You don’t need me to tell you about the Micro scooter: it is part of the holy trinity of child-rearing, along with the Bugaboo (a large, outrageously comfort-driven baby buggy) and the Trunki (a wheeled suitcase with a charmful animal personality). They didn’t have them in our day, and people without children express through their disapproval all their hatred of modern parenting. For those with children, they’re the only game in town. My friend bought his nephew an own-brand supermarket version of the Micro and his brother picked it up and put it in the bin.
The adult version was an inevitability, and I have always scorned it as wilful infantilism, like taking up dummies or nappies because they look fun when your kid has them. But the EMicro One is a scooter with a motor, and a different beast; when you reach 5km an hour, the electric motor kicks in, then you are in a truly new transport space, somewhere between a three-year-old and a person with a mobility buggy. I don’t call it a beast lightly.
I couldn’t control it at all at first. My nine-year-old son could, and mediated between me and it, the way he does with the Sky box, the Wii, and the iPad, and the imminent obsolescence of everything I do and am. “To be fair,” he said on our first journey, as the EMicro cannoned away from my foot like a possessed skateboard in an 80s Disney film about how hilariously stupid grownups are, “you’ve only just started and we’ve been practising since we were three.” I prevailed, though, and we were all late for school. That was day one.
Day two, my son was on the EMicro, my daughter was on a regular Micro, and I was, too. He was so fast, he was a thing of beauty, he looked like an advert for the future. My seven-year-old daughter was moving like an ice skater. I was too large for the Micro and looked like the set-up scene in Casualty, where it is explained how I came to have a gash in my forehead and lower lumbar pain at the same time.
Day three, I was back on the EMicro. I had perfected braking, which was a huge boon. I still found that my enjoyment varied with the terrain, so on well-maintained tarmac I felt like Iron Man, and on pitted pavement, more like Wile E Coyote. I worried a little about the cursed asymmetry of one thigh getting more use than the other, like when you’re breastfeeding. I wasn’t the fastest. But I felt like the fastest.
EMicro One in numbers
Price £749.95
Time to full charge 1 hour
Acceleration 0-5km/h in three days
CO2 emissions This joke has gone far enough
