Thomas the Tank Engine
It still happens on meeting people, although only occasionally, now. “Thomas, eh?” the odd one in two or three dozen will say. “‘Thomas the Tank Engine’! Ho ho! Bet you used to get that all the time!” And because they seem so hell-bent on sympathising with me I feel 
like I just have to smile ruefully and admit that, yes, kids can be so cruel. But, as a plain and simple matter of fact, that basically never happened. Never! The closest thing to nominalistic trauma ever inflicted on me as a child was the plethora of birthday and Christmas cards Crayola-crayoned to “Tomas”, complete with back-to-front ’s’ and arbitrarily lower-cased ‘t’. The idea that there was any mileage to be had from ironic comparisons to Really Useful Engines was apparently dismissed out of hand.
I was in my late teens when it started. Football first, any ball slotted between my legs inviting cries of “Choo choo, Thomas!” Then, suddenly, the whole world was in conspiracy to call any person of somewhat corpulent build whom I was seen with “The Fat Controller”. Fortunately, just as I was starting to get fed up with it, the whole thing was derailed (“Ho ho! Bet you used to get that all the time!”) by the infinitely more fruitful circumstance of my having been thrown out of a Glasgow bar for throwing up in their sink, something which I didn’t actually do but fully intend to make good on once my appearance has changed enough for them to let me back in.
(In real-life conversation what would follow here would be a long, thoughtful pause, as it occurred to me for the first time that someone actually did throw up in that sink, and got away with it too. Probably even blamed me for it. Took my good seat in the corner and casually drank the rest of my pint. Is currently reading this aloud to friends whilst giggling at my clumsy use of cadence. I bite my bottom lip and frown, silently internalising yet another source of vague, unfocused grievance, before going on: )
Anyway! I always liked Thomas the Tank Engine, to the extent that its theme tune is what I shall probably choose to enter the ring to should I ever become a professional wrestler, or come down the aisle to if I ever get married, right down to the rotating wrist movements mimicking the wheels of a train. I think I liked it (the show, not the tune) because it was so demonstrably unreal, model, idealised. And because of its falseness you took it at face value, not as a representation of the world as it actually is but as someone hopes it is, would like it to be. Animation used to be someone’s imagination meetings ours up there on the screen. Now instead I watch cartoons that look like real life and, right outside my window, the Lego bricks and Fisher Price construction of local government ‘regeneration’. Neat. Neat-o.