Badge
The best thing about my boyhood in South Wales was the plastic Sheriff’s badge my father pinned to my waistcoat. Of course, back then I didn’t see it as plastic, but gold. Reflecting on it now, it occurs to me how unlikely it is that even a real Sheriff’s badge would be gold, but when I was boy everything that was good was gold, from tinsel to hard hats. My family was blessed with an abundance of gold, but the best of all was that badge.
Mum didn’t approve of me and Dad watching those Sunday afternoon Westerns, the hundreds of them with only slight variations. I never viewed them, then, as separate films, with separate titles like The Tall Man, The Strange Man, The Tall Stranger, The Man from Texas, The Man from Laredo, The Tall Texan, The Tall Man from Wisconsin, and so on. To me
