Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.

Tweet Ah, wanderly wagon. A children's show from those days where a vignette about snakes and ladders could prove as terrifyingly existential as a one-act Samuel Beckett play. And, as we all know, life sometimes still feels like a fucked up game of snakes and ladders with a know-it-all prick of a crow cackling 'I told you so' over your shoulder.

(Aside - If there was an Irish 'Neon Indian', he'd swipe the theme tune to wanderly wagon and fucking run with it for ever, the chillwave cunt. Hey, wait...I'm just kidding Neon. Come back please, I need you. Hang out with me and the possie like we did in the 'Shaw last week. Remember how we ironically ate roast potatoes cos it was Sunday, then non-ironically gobbled a load of cattle wormer pills from New Zealand and jiggled around the barr to your tune and it was only lunch and it was mad? Then we capered through Rathmines in the daylight until the worming tablets wore off. Remember how we got home to play guitar hero and luxuriously felt that every time we busted major fret during Dragonforce's 'fire and flames' a discrete unit of the human soul did not have to die? Y'know, not like it felt that time before? The time you cried at the TG4 euroweather?)

When this show used to come on, my brother and I went quare. Bloodless faces, tiny bodies collapsed in stiff sobbing angles behind a couch. Indeed'n I still feel the visceral panic which used to overcome me at the start, when the wagon moved in semi-animate slow motion through the air, piloted through waning time-lapse light by a peculiar sort of overjoyed pig lady pilot. My mother describes the scene well: two screaming twins, faces pumped beetroot, scrunched together in mutual telepathic horror behind a couch, yet still very much drawn to the source of that which demented their wee minds.

And as for fortycoats? I remember clearly a demonic shade to his persona. He was like an archetypical travelling salesman form hell - a comically devilish character out of Bulgakov. He also flew some sort of contraption, and confidently spoke in rhyming verse ("I'll take look at me breakfast bowl, it's empty crow, now where'd it go? And that shoal of herring which flew beyond the wagon, which caught me eye before that dragon?"*) He was a spooky fucker. And with the exception, perhaps, of rimini riddle, the single most spooky entity on RTE kid's TV.

*made up in the fortycoats style