28
37
42
Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Times.
A couple of days after I saw a Wimpy burger shop I was walking the dog and realised that I was on part of my old paper round route. The house numbers above and the titles of the papers that they took each morning seem to be indelibly etched into my memory.
Each morning I would get up and with two other paper boys we delivered papers across our village. Delivering papers and coming home again with fingers black from the ink of the newsprint.
74
19
5
The Daily Telegraph and Financial Times, The Daily Express, The Sun.
I can remember the first part of the route pretty well, not all of the papers or all of the house numbers but the first few houses and papers are as vivid now as they were 40 years ago. The memories are as fresh today as they were back then. There’s a bit of a chill that runs down my back when this happens.
I also have all sorts of memories about different things that happened on different days. For example the dog at 60a who liked to come and greet me and take the paper from me and deliver it to his master. I’d say about half the time he used to greet me, whilst he’d save me the trip all the way to the letterbox, he always cost me some time because we had to say hello properly. He was a lovely dog.
By and large I never had problems with dogs, most were pretty amiable. There was a Jack Russell who tried to take a chunk out of my ankle once but got no further than hanging off of the back of my boot.
I walked a good part of the original route but didn’t intend to walk the whole thing as it used to be a lot of dead ends and u-turns. I planned on taking a diversion and heading over the downs and back home via the forest.
When we set out rain wasn’t forecast but as I’ve learnt since we’ve moved house the weather forecasts for this area are totally unreliable, and as we walked up on to the downs I could feel the first drops of rain. We weren’t dressed for the rain.
I hoped that we might get away with a short shower, and indeed we did but it was a heavy one.
There wasn’t much point in turning around as we’d have gotten just as wet so we carried on and as we left the downs and headed into the woods the rain eased and we were able to begin to dry out a little bit.
Thinking back there were many mornings that I did my paper round and got just as wet as I did on this day. The difference today was that I didn’t have to head off to school after completing my route.
Thanks for reading.