Three Wheels on My Waggon

It was the usual Monday routine today, shopping in the morning, working at the shop this afternoon. A Reliant Robin followed me to Morrison's; I was hoping it would be parking up so I could get a photo. These cars, which are getting very rare on our roads nowadays, bring back all sorts of memories of my early twenties when my first child, Peter, was born. At the time I owned a motorbike and my wife and I went everywhere on it, even when she was heavily pregnant. Once Peter was born I realised the bike was not really suitable transport for bringing them home from the hospital, so I bought a three wheeler. As I had a full motorbike licence I was able to drive a Reliant without 'L' plates and on motorways. The fact that the controls were identical to a four wheeled car didn't seem to matter. So I did a bit of practicing around the streets of Taunton and duly picked them up to take them back to our farmhouse flat.

I enjoyed driving without getting soaking wet when it rained, though I did keep the bike as well for quite a while. It was some years later that I finally took a driving test to enable me to drive a 'proper' car.

We often travelled from Taunton to London along the M5/M4 to visit the in-laws, the folded pushchair fitting behind the back seat. My only accident in the three-wheeler was once when travelling to work in Somerset, down a steep hill in thick snow. Normally I would use the tracks made by previous cars, unfortunately I could only get the rear wheels into a deep track, the middle wheel left to its own resources decided to send me careering into the hedge at the side of the road.