We human beings are resilient creatures, and as they say, what doesn’t kill us makes stronger. We live. We learn. When we make mistakes of catastrophic proportions, we tend not to make them again.

Unless of course we are Sir Clive Sinclair.

The inventor of the Sinclair C5 has done it again. And by again, I mean he has invented an extremely ugly, user-unfriendly, impractical mode of transport for commuters. It is called the A-bike. I assume he called it this so it will appear early in the Yellow pages. The inventors of the B-bike must be absolutely furious.

From what I can tell by looking at the pictures, it utilises two wheels from a rollerskate along with the folding frame of a cheapo Argos exercise bike, with all the aesthetic beauty of a Jade Goody bikini parade.

He clearly feels that introducing a folding bike is what the commuters need. Obviously because all of the other folding bikes out there don’t cut the mustard. That’s what I like about Sir Clive, he takes a bad idea and makes it terrible.

What I find staggering is that he hasn’t learned his lesson. The C5 was a disaster, it sold 17,000 in a country of 50 million, and the ZX81 was the computer of ridicule when I was at school, powered as it was by its 1k of memory and crappy rubber buttons. He pioneered flat-screen CRT portable TV’s just as Casio were perfecting the LCD display. If he invented a new cryogenic coffin I swear people would stop dying.

He probably comes up with all these ideas whilst at home watching his Betamax video recorder.

Would you be seen dead riding one of these (assuming he hasn’t completed his cryogenic coffin of course)?

Can someone please tell me why he still gets funding for these ideas when they are clearly doomed to failure?

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