AND FINALLY

Who can forget the pictures of George W. Bush lurching around on a Segway two-wheeled electric scooter and having to jump off before he lost control. If that wasn’t the moment the fate of the hi-tech Californian-dreaming future personal transportation solution became doomed, then don’t worry, it’s now well and truly destined to go the same way as the Sinclair C5 or the DeLorean sports car.

On Monday, the millionaire owner of the Segway company, Jimi Heselden, was found dead at the bottom of a cliff near his Yorkshire home – complete with his precious pogo-stick on wheels beside him. Police aren’t treating the death as suspicious – just stupid, presumably, for expecting his gyroscopic duo-cycle, designed for the smooth plazas of Pasedena, to have the footing of a mountain goat on a rocky cliff edge.

Still, the deceased is no great loss to humanity – he made his fortune selling a type of blast-proof metal and mesh fencing for military use – as used by coalition troops!

With Iraq and Afghanistan, business was booming so much that Heselden was recently able to show largesse by donating £10m to a community charity working in ‘disadvantaged’ areas. The irony of his fortune coming from areas considerably more ‘disadvantaged’ than anywhere around Leeds is only matched by the petard-ish nature of his demise. It’s like us tripping up and getting impaled by our own punning headlines...