Mike Mounfield, an OU alumnus and member of the Platform Community Group, blogs about his quest to ride a motorised scooter and his brush with a BAFTA-winning film director...

I recently took on a temporary job as motorcycle project officer in the West Midlands. Most of the people who are brave enough to take to two motorised wheels in the West Midlands use small machines to get about and to have fun on. The riders of these scooters and small motorbikes are generally young. We know this because 60 per cent of the people who get hurt on ‘powered two wheelers’, as they are known in the anodyne language of the statisticians, are under 25 and riding machines of 125cc or less. I am not under 25 and there’s not much I can do about that. But I can do my best to see what they see, feel the bumps they feel, and be as scared as they do (if not more so!) when they ride around Birmingham and environs. So I decided to get a scooter.

My time spent with the OU studying art and philosophy gave me an appetite for good design, the mellifluous blend of form and function, and I see that exemplified in the Vespa scooter. A visit to a specialist dealer in Birmingham had taught me that, unless I wanted to reacquaint myself with my spanners and screwdrivers on a regular basis, I needed to avoid the allure of the classic Vespas and Lambrettas of Roman Holiday fame, and settle for a modern, twist-and-go equivalent.

I couldn’t quite fall for the rather angular looks of the current series of Vespas, produced under the aegis of the Piaggio motorcycle behemoth, so I decided to look for an older ET4 model.  I’m an occasional eBay user, so it seemed the obvious place to look first. And soon I had something quite special in the cross-hairs: a very pretty 2001 model in silver, allegedly dent-free, and currently living near Nottingham, ironically my home until March this year. I knew from watching for a while that this little beauty should go for anything between £900 and £1,300 and decided to watch and wait, my usual eBay tactic. In the last couple of hours I leapt in with a bid, was out-bid, bid again, out-bid and so on, until I was faced with £1,220 with minutes to go. I jumped. And became the proud owner of my very first Vespa ET4. Then the fun began.

The seller got in touch with me and started to make excuses about not having the V5, what used to be called the ‘log book’. Now, a V5 isn’t proof of ownership, as any trader will tell you, but if you steal a car or motorcycle you don’t generally find it in the glove box or under the seat, so it’s reassuring that if someone sells you a machine with a V5, they probably haven’t nicked it. If they say they have a V5, and then after you’ve bought it start making excuses about not being able to find it, the alarm bells should be ringing, or you should get your hearing checked.

This is what ‘Shane’, my new friend from Nottingham, was now telling me via email. To be fair, he offered me the chance to pull out of the deal, and said he would re-list the bike. I nearly took his offer, until he said something intriguing: “It’s not really in my interest to sell you a nicked bike.” He was reluctant to elucidate, but eventually admitted to being a film director. Yeah, of course you are mate, and I’m Roman Polanski (though that would imply that I’m sitting in a Swiss jail as I write, awaiting extradition to the US for doing naughty things with young girls, so perhaps not). 

Then he admitted that ‘Meadows’ comes after ‘Shane’ in his particular case. I decided to trust him, but not before looking him up on imdb.com to make sure what he looked like. After a quick jaunt back up the M42 my girlfriend Millie and I found ourselves in a sweet little village on the outskirts of Nottingham (no, I can’t tell you) and knocking on the front door of a well-kept double-bay Edwardian house with the Vespa sitting outside. The man whose picture was on imdb.com answered the door.  “Yep.  You’re Shane Meadows.” I don’t meet Bafta winners every day; I wasn’t working to a script so give me a break.

He invited us in and was the most genial host. We were there an hour, mostly talking about him and his films.  Millie’s son is a major film fan, especially of the modern English genre, and she came away with a signed DVD copy of Once Upon a Time in the Midlands. He was most apologetic about the lost V5 and knocked £20 off the sale price for our petrol. It was fascinating to speak to a creative auteur; he freely talked about his next project, his favourite from his work to date and the background that pushed him toward making the early 21st century version of ‘kitchen sink’ drama. We parted with each other’s mobile numbers. He hasn’t rung yet.

So that’s how I came to be riding around Birmingham on Shane Meadow’s scooter. And a lovely scooter it is too.