When you’re a kid — or, more specifically, if you’re me as a kid, your imagination sometimes likes to play tricks on you. Or perhaps it’s not “tricks” as such, but more a sense of artistic verisimilitude, or other such pretentious-sounding words. In simple terms, my mind liked to imagine that mundane things looked like other things.
Electricity pylons, for example, looked like an angry moustachio’d man. They stood there in the fields and meadows of the English countryside, glowering down at me as I sat in the back seat of my parents’ car on the way somewhere. I was always most keenly aware of them on long journeys, particularly the ride from Cambridgeshire to my grandparents’ home in the West Midlands. This was a journey of about two hours or so which was largely motorway based, and so there was relatively little to look at save electricity pylons for the majority of the route. (There was also the mass of TV and radio aerials near the town of Daventry, which our whole family knew was where King Graham was from, even though said farm of masts didn’t appeal in the King’s Quest series even once, disappointingly.)
I don’t feel such a strong sense of “alternate identity” with electricity pylons any more. That side of my childish imagination has gone the way of my childhood. But certain things have stuck with me — chief among which is the fact that I genuinely believe that traffic lights look like faces.
No, wait, stay with me. Let me describe it first and if you’re still not convinced I’ll draw you a picture.
Red lights are looking somewhat surprised, wide-eyed and open mouthed. Red and amber together are still eyebrows raised, but pleasantly surprised — a smile is creeping onto their lips. A green light is grinning with eyes closed — the facial expression most commonly associated with the obnoxiously overused emoticon “XD” nowadays — and an amber light, preparing to return to red, is eyes closed, looking worried — the kind of expression you might pull before driving your pedal car into an expensive plant pot, or something like that.
No? I can see I’m going to have to demonstrate this in a visual manner.
[Pause, while Pete fumbles with Paint.net]
All right. You want proof? Here it is. Traffic lights pull faces. And if I don’t convince you after this, then your sense of childish imagination is disappointingly withered, possibly dead. So there.
All right. That may not be the most compelling evidence ever put down on paper (real or virtual) but it’s what I saw as a kid and it’s what I still see now. I bet there’s something weird you look at in the same way. It may not be traffic lights, but I bet there’s something.