Thomas

Joshua and Thomas are friends. Thomas the Tank Engine, that is. Joshua loves to hear the Rev W Audry stories read aloud from his Thomas omnibus, he loves to watch Thomas on DVDs, he loves to play Thomas stories with his Duplo, he loves Thomas, full stop. (A long time ago I noticed that all the guys I dated had some sort of obsession: car stereos, RTS computer games, comic book heroes ... I just never realised until now that this obsessive nature was present in the male of the species before puberty.)

Yesterday when I woke up I found Joshua quietly drawing at the dining room table. He was drawing each of the trains that he has in his Duplo collection: Thomas, Percy, Gordon, Toby the tram and James. He showed me how he had written the correct number on each engine (although most of the numbers were backwards, and he admitted, "James' number 5 turned out a bit like a J.") He even included their faces, despite the obvious difficulty of perspective when you are drawing a train from the side, rather than the front, as well as getting their relative size correct.

Up until now, Joshua's Thomas obsession has led mainly to an interest in drawing maps of Sodor with train tracks covering the page. This is the first time he has set out to draw the engines themselves, and I'm pretty proud of his efforts.