was almost their undoing. Returning home from a dance late one rainy night, the bike skidded on wet cobbles. Mum was thrown into a ditch — though anger turned to expectation as she considered the romantic possibilities of being rescued by her gallant beau. Lying in the mud, dress torn, she heard him approach: “Don't worry, darling,” he whispered. ‘The scooter's going to be fine.”
Vespa is celebrating its 60th birthday, and few other marques conjure up as easily the feelgood factors of romance, hedonism and freedom. The two-wheeled ‘wasp' (vespa is the Italian for wasp and, to non-believers, the irritating drone of their engines and the way they buzz about maddeningly in traffic means they are aptly named) came into being in 1946 when Enrico Piaggio arrived at Florence's patent office and posted a trademark for “a motorcycle with a rational arrangement of organs... and with covers concealing all mechanical parts.” This “arrangement of organs” has gone on to thrill 17 million Vespa owners over the decades and led to the development of 98 different models — most of which have stuck incredibly closely to Enrico's original blueprint.
Having completed my CBT (compulsory basic training) in the UK — a one-day course designed not so much to keep sedate fortysomethings at bay as to stop 17-year-old wannabe Valentino Rossis from killing themselves — I straddled a lipstick-red Vespa 125 LX (a modern version of the Roman Holiday classic) and headed for the potholed streets of London. For a style struggler like me, who has spent most of his life fighting relegation to the lower divisions of urban cool, the very act of sitting on a scooter feels like instant promotion.
The LX is fully automatic. It's a “twist'n'go,” which sounds more like a hair-care product, and, sitting up, feet planted squarely on the runners, it doesn't so much feel like riding a bike as steering your granny's (turbocharged) mobility chair.
The LX has a flip seat with storage for a helmet and wet-weather gear, and it only costs a fiver to fill up. For that, I managed about 34km per liter. It's also Congestion Charge exempt and free to park.
I've been a London cyclist for 20 years now and so felt I'd take to scootering like Pete Doherty did to heroin, but I was surprised at how vulnerable I felt. The Vespa, however, did give me all the other benefits of two-wheeled city transport (little pollution, quick journeys and a feeling that crisscrossing the city is less impossible than, say, a color-blind man solving a Rubik's cube), but the one thing it didn't give me was exercise, which is why, when this nifty Vespa goes back, me and my stomach will be returning to pedal power.
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