I fancied cycling out to a café yesterday afternoon up the Causey Mounth road in Aberdeenshire, an ancient drover’s road and a long uphill drag, but didn’t. Hills are one thing, but a hill with a gale of wind blowing is quite another. So I wrote a limerick instead…
A fair-weather cyclist once tried
To go for an afternoon ride
On a late winter’s day,
But got blown clean away
‘Cos’ twas blowing a hoolie outside.
Parody, litotes and satire
I was too young to be allowed to watch the first series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus when it aired on TV, but I did catch the second and subsequent series.
There was a lot that was pretty average in most of the episodes and I’m convinced that they are now viewed as ground-breaking not because they were laugh-a-minute shows, but because of the open-ended and nonsensical nature of the sketches and the ease with which the occasional really funny parts could be repeated ad nauseum by schoolkids in the country’s playgrounds.
And now Terry Jones has died, becoming the second of the Pythons to have “shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible”.
Subsequent to the Flying Circus series, Jones’ Ripping Yarns productions (co-written with Michael Palin) were, and remain, a joy to watch and, as an amateur historian, he successfully challenge orthodoxy, writing, for example, about the medieval era that:
A lot of what we assume to be medieval ignorance is, in fact, our own ignorance about the medieval world.
He also got to voice the best ever line in any of the Python productions…
better than: It’s only a wafer-thin mint, sir…
better than: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
better than: Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
and even better than: PININ’ for the FJORDS?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that?
’tis simply this: He’s not the Messiah – he’s a very naughty boy.
And here’s the limerick:
There once was a man so imbued
With humour that verged on the lewd
That he took of his clothes
And sat in repose
And played on his organ when nude!
I say, Mr Derek…Â
If you think this week’s ALAW sounds as if it’s a bit ‘make do and mend’, you’d be right. I wanted it to be an uplifting five-line eulogy for the actor Derek Fowlds who died recently, but I left it too close to my weekly deadline to produce a well-polished one.
I best remember Fowlds as Mr Derek, Basil Brush’s straightman in the puppet fox’s TV show, and then as Bernard Woolley in the renowned Yes Minister series.
His rôle in the latter was as a support to the two leads, but his delivery and comic timing elevated it well above that of a mere bit part and included the punchline to one of the best sketches in the entire series. (I never saw him in Heartbeat, a long-running daytime TV drama that he valued for giving him financial security in his later years).
Here’s the limerick:
I say, Mr Derek has died,
But memories of him will abide
As a stooge to a puppet
(A fox, not a muppet)
Who then sat at a Minister’s side.
There let him bouse, an’ deep carouse…Â
On Scotland’s love affair with strong drink and knavish, romantic poets:
A Scotsman once boused at the nappy
Got fou and was then unco happy.
His hard-drinking fate
Was a liquored-up state;
A poetic-but-guttered wee chappie!
‘Tis Burns Night tomorrow, so…
Greggxit!
I like towns (and cities) with their own character rather than homogenised, lookalike town centres filled with same old chain stores, betting shops and charity outlets.
All of which means that I’m not a great fan of shops like Greggs, the ubiquitous UK bakery chain. Consequently, I was amused to read that its only outlet in Cornwall, a concession within a service station, has closed. Apparently it was much ado about pasties. The Cornish, it seems, prefer the real thing:
“It’s obvious that Cornish people will use Cornish bakery’s where they can get a Cornish pasty rather than the s**t pasty slice from Greggs. They were never going to survive here.” [as quoted in the Daily Telegraph, including its misuse of the possessive instead of a plural. Groan!]
If only the good folk of Kendal had the same attitude I might still have been able to buy a decent slab of sly cake on my occasional forays to visit the Matriarch!
Anyway, as this is a retail-orientated ALAW (and with some economy with the actualité) here is a limerick BOGOF offer…
A bakery once tried to expand
In the south-western parts of the land,
But the Cornish aren’t patsies
And want their own pasties
So Greggs, it appears, has been banned.
There once was an outlet of Greggs
Whose pasties were really the dregs
Of the pastry-shop art
So it had to depart
With its tail firmly tucked ‘twixt its legs.Â
A receding heir line
As I’m not a great fan of the British monarchy, I usually try to avoid ‘royal’ news. Indeed, when William married Kate (one of the so-called Wisteria sisters, christened thus due to their adeptness at social climbing), Firstborn and I managed to avoid the whole televisual shebang by hiding deep below ground in a cave in the Yorkshire Dales.
(We had also hoped to avoid his brother’s matrimonials a few years later by zip-lining through the old slate mines in North Wales, but, sadly, our plans were scuppered.)
However, I found it impossible to avoid yesterday’s news headlines in which Harry and Meghan proclaimed to the world that they are leaving ‘The Firm’.
Will it solve their problems with regard to media intrusion into their lives? I doubt it!
Do I care? Not really!
Does it merit a limerick? Oh, go on then…
An actress once failed to foresee
An imperial calamity
‘Cos when Meghan met Harry
She thought she could marry
A Prince and then live royalty-free!
A laying on of hands…
It seems that a modern-day ‘Mrs Doyle’ took her devotion to the Pontiff a bit too far this week and was literally slapped down when she tried to get her hands on him.
The pugilistic Pope Francis later apologised, but I think it was a very human response, so good for him!
It also spawned this…
In a slugfest that soon spawned a trope
Twas Ali who once Roped-a-Dope
But those days are gone
‘Cos the game has moved on
To one where you now Grope-a-Pope!
Veni. Vidi. Ego deditionem!
On quizzing…
If barking up the wrong tree, backing the wrong horse, being wide of the mark or pi***ng into the wind scored points, I’d be a record-breaker. This applies especially to the Royal Statistical Society’s Christmas Quiz.
I ask myself how that it is
I’ve come over in all of a tizz.
The answer’s statistical,Â
– Analytically mystical –Â
It’s the annual RSS quiz!
It’s beginning to look a lot like Excess…
It’s that time of the year again and Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas in the Piscibus household without me bemoaning the rampant over-commercialisation of the festive season. So here goes…
‘Tis the season, they say, to be jolly
And for halls to be decked-out with holly,
But there’s no more Divinity
Just the epitome
Of a monsterous Yuletide folly.
It’s interesting that the prospect of being served caviar, the roe of female fish, sends some folk into paroxysms of gustatory delight whereas the thought of eating cod milt (male roe) usually evokes a rather different reaction (for the record, I’d avoid either!).
‘Disgust’ was apparently the reaction in a recent segment of James Corden’s Late, Late Show. Former paramours Harry Styles and Kendall Jenner were obliged to ask each other ‘awkward’ questions. The forfeit if Styles refused to answer Jenner’s question was to sample a plate of cod milt.
Styles chose to forfeit when Jenner asked which of the songs on his last album were about her.
But I have a question too. Most people think of ‘roe’ as fish eggs, so I just wonder how many people have enjoyed cod roe as a kind of caviar for the proletariat without realising that if the product’s packaging said ‘soft’ roe, then what they were buying was, in fact, milt?
Just asking!
A girl that he once used to date
Challenged Harry to eat something he’d hate.
So he went at full tilt
And ingested the milt
Of a codfish served up on a plate.
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