I am what the high tech marketing men call an “Early Adopter”. In other words I am the sort of idiot who patrols Tottenham Court Road in search of the latest anything. I spend hours scanning the internet looking for gadgets which have been released in Taiwan or Cupertino but are not due in England for another six months. I am, in other words, a rather sad nerd.

All of which may explain why a few years ago I nearly wet myself when I first read about a gadget in American called a Segway. This, I was assured, was about to revolutionise personal transport. Walking would be a thing of the past. Cars would be irrelevant. Motor scooters (another of my passions, by the way) would go the way of the Reliant Regal and the Bond Minicar.
The Segway consisted of a single axle on which was a small platform big enough for a pair of shoes. Sticking up from the platform was what looked like a pair of bicycle handlebars. There would be zero pollution, zero noise, zero hassle.

Quite how one was meant to balance on a single axle without years of training as a circus high-wire acrobat remained to be seen. But as far as I was concerned, the Segway was top of my Must Have list.

And then my personal radar screen went blank. For at least two years I heard nothing about the Segway, and I assumed it had been aborted at birth. Until, that is, the editor of Lusso asked me if I might be interested to try some strange gadget called a Segway.
Would I hell!