Back in 2018, at the start of the festive season, Rachel, Alice, and I visited the Christmas On The Home Front event at the museum of Kent Life, and the first thing that caught my eye was an antique tricycle parked outside one of the old houses.
This tricycle, with its solid rubber wheels (rather than those namby-pamby inflatable tyres the kids have these days), was identical to the one I had as a child, in the early '70s.
Was the tricycle that my parents gave me second hand? Quite possibly, as we weren't rolling in money.
I have no recollection of it being some kind of "family heirloom", so I don't know my trike's provenance.
Perhaps tricycle design hadn't evolved since the war years and mine was, in fact, newer?
I'll never know, but I didn't expect to be transported so clearly back to my own childhood while attending a recreation of British life during the war years of the 1940s.
I have fond, and vivid, memories of trying to build a ramp - with a stack of bricks and some hardboard - in the steep drive of our family home in Pembury, to Evel Knievel myself over some imaginary gorge.
Instead, the ramp just toppled over sideways as I rode my trike up it!
Those solid tyres were memorable as well. There was no give in them, so every lump and bump I rode over was vibrated through the tyres, and the bike's metal frame, right into my tiny body.
On the positive side, I never got a flat. So, there was that.
And look how small it is. In my mind, over the years, it has, of course, grown with me, so to be reunited (in a way) with it just brought home how long ago this all was.
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| Alice isn't interested in my nostalgia |