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> I liked that poem, Dom. This is not a new poem, but it's kind of > concerned with the same questions: Yes, I remembered that one from somewhere (you might have posted it here before, a while ago). Derailed trains again, interestingly enough. My son watches Thomas the Tank Engine a lot, which is full of disasters (which are his favourite bits). A psychologist recently suggested that the series was making children frightened of train journeys. Oliver re-enacts the particularly "traumatic" scenes with great relish and enthusiasm. I think it's a bald and useful truth about what it can be like being eight or nine years old that I really did see being myself as something that absolutely had to go on happening without interruption. The idea of any sort of hitch or hiatus in the continuous thread of consciousness raised all sorts of problems. One could become totally estranged from oneself in an instant. An obvious response to this anxiety is to place one's identity in the safekeeping of others, who will keep watch over it even when one forgets oneself. I think this is an idea that occurs sooner to some people than to others; it came rather late to me. Dominic