Motorbike experience: Memoirs

May 5, 2017. It’s write Easy.  Every Friday I join a writing group and write anecdotes from my past. We usually get six words for the week. We pick one word or more and write about it. My word was motorcycle.

Some people, when they are young, love to show off by having a better motorcycle than their best friends.

My son, while at school was and still is a big motorcycle fan.

While in school he bought himself a field motorbike with his money selling newspapers. It took him two years to put the money together. It was a second-hand motorcycle, and most of the time he was busy trying to fix it. As soon as it was roadworthy again, he would go off with lots of noise and speed up and down the dirt track near our house.

He studied at the Technikon in Pretoria. After a year of using a yellow Austin Mini which I gave him as his first vehicle, he bought himself a black streamlined motorcycle.  He enjoyed to ride it. He even would drive the hundred and fifty kilometres home on the weekend to visit me.

Some years later he told me that he nearly killed himself driving down a steep hill. He drove downhill and lost control, ventured on the pavement, and almost bumped full on into a signboard pole which stopped him. He showed me photos of the brake marks on the road and sidewalk. Lucky for him that he missed it by a few millimetres.

One of the first things my son did when he arrived in New Zealand he bought himself a motorcycle. He even bought a second which he tried to modernise his own way. He loved fiddling with the engines. Nowadays he is more into designing and making electronic boards which bring in some money to help pay the bills now that he has expanded his family.

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