davywavy | Railway safety.

One of my more unusual memories of childhood is of a nightmare that I had. Like most childhood memories, it's quite dim and distant now, but I distinctly remember having a dream in which a school held its sports day on some railway lines. The children would run up and down the lines, and periodically a train would come along and squash some of them. It was quite a graphic dream - there was lots of blood, and there were weeping children and doctors trying to find who owned which leg and so forth. It's rare I remember much about my dreams, but this one clearly made an impression as I can remember it pretty clearly even now.

Anyway, after decades of thinking this had just been a juvenile nightmare, I discover that it wasn't a dream at all - it was in fact a safety film which I had been shown at school warning me of the dangers of playing on the railway. This must have been when I was about seven, remember. I mean, if you showed seven-year-olds films like this at school now, I'm pretty confident that someone would be arrested. Certainly, there'd be some harsh words about it on Twitter.