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I’ve got a Nuttall-ergy.
Just churning out the jokes this year. What’s that? Four now?
I got off the tube at Ladbroke Grove. It was a crisp and sunny winter afternoon and I saw myself reflected in the windows of the train. As the train pulled away I carried on looking at the reflection, seemingly in the same place, but actually in a different window as the train gathered speed. I thought that this is a metaphor for life. We’re all just reflections in the window of a moving tube train. Life starts slowly, gathers pace and then suddenly the train and your reflection is gone. Just like that. No one really notices or cares. And the world carries on.
It was like seeing my own death or my own ghost
It didn’t make me feel sad. It just crystallised a truth. It’s so hard to imagine the world without yourself in it. Even though it was here for a long time before you showed up.
It would be an even more apt metaphor if the moving train reflected you at different points in your life and you saw the ageing happening before your eyes, like a flick book. But that would probably be a bit heavy-handed from the world of reflections. And freak you out a bit more. Especially if the final reflection was you aged about the same age as you currently were. Best to go with the non-magic symbolism.
He’s not dead. His train has just left the station.
Very much enjoyed this article about the various Bungles from Rainbow. Rat Bungle has always been my favourite. In hindsight it seems impossible to believe that anyone passed that horror show for use in a kids’ TV show, but I had fun imagining the meeting after the first series when they decided to change it to something that wouldn’t give children nightmares. Maybe there were no meetings. Maybe TV worked back then with people just picking up whatever props were in the cupboard and doing their best with them (I am fairly certain that Rod Hull just discovered the Emu puppet in a prop store and ran with it, which has always seemed a bit unfair on whoever it was who actually made the thing).
Having said that, maybe kids enjoy dead-eyed puppets and the like. I liked Hartley Hare in Pipkins (not as much as I liked Topov, but Hartley is more remembered for some reason) and he was even more scary and lasted for ages.
