Saturday 14 February 2009

A beginner's guide to Schweebing



I'm not sure that I've emphasised it entirely on here, but I do really like my new car. It has all sorts of things that I've always wanted from a car. It goes (for the moment). It has lots of space, which is good as there are lots of us and we have lots of stuff. It is sleek and it looks good, which is a necessary for any vehicle of quality. But there aren't any cars that are ever going to be as a good as a bicycle. Sure they have space and can look good, but with a bike you can barely carry anything and you're going to smell bad once you've got there, so all concerns of possessions and vanity become irrelevant. Like traffic lights.

So anything kind of bicycle shaped is bound to catch my attention and having me grinning at Annie for some pocket money to have a go on it. Enter the Schweeb. A combination of a recumbent bike and an upside-down monorail. You lay inside a bubble that is suspended from a glorified curtain rail. You head forward as fast as your legs and the seven gears will propel you, and then swing out wildly at the corners. All this happens a couple of feet off the ground. You take in a shortish oval track that also has a couple of vertical undulations just to give it an extra Return-of-the-Jedi, Speeder Bike feel. But this sensation will be improved once the track is made a touch smoother, longer, and the recently planted trees have become more of a forest.

All very interesting, I hear you say, but where do you rank amongst the world's Schweebologists? I am proud to reveal that I am the world's 4th fastest Schweebist in my Class. My Class being: piloting a Schweeb with a small boy stuffed inside the bubble too. My solo run made me the UK's 16th fastest Schweeb Driver in my age group, but the tabloids will have a field day when they find out I tried to claim Lebanese heritage in order to increase my ranking. New Zealand computers have not heard of Lebanon, so I was unable to pull that one.

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