UP & DOWN CANARY WHARF

It's getting hard to organise even a modest anniversary these days without a row breaking out. First there was the D-Day commemoration, which was almost eclipsed by a brouhaha about spam fritters. Now there's a ruckus about another crucial 50th anniversary - that of the first appearance of the Thomas the Tank Engine books, that strangely wooden myth-cycle in which a cast of trains, coaches and trucks with moony faces clank pointlessly up hill and dale at the behest of a fat bully in a top hat.

A series of cheerful events is proposed, including an exhibition at the Railway Museum in York. Thomas's inventor, the Rev W Awdry, still with us at 83, has been invited to take part. But far from expressing delight at the longevity of his creation and its transmedial reworkings, he used the occasion of a Bookmark documentary to deliver a verbal pummelling to Britt Allcroft, the woman who turned his stories into the videos that toddlers adore and parents endure.

Ms Allcroft's videos, the Rev Awdry thundered, Lack Authenticity. They show "a lamentable ignorance of railway practice". They elevate Thomas, the small blue engine, to superstar status, even though he wasn't in the first three stories. "Thomas is in charge of his branch line," grumbled the Reverend, in the bitter tones of a man betrayed. "In the videos he's crane-shunted to all sorts of places with no explanation of which engine is standing in for him."

Worst of all, however, is what happens in a video called Henry's Forest, in which a train called Henry (presumably the Green Party Engine) stops to admire the scenery. "What possible interest," Awdry snorts, "could a railway engine have in scenery?"

This is not only a bizarre enquiry to come from a chap who has spent much of the past half-century convincing children that railway engines are, at various times, naughty, lazy, tired, bored and eager to engage in mischievous banter. It also makes one wonder about the kind of books the Reverend used to approve for his own children. Did he reject The Lord of the Rings because hobbits cannot reach the age of eleventy? Did he shout at his tiny charges, "What possible interest could a Cheshire Cat have in gradually fading away?" Did his children quake with fear of his disapproval when he discovered that Black Beauty was capable of an interior monologue? And is the Reverend's reductionist view of the imagination the real reason why his books are the most lethally dull productions in the whole canon of Kids' Lit?

H H H

Another victim of children's fiction is Carol Anderson, a Canadian widow of 46 summers, whose life in the rustic idyll of Comox, British Columbia, has been blighted by family trauma.

Mrs Anderson is the unfortunate mother of Pamela Anderson, the strikingly proportioned actress from the television show Baywatch on Saturday evenings (personally I prefer Mr Andrew Marr's series on political ideology on the other channel, but the young male Weaslets seem to derive some benefit from the beach drama's displays of artificial respiration). Anyway Ms Anderson, who was recently to be seen adumbrating her philosophy of life in a British tabloid, has now celebrated her marriage, in beach attire, to a young rock musician called Tommy. The happy pair were photographed in their going-away clothes: she amusingly clad in a Lambeth Council polythene dustbin liner; he relaxed in a lumberjack shirt and facial jewellery, although the tattoo on his neck reading "Bobbie" was perhaps ill-advised.

Ms Anderson's mother did not attend the wedding (perhaps she had no fashionable swimming costume) and vented her fury in the Daily Mail. "Pamela", she said evocatively, "is essentially a milk and cookie girl. That's what she's always been - very sporty, a very clean girl. She's never smoked, drank or did drugs. I'm not saying she does now, but that person she's married looks as if he's done everything... Quite honestly he looks like a mother's nightmare with that ring in his nose."

There was more in this vein, until one began to fear for the harmony of Christmas dinner chez Anderson next December. But I was struck by one moment of insight in Mrs Anderson's tirade. "We'd always planned her wedding day," she wailed. "Nothing huge or extravagant, just a simple family affair. That man's robbed me of that. They've behaved like children."

Of course. While apparently berating the runaway pair for their all-too-modern sophis-tication, her maternal eye could see that they were merely responding to an impulse from childhood. Need I spell it out? Where have you heard that combination before - of beach, beauty, sex, rock'n'roll, marriage, nasal rings and too much disposable income?

The Owl loked up to the Stars above

And sang to a small guitar,

O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are

And what happens to the Owl and the Pussycat? The smitten feline, already possessed of "plenty of money/Wrapped up in a five-pound note" determines that "too long we have tarried" (five days in the case of Tommy and Pammy) and suggests wedlock. Fetching up in the land where the Bong-tree grows (a clear reference to the ubiquitous Mexican palm trees), they look for guidance:

And there in a wood, a Piggy-wig stood

With a ring at the end of his nose.

Impressed by this porcine ostentation, they buy the ring, marry and dance - where? "On the edge of the sand," of course. Who would have guessed that Edward Lear was writing, in 1871, the script of a Baywatch romance? And one in which - unsurprisingly, given Mr Lear's eccentric habits - he carefully excluded any mention of mothers-in-law?

H H H

My heart sinks at the news that Comic Relief is on its way round again. Not because I believe it to be anything but a good and wise and wonderful thing; but because I am alarmed by the tendency of such charitable shows to persuade the normally inactive to perform some stunt or other for a good cause.

Recently the Rev Peter Wyld, a one-legged, 75-year-old retired vicar from Oxford, was persuaded to take a 12,000 ft sky-dive in aid of Prisoners Abroad. He did it and raised £3,000 in the process. Sadly, Rev Wyld didn't enjoy the experience. "I've been a conceited show-off all my life," he confessed to the Church Times, "but I've never been a show-off for so little reward. It was absolutely horrible."

It seems that everyone at the Northamptonshire airfield wanted to tell him that "after one jump I'd be hooked." He wasn't. "The explosion of terror at falling forwards out of the plane was the least frightful bit. Going up in the little plane with one side open was dreadful," he explained. Nor was his return to earth par-ticularly enjoyable. "There was no elation after we'd landed," he records. "I felt I'd just been an idiotic old man."

In the weeks to come, the country will be full of people telling us how much they enjoyed their first bungee jump or their sponsored abseiling session. Mr Wyld should be applauded for giving us a glimpse of the horrible truth. Those of us who hate the prospect of taking a walk at 12,000 feet without the benefit of an aircraft, but have never quite been able to explain why, owe him our gratitude.

H H H

The question of what happens to us when we die has troubled mankind for centuries. No more. A new book of personal reminiscences, The Truth in the Light, has come to the rescue, and offers us the sum total of human experiences of heaven. What's more, heaven turns out to feature, yes, a long tunnel, yes, a series of bright lights, and yes, "a Jesus-type figure... with a very pleasant face".

This could well be a description of Richard Branson's nightclub of the same name (especially when Mine Host is on hand), but the book's interviewees claim to have found the real thing. The chief eye-witness is one Allan Pring, who had a minor operation in Manchester Royal Infirmary and found himself "wide awake in a huge space - like the Albert Hall but thousands of times bigger". Ruling out the possibility that he had woken up in Birmingham's National Exhibition Centre, Mr Pring became convinced that he was dead, especially when a "wide, panoramic screen in glorious Technicolor" appeared in front of him and showed him the whole of his life, very fast.

Next, he floated into another room, where four hooded, sub-human figures asked him searching questions about his behaviour, motives and world-view, like a celestial Nolan Committee. Press conference over, he shot down the aforementioned tunnel towards a bright light, before popping back to the land of the living to tell his wife that there is no such thing as death.

Unfortunately, the 350 other people who have been to heaven and back and reported their findings do not necessarily share his delight. A former policeman from Suffolk disappeared down the usual tunnel towards the usual white light, only to meet his mother (who died in 1973) and several relatives. In the nick of time, Jesus turned up and stopped him from joining the party. A lucky escape: family get-togethers are fine in their place, but you wouldn't want to be stuck in them for eternity.

It was Evelyn Waugh who said that "every creed promises a paradise that will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilised taste". Bright lights, Technicolor screens, cotton-wool tunnels, Uncle Fred and Auntie Rita - you can see what he meant. The Weasel