MILESTONES

Well, a day out with the Intrepids at Milestones Museum. If you haven't had the pleasure, it's really great. They've constructed a small town indoors, featuring shops and fittings and vehicles from yesteryear.

There is an ironworks, a gramophone shop, an old-fashioned post office, a little co-operative and a toy shop, a gas showroom, a sweet shop and a sawmill. There are steamrollers, glittering fire engines with smart wooden ladders, and old shiny cars with klaxons.

Amazingly, they've made this cobbled wonderland really attractive for kids too, in ways that you can only really find out if you go. There were loads of them there today, having a great time.

Including me. You know how I love a museum.

What I don't love so much is the Intrepids' guide to navigation, which seems to rely on the principle that the satnav is nearly always being deceitful, that red lights are more of 'a guideline' and that leaving somewhere close to on-time is exclusively for bores and pedants.

We got home (having stopped off at a tea shop) and put the kettle on for a cuppa. Due to an administrative error, my Mum has ended up with a small shipment of hot cross buns, so we polished a few of those off as well, before I went off to feed Emmie's cat and then went home for dinner.

I guess the idea of a milestone is that it tells you exactly how far away from a thing you are, whether it's your destination or your origin. It fixes your journey, demarcates your progress and tells you something about the path you're  on.

I felt like I saw a few things today that were just on the cusp of my memory. Pipes like my grandpa had, an electric fire with a metal fireguard, stickle bricks, buckled meccano and old-looking tools that were in my Dad's toolbox. These things acted as little milestones of my childhood, things I'd seen and taken for granted.

There are things that happen too, that are like milestones: little insignificant things that standout as memories and remind you how different you are these days. I'd like to take more notice of these I think.

I didn't go into all of that meandering with the Intrepids, though I have a feeling they had similar, perhaps more powerful emotions about the things they'd recognised.

And anyway, I would have ended up making a sarcastic comment about not quite having the same attitude toward recognising road signs, and that would not have helped anybody.