How many motorcycle
marques can you name
that start and end with
a consonant?
WORDS: Roger Moroney
PHOTO: Geoff Osborne
COUNTING...BIKES.
I
recall my doc’ asking me once if I slept well.
“What... at night or at work?”
I replied with jest.
A jest he was in no mood for as there were
other people waiting outside to see him and
the last thing he needed was a third-rate stand-
up comic with inflamed knee joints seeking
applause.
So he answered with an expressionless glance,
as well as silence.
“Ahh, about four or five hours a night... off
and on,” I said, and he simply nodded and said
something along the lines of four or five hours a
night off and on was better than nothing at all.
I’m not alone I understand.
Apparently the more years you tack onto your
life the less hours you spend asleep. Kids sleep
all night... they sleep through anything.
But something in older heads is not so
amenable to the prospect of shutting
consciousness down.
Maybe it’s because after sixty or so years you’ve
gathered and stored so much information
inside your scone it all starts oozing out the
doors of the memory bank vaults and keeps
you awake.
That’s my theory, and I was thinking about it so
much the other night I couldn’t get to sleep. So
when I get into that state I start playing the word
games... the strange facts games. Like running
through the alphabet and coming up with a
motorcycle brand starting with each letter.
Or a rock band’s name... starting with every
letter. Beats counting sheep because with
the advance of the river-soiling dairy industry
there are none left to count. So there I was, at
2.17am, adrift in a sea of consciousness, when I
stumbled upon what I subsequently tagged “the
vowel and consonant factor of motorcycling”.
My mental “research” concluded that Japan and
Italy were adherents to the vowel while the US,
English and a couple of other European brands
were from the land of the consonant. For I
wallowed there and rolled through the big guns
of Japanese manufacturing... Honda, Suzuki,
Kawasaki and Yamaha... and discovered they all
end in a vowel.