The road that I grew up on

Today I was off work and down in Clonmel for the day. Usually I'd have gone to the gym but I'm battling a head cold/cough/flu type thing that feels more like consumption  than your common head cold and I was finding standing up right to be a bit much of an effort so I gave a class a miss and was heading up to my parents place for a lie down when I got a sudden burst of energy and decided to go for a walk up the road.

My parents house is up a slip road, the kind of road that's narrow enough that you dread meeting another car especially because these days all of their neighbours drive like lunatics. The road itself stretches upwards for a mile and we ran up it and were dragged up it many times when I was younger so it felt funny to be willingly taking myself for a walk in the autumn sun, just clearing my head and realising quite how many memories I have on this little stretch of road.

There's the field next door to our garden where our neighbour houses his cows, when I was younger and bolder, myself and a friend of mine used to sneak in and tear holes in the black plastic covering his haystacks so we could slide down them much to his annoyance.

There's the next house up where it was rumoured the eccentric old lady would wheel her dogs around in buggies but I never once caught her in the act. It was usually as we passed here that I would start pestering my dad for a story about what it was like when he was young and not the one about when he was small, he was so small he could fit inside a matchbox but real snippets from his life at our age.

There's the house where a grumpy older man lived with his hordes of greyhounds. A retired guard, he was well known but not exactly well liked. You can see the marks on the walls of his backyard where he built an extension onto his wall and I can still feel my breath heavy in my throat when I remember the night that caused him to up his security. I was talking a regular walk with my brother,sister and dad when we passed the that house and one of the dogs jumped over the wall and started to chase me. It was only because the noise alerted their owner that I don't sport some impressive dog bite scar.

There's the neighbour that used to come to our house to play until the time I accidentally broke my brothers wooden crane and panicked and blamed it on him. He wasn't invited back and it wasn't till years later that I drunkenly confessed ( I was in my twenties at this stage) but he didn't seem to be holding a grudge.

And then there's the hill that caused me to feel anxious every time I have to cycle down one. Aged about 9, I was riding on the crossbar while my older sister cycled. As we went down the hill, I closed my eyes as there were flies everywhere and unfortunately so did my sister and the bike went into the ditch, my sister landed in a pile of nettles and I skidded a long the road on my back.

And the gate into the field that used to be home to a horse that I developed an attachment to about twenty years ago. I named it strawberry and used to pretend she was mine. I'm sure every kid goes through that kind of phase of horse worship.

In a way it was like a walk down memory lane and in another it was just another walk of many up the road I grew up on,