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This is not a story, this is a life.

Having spent much of my life writing stories, I am used to being in control of the material I have thought up. I can alter it, mould it to my fancy and fit it tidily into a plot with a beginning, a proper middle and an end.

I tried to do the same with this and of course it didn’t work. My life was already there, already fully inconsistent, irrevocably tangled, ill-timed and beset with incongruous events.

I suppose if I had been a dedicated person, one like my grandfather, who had a single guiding purpose throughout his life, there might have been a significant narrative on which to thread the events. But, although I have committed myself fairly passionately to various causes and purposes, these have come and gone as randomly as the circumstances that gave rise to them.

Even the main work of my life, making films for children’s television – Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, The Clangers, Bagpuss and the others – was not something I deliberately trained for and set out to do. It was something I slipped into almost by accident, because of some trouble with magnets.

So, in the end, I simply looked through my memory for the pieces that have, for reasons of their own, stayed with me, perhaps because they once made sense, illuminated some perception, caused grief or joy, or were just fun. I have assembled the incidents in more or less chronological order and have put together what seems to be a sort of travel book.

The engine wasn’t reliable, the track was badly laid, it led through dark tunnels and into weedy sidings, and as to where it was heading … your guess is as good as mine!

But I hope you will enjoy the scenery.

Oliver Postgate

December 1999