Where have all the tricycles gone? Long time passing

Hello everyone and welcome to Garage Chats. Some of you may know me as the pensive older lady in the Sales and Admin Department (S.A.D).

Tricycles; what a sad loss to children that they have fallen out of favour. Who decided that I would like to know?

Here is a picture of my tricycle from when I was a wee girl in the early 1900s.

I remember Grandmamma sending me off on the 2 mile jaunt to the butcher to get a nice piece of hogget and some dripping. Off I would pedal with a lovely mint humbug to suck on.

The joy of the tricycle is its versatility. It is the child’s cargo bike. Toys can be carted around. Wagons can be attached and towed. It can turn a tight circle and also, brilliant, can be cycled in reverse. They provide hours of fun and learning in the back yard and during little trips out in the neighbourhood.

It can pushed to the top of hill on your street and you can get on it to race your neighbourhood friends down and soon you will realise that you don’t have brakes and you did not know before this very moment that hills require brakes and so you feel your brain making a leap in learning and you know that you are going to crash and the fear you experience then will stay with you for the rest of your life and you will decide to aim for a driveway and hope to roll to a stop but that is a false hope and you will take the skin off both knees and the pain is so intense that you will limp to the woodshed and hide there to recover.

Here is a photo of two modern day tricycles that I have been storing in my garage for 15 years and counting.

It has been fashionable for some time now to give the wee ones a runner bike. The theory is that it is easier to progress to riding without training wheels if the child has had a runner bike. Well I say tosh to that. I agree that the runner bike is fun, fast and more convenient because they are light and easy to transport. But is it worth giving up the fun of pedalling along in your own little world with the teddies and/or trucks attached to the back? We in the minority say no.

A Poem

Veronica Virginia Jones-MacSpickle’s

Parents bought her three different coloured tricycles

Pink for going forwards, red for going backwards

And black for using when going round in circles

(Anonymous)

Until next time – keep your distance
Shop Mum