69 years to heaven!....

....as Dylan Thomas would say.

How the heck have I reached this age?

It only seems like yesterday that I was playing as a boy with my Dinky Toys and Hornby Dublo model railway, fishing and collecting frog spawn from the local ponds, building balsa wood aircraft, making bows and arrows, dashing around on the fabulous trolley that my father built for me, an item that perhaps led to my interest in classic cars.

Me, probably 1950 in Devon, sitting on Berry Head, Brixham gazing over Torbay.

Days that seemed to be endlessly filled with sunshine, playing in the fields that have now, along with the ponds, been consumed by building development, bike rides over quite long distances, now impossible due to the density of traffic and then later playing 'kiss chase', and that first kiss from a girl that I still meet in the village, who has been reminded frequently of that blissful moment that she had completely forgotten!

School-days, smoking fags behind the bike sheds, five for a shilling I seem to recall, and then the transition to pipe smoking at about the age of eighteen, the first job as a Junior at a local bank, to be followed by an interesting and varied career that has at least allowed me to support a lovely family, fairly comfortably.

Many, many blessings, but it doesn't seem to have taken long to reach today!

Anyway, Happy Birthday me!