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When I grew up I was an only son. I still am, come to think of it. I had two sisters, but they were much older and, lets face it, girls! So the day our new neighbours arrived and I learnt they had three sons was a red letter day. 

 Steve was a year older than me, Henk and Malcolm about six years older. They all played rugby, cricket and golf and all had a passion for motorcycles. It was like finding kindred spirits that had been lost for 15 years, and especially Steve and I became inseparable. We fished together, played golf together, got into trouble together. Almost like an African version of “Stand by me”. A rites of passage thing. 

 Both of us owned Honda MB5 motorcycles, tiny little 49cc insects that reached 66mph on a good day, with no wind and a steep slope in its favour. Every journey turned into a cut and thrust battle to reach our destination first - my bike was the quicker of the two, but Steve had a weight advantage. 

 Henk bought a Suzuki Katana 750, and Malcolm a Honda CBX1000. Our hero worship of them was sickening, and they exploited it at every possible opportunity. We ran little errands as if we were their servants, and in return we could ride with them whenever it was possible. 

 One burnout and twenty beers too many resulted in a seized Suzuki engine. Henk was in the Army at that stage and not flush. Another six-pack later a brilliant plan was born - we would place sheets on the ground in their double garage and strip the Katana engine systematically, placing the parts stripped in sequence on the sheets, replace the damaged parts and rebuild the engine by reversing the process. Such brilliance. We could not fail. 

 The next morning dawned bright and clear, and ever the dawn of a new day cast no pall over our plan. In no time at all we were crawling like ants over the motorcycle, but this chaos negated the orderly strip down and soon Henk fell back on his military training, organising us in a labour intensive human belt that had the engine stripped down and neatly laid out on white sheets in no time. 

The feeling of accomplishment soon led to other conquests and we decided a round of golf would be the perfect encore to the stripping of a motorcycle engine - all of us guaranteed to shoot sub-par rounds in light of our mechanical triumph. We left to go and play golf. 

In our absence their father arrived home. Now Uncle Hennie was not a man to be taken lightly, and he did not tolerate fools gladly. The fact that he himself could convincingly apply for fooldom was obviously lost upon him. A prophet is never honoured in his own country. But I digress. 

Upon returning home he tried to park his car in his garage, only to find the floor looking like a modern art interpretation. According to Simon, the gardener, he became very angry and summoned Simon to find a box, in which he then proceeded to dump everything he found on the sheets. Every little bolt, washer, bearing - everything. This he shoved into the corner of the garage and stormed off to get a drink to calm his nerves. 

A distillery would have been insufficient to calm Henk’s nerves when we returned after our golf game to find the sheets neatly folded on the bench and the Katana engine in the box. Steve placed a comforting arm around Henk’s shoulder and said: “You know, that is why Suzuki never developed a Katana Boxer engine…..”