…a sleepy little boy laid down on a tatty brown hearthrug in front of a flickering log fire and took a sip from a mug of lukewarm milk. A battered old TV in its cream casing slowly hummed into life, and showed the little boy a little shop, with a dainty front window and a little girl wandering in through the door. And inside, also dozing on a tatty brown hearthrug, was a saggy old cloth cat. Baggy, and a bit loose at the seams, but Emily loved him.
I’ve just come in from working late to find out that Oliver Postgate passed away peacefully today. In the distant, sepia-tinted mid-Seventies, when all my tiny memories were a little beige around the edges, Oliver Postgate made my favourite programme in the whole wide world.
I don’t often feel things like this especially personally, but that’s really given my old heart a big battering.
I was ill a few weeks ago, and spent a long Thursday afternoon lying on a big cushion with a blanket over me. Sorcha put the Bagpuss DVD on, and I lay there for the full three hours, drifting in and out of sleep as this gorgeous, gentle, sepia-tinted magic unfolded in front of me. A tired, 35-year-old man feeling like a sleepy four-year-old once again.
And when Oliver goes to sleep…
RIP, you lovely, gentle wise old man.
Wiffle Lever To Full! 
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