IT was with a wry smile that I read the news that paving “flags” in Straylands Grove were to be replaced (The Press, December 2).

A somewhat old-fashioned term today, and one which I wasn’t familiar with as a three-year-old boy back in the early 1960s.

I had been given a small flag (as in pennant), which I was very proud of, and which had been attached to the handlebars of my tricycle.

I rode round our block and, in Straylands Grove, narrowly missed an old woman who snapped that “bikes aren’t allowed on the flags”.

I arrived home in tears, reporting that I had been told that flags weren’t allowed on bikes.

Matt Rylatt, Caedmon Close, York