A Melted Toffee Sweet on a Summer Road

I was walking home tonight, when I suddenly started thinking about this.

We were living in Forres, Scotland, so this would have been sometime between 1982 and 1985, and I was between eleven and thirteen years old. I remember it was summer - my sister Rachael and myself were playing (or attempting to) play tennis on the road in front of our house (it was a cul-de-dac). As I sit typing this I am thinking that it must have been quite late - 9:00pm, and still bright daylight, maybe even sunny - the sun didn't sink over midsummer that far north till incredibly late. I remember other people being about, other kids I didn't know that well, maybe my sister's friend from next door. I suddenly noticed something on the tarmac of the ground and looked closer at it. It looked like some kind of sweet, some sticky toffee half-melted onto the road. As I looked at it time seemed to flip back. This sweet triggered off some incredibly powerful, but undefined memory, something from deep in infanthood, maybe even babyhood. Something from the past that swamped the present. As I stood there, tennis racquet ignored, I tried to reach back for this memory, tips of fingers brushing something that slipped away, some memory of comfort and strange sickness, a sticky, weird childhood sickness. It slipped away, whatever the memory was of, and I've never been able pinpoint where it was from. If it was a memory of course. Might just have been some glitch in the brain, some misfiring synapse, some broken connection whose side effect was a feeling of familiarity and fascination.
A melted toffee sweet on a summer road.
A strange kind of time machine.

I started thinking about this on the way home tonight.
I don't know why.