THEY CALL ME BABY DRIVER [526]

Every so often, I will see a quadricycle parked around town. It is a Citroën Ami, a tiny two-person electric car sold by the French carmaker since 2020, the latest in a line of tiny French cars that its citizens can drive, on a moped licence, from 14 years of age – if they were born before 1988, they don’t even need the licence. To me, it looks like an idea of what future cars could have been, until it was not.

In the UK, the Ami meets the limits allowed under the AM category moped licence: it weighs 425kg before the battery is installed, and its tiny 5.5kW electric motor produces only eight brake horsepower and a top speed of 28mph. No petrol option exists, which would have been restricted to a maximum capacity of 49cc. Presumably, leaving town involves driving the Ami to the nearest bus or train station first.

Similar cars have been available in the UK. Famously, the Reliant Robin, the three-wheeled fiberglass-bodied car that weighed not much more than the Ami, can still be driven under a category A motorcycle licence, often a major selling point. Scutum Logistic’s Silence S04 Nanocar is sold through Nissan in the UK, including a more powerful version that requires at least a full motorcycle licence, while the French tradition of “voitures sans permis” continues under the Aixan brand, and even via the Renault Mobilize Duo and the Twizy, which had no doors. To avoid confusion, the “Invacar”, an infamous 1970s single-seater car leased to disabled drivers through the UK government until 2003, had a similar engine and power to a Reliant Robin, but requires a full category B car driving licence due to its weight.

Meanwhile, the driver’s door of the also-fibreglass Ami – all models are left-hand drive – is a “suicide door”, hinged at the back, making it interchangeable with the front-hinged passenger door – windows flap open, instead of us. To avoid installing any navigation and media controls that could become obsolete over time, you instead dock your smartphone in the middle of the dashboard to use the My Citroën app instead, with an activation button on the steering wheel.

The current price for an Ami in the UK is £7,695. On Citroën's UK website, it says the Ami “epitomises Citroën's legacy of pioneering automotive innovation. Much like the iconic 2CV revolutionised transportation, Ami introduces affordable quadricycle mobility to today's world, making it ideal for modern urban journeys.” However, any model of Citroën 2CV, which was still a regular car, and legislated, insured and taxed as such, will outrun an Ami – even the initial 1948 model could reach 40 mph, but not much further.

It would be simple to bundle the Ami with previous “microcars” like the Messerschmitt, Bond Bug, Peel P50 and Isetta, the latter famously licensed by BMW, but the introductions of those cars were motivated by post-war demands for a personal transport more substantial than a motorcycle, and threats on fuel supply, which subsided with the likes of “superminis” like the Citroën 2CV, Renault 4 and the Mini.

Aside from the Ami being a perfect first car for someone, albeit one to graduate from if you want to safely travel long distance – the range of its battery is only forty-seven miles –  looking at it gives me a feeling of what a car of a far-off future could have been, like a personal transportation module that would then attach to a guiding rail – this would have been after the introduction of the People Mover at Walt Disney World, but before the realities of trying to make a self-driving car on a regular road.

For me, the Ami is still too much like a car for me to consider, as I can’t drive a car – I could get a moped licence, but being forced away from the sides of the road, into the way of cars, isn’t desirable. If it was more like a cycle, and I could drive it on a cycle track, then perhaps I would be happier.

I SAW THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY [525]

ITV News, with newscaster Lucrezia Millarini

When I previously discussed how BBC radio had no news to broadcast on Good Friday 1930, I clarified how specific the circumstances were: allowed only to report from newspapers and news agencies, the public holiday meant no newspapers were published that day, no wire services were running, and no other news was physically reported in time.

 

Today we, the audience, are like the BBC were then, primed to be on tenterhooks. The gap in time between the reception and dissemination of information has almost entirely been closed. Continuous, unedited live audio and video from anywhere can instigated at a moment’s notice by most people, ready to be picked up by anyone else. 

 

All technological and practical constraints that shaped TV and radio news have been removed. Instead of five-minute summaries or half-hour bulletins, the news is as long as you want it to be. Therefore, only you can shape what those limits are.

 

Because I will look at my phone an untold number of times per day – I don’t wish to know that number either – I can call myself up to date with the news, having looked at various reputable resources through the day, from the BBC, various UK newspapers including “The Guardian” and “The Times”, and American sites like CNN, “The New Yorker”, “The Atlantic”, “The New Yorker” and “The New York Times”. For this reason, once I arrive home from work, the last thing I want to watch is more news – a quick cursory glance through the evening will confirm if anything else has happened outside of business hours.

 

Our family, however, continues a tradition of watching the news from ITV in the evening. A half-hour regional news magazine has been anchored at 6pm longer than I have been alive, but the national ITV Evening News has become so long that, as a family, we consciously break away from it to watch something else. ITV’s evening news originally preceded the original news for fifteen minutes until 1998, when it was decided to make it ITV’s main news of the day, doubling the length to give more time to each story. From March 2022, it doubled again to an hour, adding the occasional longer investigation, but having more stories overall. The consequence, for us at least, is fatigue – there are only so many ways you can hear how human beings can be killed. Fortunately, we are relieved when “The One Show” begins.

 

Replicating daytime radio, hourly daytime news and weather summaries began appearing in 1986 on BBC One, with ITV following two years later. Largely made redundant by TV news channels and the internet, mornings on UK television are filled with people talking about the news: BBC One has “Breakfast”, “Morning Live” and an hour-long lunchtime news; ITV has topical shows “Good Morning Britain”, “Lorraine”, “This Morning” and “Loose Women”; BBC Two rebroadcasts the corporation’s global news channel, plus “Politics Live”; and Channel 5 has a succession of discussion shows from 9.15am to 3pm. Everything is up for discussion from various commentators, some appearing multiple times across these shows, some becoming identified with certain shows, like Sonia Sodha and Nick Ferrari on “This Morning”, or Kevin Maguire and Andrew Pierce on “Good Morning Britain” – all of these people also have regular newspaper columns. If you think one show is going on about the same subject for too long, or you want to hear what someone else thinks about the same subject, you have a choice of viewing. Only “Breakfast” and “Good Morning Britain” maintain news bulletins separated from commentators. Meanwhile, Channel 4 broadcasts American sitcom repeats in the morning.

 

This cacophony of news commentary is what led me to cancel my subscription to “The New York Times” once I realised I was only reading its comment section, and to complete the word puzzles. In truth, I cannot work out which of these was driving me most to the paper, but even if I agreed with what I was reading, too much of a good thing is still too much, and I haven’t played Wordle since.

 

I was planning this article just as the United States announced tariffs on countries that did not support its intention to take over the Danish territory of Greenland. Such a discombobulating story led me to constantly check my phone for updates, whether they would come or not, until I had enough of a context and grasp on the story. But “flooding the zone” of public discourse with announcements and edicts to keep politicians and countries on edge, dutifully repeated by news channels to keep us informed, only puts everyone on edge – it is an inevitably parasitic capture of the news cycle.

 

I think the only answer is to create your own bulletin – create times when you can update yourself, leave time to think, and see if there are any updates later. It may sound odd to compare it to the Muzak Corporation’s system of background music, known as “Stimulus Progression”, but it worked on the basis that motivational music be followed by periods of silence to limit fatigue.

 

I can only say this has worked for me – I have cut my phone usage by over an hour a day since 2026 began, but again, word puzzles form part of that time.

WE ARE HERE TO GO [524]

Have you set any New Year’s resolutions for 2026?

Have any goals been set for the year ahead?

What rewards have you planned for when you achieve your Key Performance Indicators?

I have too often set myself up for failure by imposing targets on the organic flow of time, and too often have been disappointed when events didn’t work out as I hoped.

I have therefore been hesitant to risk further failure, but also unable to resist the post-Christmas, pre-New Year opportunity to, for once, switch off my attention.

The hopes of a single year can also be rendered trivial by considering in what “era” you may be residing. I have recently listened to a 2024 BBC radio essay series by Naomi Alderman, titled “The Third Information Crisis”, which led to her 2025 book “Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today”. Alderman posits that, following the advent of writing and printing, the internet has placed us into a tumult that “we will be in for the rest of our lives, changing us psychologically, socially and emotionally in ways that cannot be reversed.” With individuals no longer seeing eye to eye, Alderman implores us to step back from confrontation, but not to retreat from it, and “try not to burn anyone at the stake today.”

Always hoping for a clear horizon, being told instead how to deal with an unending choppy sea is not what I would rather be doing – I would rather move than acclimatise. Forming a New Year’s resolution then became a distraction from action. All I could think of was “break programming”, whether that be my own, or expectations or edicts imposed from outside, and to make sure the new plan sticks, to “get going”.

I then realised that “break programming, get going” was all I truly needed. Every resolution is a potential action that is given purposeful direction. I need not boil it down further, or add further ingredients, for breakfast is already served.

My use of “programming” is literal. Have you fallen into a routine either of someone’s or your own making, at work or elsewhere? Once you break the programme, and are you prepared for the time it will take to implement a new one? Do you have the knowledge to rewrite the code, or do you know how or where to find it?

“Get going” sounds chiding, especially if you decide to add an exclamation mark, but it is positively emphatic: make plans, but more importantly make a start and, most of all, keep going, regardless of any stumble. I also happen to prefer “get going” to “you got this”, something I hear in the instant I’m sure I haven’t got “this”.

Most importantly, whatever you want to do, no-one will tell you how to do that. Ease in, get started, and if it doesn’t work, make changes. If that works, make sure it doesn’t become too much of a routine, one you resolve to change at the next New Year. Onwards, and so on.