On Hitting an Old Woman With My Electric Scooter in Highgate Village

Some details of the incident have been changed in order to protect the author’s identity should the matter be brought to court.

If a writer is to convince his reader of his way of thinking it is indispensable that he first define his terms. The reader, should he start off with any distorted understanding of the concepts which the author intends to lay out, is apt to fall into misunderstandings. As clear as the speaker’s words may be, and as attentive as his interlocutor might be in listening to them, if each participant begins from a different pole of meaning they cannot but fail to come to a mutual understanding. Worse, they may walk away from the exchange with an entirely new, strange idea which neither person wished to communicate, believing that what is now rattling around in their head is precisely what their interlocutor wished to say. 

We give the benefit of the doubt when conversing with a person for whom English is not their native language. We forgive their poor interpretations, and are charitable in ours. We tolerate the irritating, non-verbal fillers which litter their speech. But when it comes to dealing with a person of our own tongue - within which there is as much potential variety of meaning, as wide a field of interpretation as that between two distinct languages - we presume  a perfect comprehension; a mutual conceptualisation of each and every word, structure and concept of which the exchange is composed. We subsequently form a rash judgement based upon our own interpretation, and rarely ask our interlocutor for his. 

In written works, in which the communication is unidirectional, the onus of defining terms inevitably falls upon the writer. The good reader is the receptive one that surrenders himself to being disarmed of his disillusions. I ask that the reader do this: that he be a good reader and allow myself, the author and arbiter of meaning, to explain his terms before he pronounces his judgement.

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The woman who I accidentally hit while riding my electric scooter through Highgate Village on Sunday 4th June was elderly only in the sense that her age exceeded seventy years. This might strike the reader as a pedantic distinction, but I will disabuse him immediately of the image which he undoubtedly holds in his head: that of a wise, frail creature, seasoned by war and hardship, conservative in outlook, and innocent of modern sexual practices, lying hopelessly mangled upon the pavement. The collective image which most of us hold of the elderly is shaped by the now-dead Blitz generation which preceded that of this woman, of which she and her generation bear no resemblance, but upon whose coattails they greedily cling.

I will remind the reader that a person of seventy-five years of age will have been born in 1946, just late enough to dodge the war and just in time to gobble up the devil-may-care decadence of the 1960s, the consequences of which we are still suffering. She will have spent her early domestic life, not serving King and Country, but leafing through recipes in a microwave cookbook. This is - or was - a woman who would have stood by as one of the most destructive infrastructural overhauls of London took place; a woman who allowed the city that I was to be born into to be converted from a human-friendly settlement into the car-riddled monstrosity which it is today. 

This is the sort of filth she would have flicked through as a young working mother.

For the car’s promise of liberation is a false one. With the one hand they will give you an automobile, and with the other they will push everything further away. I live in a neighbourhood in which the closest butchers - Highgate Butchers - is a forty minute walk away, the expectation being that I will simply hop into my car and arrive within ten. Were there no cars, they would either move the butchers closer, or else they would not put my lodgings at such a distance from it.

It was as I was riding to the butchers that the mudguard of my wheel struck her. While the fall and the subsequent running-over of her ankle cannot have been a pleasant experience, I very much doubt that it was fatal. This was not, as I have already mentioned, a poor little creature of want, but a woman whose generous frame indicated a sedentary life of indulgence. It is unlikely that she felt anything at all, given that - as the reader can imagine - the fall was amply cushioned. The brunt of the impact, I dare say, was absorbed by I and my scooter and, had I not deftly balanced the vehicle following the crash, I might well have tumbled to the ground myself. 

This butchers is some forty minutes from my house should I choose to walk.

Given her age and frame, this old woman was likely an automobilist who was tottering to her car when we made our little impact. Perhaps she was even amongst the very first women of her generation to have driven a car. No doubt she would have felt a sense of empowerment behind the wheel, ignorant of (or more likely unwilling to see) that feminist liberation was a mere pretext for the automobile industry to tighten its grip upon the city. What might have been done to avoid the collision? She could have paid better attention. She could have moved to the side when I called out “make way!” She could have joined any number of the road protests which took place during her lifetime.

But the blame will inevitably fall upon the person who chose to use a sustainable form of transport. Recent attempts to ban the electric scooter only further reflect the incestuous relationship between politicians, police and automobile manufacturers. The sporadic and sensational reports of collisions caused by electric scooters conveniently fail to mention the number of fatal or near fatal accidents caused by automobiles. And yet banning the automobile is considered to be an eccentric view. It is worth mentioning, too, that a large proportion of the electric scooter community is made up of Black and Minority Ethnic persons. This, at least, has been my observation. Is this, perhaps, a racially motivated attack by Westminster? Or is it motivated merely by that familiar, perverse desire to dominate the weak? 

Considerable economic, social and psychological sacrifices have already been made by the youth of this country in order to protect a class of elderly citizens who have never even seen the inside of a bomb shelter, and from a virus which has proved harmless to anyone but those for whom a sharp rush of wind would end it all. To deprive us now not only of affordable housing but affordable transport would be a far greater blow to the country than anything suffered by that old woman.