a rosy glow

 We yearn for the past - because it is somehow enveloped in a rosy glow. You know the sort of thing - 'it was always warm and sunny in the summer and life was much simpler when we didn't have a hundred TV channels to choose from'.

So my memory tries to convince me that during my early childhood, it was always sunny and warm and I played outside all the time and bedtime was when 'the lines went up' (our family pet name for the credits) at the end of Coronation Street on one of the two available TV stations. There is certainly a glow around these memories, as rosy as my cheeks on the many photos and cine films which no doubt colour my recollections.

My bedroom was a place of warmth and safety, where dad read me a story and fed Big Ted with fruit gums each evening. So, it came as a surprise to find that first bedroom featured on Zoopla 4 bed detached house for sale in Widdrington, Morpeth NE61 - Zoopla. Only it is no longer a bedroom, but the family bathroom in a spectacularly upgraded house which inside at least is barely recognisable and has expanded into all of the station building.

Back in the early 1960s the toilet was outside in the yard though we did have the luxury of a bath, even if it was in a small area partitioned off from the Ladies Waiting Room at the station. But the memory of such privations can't undo the sense of well-being and trust which should mark our early life. This was the time when the 'pennies' in the foundations of life were new and shiny. Whatever has happened to the house over the years, those pennies remain, a bit of me (and the family) is embedded in that home.

Of course, some things never change. There might be a high hedge along the front of the house now, but the trains on the East Coast mainline still thunder past over a few feet from my old bedroom. Here in 1963 is dad, the Station Master ready to greet the train to Newcastle. No hedge, but the award-winning station garden is in full bloom. Oops another rosy memory.