Well, the article says she was out with her 3 children. I agree, rather decent of them not to put photos of the children in the paper, guess they wanted a photo of her on her own on a scooter (looking a bit crazy), than a photo of her on a scooter with the children (looking like an ordinary mum coming back from a trip out with the kids).
Perhaps I've just had my views of such things warped by the cost of bikes for larger/adult sizes, but I don't think £165 seems that expensive, particularly if it's actually one of the DCs, not hers. I wouldn't think anything of it if she was riding a bike back from a trip out with the DCs to a park on a bike that cost a couple of hundred quid. Is it more that a bike is deemed to be more dignified? There seems to be a lot of the reception children at DS's school that can't ride a bike but have scooters. At the moment, most are still on smaller micro ones, as I wouldn't be surprised at all to spend that sort of money on a bike once they were getting towards the top end of primary, are scooters priced similarly to bikes, or is this a proper posh type and most year 6s on scooters are on £40 ones?