Hunter of the Highways

I would just like to make the public aware of a deadly menace stalking the streets we live on. Many of us are completely oblivious to the threat posed to us by these motorized monsters, and walk past several a day without realizing the terrible hazard to our health.

I am talking, of course, about that ever-present Satan of the streets, the Vespa. Hailing from their religious capital, Rome, the Vespa are an extremist secular offshoot of the Roman Catholic Motorcycle, believing in practicality above style and economy above safety.

The Vespa is a natural predator in the urban environment; claiming up to seven pedestrians and two riders per month. It is a fiercely territorial beast, marking its territory by leaving single-tracked tyre marks on driveways and leaving its broken mirrors on sidewalks whenever it changes its skin. Being a sub-genus of the family of Crustaceans, the Vespa is known to moult approximately twice a year. Normally after a major encounter with its only natural enemy, the motor vehicle, it sheds its coat of paint, discards the now-broken side mirrors and dons a new look; at odd intervals, for instance when its pet (normally a member of the species homo sapiens) has achieved some kind of financial milestone, it even obtains a brand new cow-hide for its back. How it obtains the skin from this animal is as yet unknown; it is speculated that the Vespa hides in trees and waits in ambush for the grazing quadruped before jumping on its back, stripping its skin off its bones and speeding away before the rest of the herd corners it and forces it to perform donuts in the meadow.

I myself have had several near-death encounters with this bipedal barbarian. A certain street in Windhoek is home to a legendary pink Vespa of legendary durability. It is rumored that this particular model still had its original coat of paint, and that the mirrors had been replaced only twice in its entire lifetime. I was on my way to a frozen banana-makers' convention when I unwittingly trespassed on the territorial tarmac of this roadworthy ravisher. Hearing a buzzing noise, somewhat like a bee trapped inside an empty baseball bat, I catch movement out of the corner of my eye. Some primal urge kicked in and forced me to walk to the side of the road. If I had stopped to tie a shoelace or even tried leopard-crawling to the curb I would have been seriously injured. Lucky for me the human brain is hardwired for protection against the Vespa, or else I would merely have shrugged it off as some flamboyant bicycle; decades of fighting between man and machine had imprinted this predator's ways into our very genetics.

So the next time you stop at an intersection with your white Toyota Yaris and see the silhouette of that pavement parasite, don't hesitate to pursue that foul beast and destroy it without a second thought. Our streets would be a safer, less economic place for all of us if we can only stick together to wipe out this threat.