These days, trips down memory lane are a frightening experience. I am now that older person who reminisces about how things used to be. Today I had lunch with my Dad and Brother is a tea shop in Newport which was once a bookshop where I had a Saturday job when I was at school. We dined in the small side room that once housed children’s books.

I loved that job. I’d do the stock take in the morning, unpack the week’s deliveries and take great delight ringing people to tell them the books they had ordered had finally arrived. By lunch time I’d take over serving customers and in quiet moments would pull up a stool and browse through new books. It was gut wrenching to be made redundant because they had taken on someone on a youth training scheme and didn’t need us both. I secretly hoped that the ghost that inhabited the Tudor Building would frighten her away.

It’s a bit ghostly to revisit places and they be so familiar yet not. Things seem new but still as they were.

Ancient lanes I cruised through during my teenage years are now woven with new by-pass roads. Old properties now crowded in by new builds. Trees planted 3o plus years ago in our old front garden are now towering specimens.

I suspect that if my mum had not been laid to rest in the local village church I’ve never had returned to the area after my Dad moved away. I like these little visits as a family, brings back happy memories and I get a chance to pay a special compliment to my mum. A spot of clothes shopping in a little boutique in Newport, something my mum and I used to enjoy. Or at least that’s my retail therapy excuse.