Gazing longingly out of my bedroom window, I scan the unkempt mess of my garden. I sit here often, just looking, deep in the winter of my life. Suddenly, I stop. There it is. The item I am looking for. A blue frame can be seen, desperately attempting to force its way up through the shrubbery. It needn’t have bothered; simply the sight of it catapults it to the forefront of my weary, old mind. Instantly, I am transported there. To my dream world.

A child tears out of the kitchen door, his mother firmly in tow. He sees it and comes to a swift halt. A bike! More specifically, my first bike. The shining blue frame, the chunky tyres, the gleaming handlebars: all mine. Rushing up to it, I mount the amazing gift and begin to ride. Heaven. For hours on end, I do nothing but zoom around the garden: a champion. The child’s mind is inhabited by nothing but amazement and elation at this bike. As I zip around, the colours seem to fly past. Green. Yellow. The vibrant, inviting colours of the spring of my life. The times when I hadn’t a care in the world, simply spending every waking hour astonished at the beauty and power of my bike. Blissfully unaware I was of the trials and tribulations that life still had to throw at me, there was just me and my bike. That was my life!

To this day, that is the best Christmas I have ever experienced. I spend many a day simply sitting at the window, remembering how I lived, longing to be a child again, to feel the wind in my hair as I fly around the garden on my gleaming blue steed.

Remembering the past fills me up to the brim with emotion until I feel so overcome that I am ready to burst like a water balloon and spill all my feelings out over the floor. Memories of those childhood moments are so clear and fresh in my brain that I can immerse myself in them completely and forget where I am.

Eventually, my friends also received bikes. Like me, they saw their bikes as their most prized possession: the item they could not live without. Racing down the streets, we were a rainbow of pinks, reds, blues and every other colour imaginable. Shouting out with glee, I crossed over our makeshift finishing line first. I was the winner! Laughing along, my friends joined in the chant of: “CHAMPION! CHAMPION! CHAMPION!” No-one else mattered, me and my wonderful friends were the only people that mattered. This was our time.

Over time of course, our attitudes changed. Carefree childhood bike rides morphed into afternoons of frantic computer gaming. As my virtual car crosses the line, my friends cheer. “CHAMPION! CHAMPION! CHAMPION!” I shout, the echo to my childhood as clear as crystal. Even at that point, I realised that it would never happen. Never would I return to my childhood. My dream world.

Watching my life fly past, I noticed just how fast time can go and how precious the small amount you have is. My spring, summer, autumn and now my winter, moving on so fast that that there wasn’t enough time to do it all properly. Only now do I realise that the best bit of life was the bit at the start.