In the Railway Series, mechanical whimsy (Look! A steam train! With a face!) is balanced by a taste for punishment that is both brutal and peremptory.
And they love him, despite the fact that his stories are the crazed authoritarian fantasies of a father figure who would make the sternest Freudian blanch. They love him, even though the island of Sodor belongs to a far-off postwar world where things like 'coal' and 'steam' and 'public transport' – unimaginable to the modern child-brain – were still comprehensible concepts. They love him so much that Barbie-hawker Mattel has bought the entire stable of Hit Entertainment, apparently mostly in order to get their corporate fingers on the Rev W Awdry's coal-powered progeny. Tricky word? It's probably 'coupling', or maybe 'gauge'. And it lasts until exactly the day your children discover Thomas the Tank Engine, at which point you start developing mysterious headaches come bedtime and, Oh darling, I know you're only three, but you can probably work this one out yourself from the pictures while I lie on the floor with the duvet over my face. R eading to your children is one of the great joys of parenthood.
