Pages

Friday 16 October 2015

The Duplo Train

Listening to five minutes of Jeremy's playing with his Duplo train set is like entering a surreal universe.

A train gets stuck on a country track. It has broken down. Oh no!  What will the passengers do?  They'll never get to the station!  They must find a train driver, because drivers are good at fixing trains.

Thank goodness!  A train driver has been found in one of the carriages (quite who has been driving the train up until this point remains a mystery).  He knows all about trains.  He volunteers to have a look, steps down from the carriage and approaches the engine, where he tinkers with something on the side for a bit.  He says it needs oil, and he has some in his truck, but his truck is nowhere to be seen.

He's a clever train driver, though, and he thinks outside the box and walks to a nearby farm, where he asks the farmer: "Please can I borrow one of your animals?"

"Oh, yes!" says the farmer enthusiastically, and offers a brown cow.  The train driver leads the cow back to the stranded train and walks it around the engine once.  Then he takes it back to the farmer and thanks him.

("What did he need the cow for, Jeremy?"
"To fix the train."
"Yes, but what did the cow do to fix the train?"
"It mooooed.")

All right then.  Back to the engine.  The driver returns to his carriage and waits expectantly in his passenger seat.  Oh dear, it's still not moving!  Off the driver goes to the farm again.

"Please may I borrow your goat?"

The goat is the charm, and the passengers are on their way to sounds of cheering.

There still doesn't appear to be anybody actually driving the train.

1 comment:

AlexC said...

Yay! The mystical engineering powers of farm animals.

Zoe's been getting into limited roleplay with some of her toys. A gorilla has been dubbed "Friendly Gorillala" and appears to be a doctor. One of her other toys will get hurt, call for a doctor and have Friendly Gorillala turn up and make it better either by giving it medicine that's "yucky and disgusting", or by repeatedly kissing the bit that hurts.