My first bike

I remember getting my first bike. It was a metallic purple colour and it had stabilisers. I must have been 5 years old.

I loved the bike as it gave me a whole new sense of freedom and independence. Once I got rid of the stabilisers I used to cycle around our garden, my mother always stressing to me that I wasn’t to venture out of sight. We lived at the top of a very steep hill and one day my friend, a neighbour around my own age, and I were being a bit rebellious and we decided that we would take our bikes down the hill in front of my house. We managed to get down the hill but on the way back I fell off. I ended up with 7 stitches in my chin and a huge cut on my knee. I still have the scars. I got a week off school and I wasn’t allowed down the hill on my bike until I got a lot older.

This memory was originally submitted to the BBC Memoryshare web service.

Wonderful toy by Cesca

One of my favourite toys when I was young was a blackboard that my granddad had made for me and my brothers.

Even though I've never been the greatest artist, I used to spend ages drawing on the blackboard and even got very excited when I got boxes of multi-coloured chalk in my stocking at Christmas!

Both my mother and I are left-handed and she always used to tell me how difficult it is for left-handed people to write neatly, so I made it my mission to practice my handwriting on my blackboard, dreaming that I was a teacher in a classroom full of children. I remember my mum coming into my room one day and saying how impressed she was with my hand-writing, which made me very happy.

The blackboard is still in my parent's garage to this day, wrapped up in plastic, waiting until I have a left-handed child so I can give it to them to practice their handwriting on.

This memory was originally submitted to the BBC Memoryshare web service.