Category: A Limerick A Week

Some lines inspired by the sophistry of Michael Gove…

A political ‘stardust’ devotee
Was a coke-head who went on a drugs spree
And the excuse he’d invoke
Was he only bought coke
” ‘Cos sometimes you couldn’t get Pepsi!”

 

One-a-penny, two-a-penny…

Viewers of Eurotrash, Channel 4’s late-night and off-beat look at the seedier side of European culture that aired in the UK in the mid-1990s, will remember the strangulated tones of Antoine de Caunes’ archetypical French-accented English.

They may also remember that the sight of oiled-up, bronzed and supine-but-topless Riviera bathers brought to his mind the image of some rather overdone fried eggs; imagery that is equally applicable nowadays to the bearers (barers?) of both boobs and moobs (although the latter is not what de Caunes had in mind).

Unfortunately, it is a visual epigram that is hard to forget, moreso given the sights on show when walking along the bay in Puerto Pollença, Mallorca, in early June as we have just done en famille.

Another beachside visual epigram that is hard to shake off comes courtesy of the English comedian Harry Hill, who once observed that, when viewed par derrière, the prevalence of thongs amongst sun-worshipping beach-goers left him hankering after a hot cross bun or two.

Hmmm! Thanks for that Harry. You can blame him for this week’s limerick…

A young man when out for some fun
In the heat of the Mallorcan sun,
Snuck some brazen wee peeks
At the unadorned cheeks
Of a lass with a tanned hot cross bum!

Another three men in a boat…

Jerome Klapka Jerome was not the only person to wax lyrical about the adventures of three men in a boat. Back in the 1970s, three editions of the BBC’s anthology series Play for Today told of the adventures of another trio in a boat – three Yorkshire miners named Art, Ern and Abe.

The episode that I remember best was entitled Stratford or Bust and it regaled us with the tale of their haphazard journey by canal boat from ‘up north’ to Stratford-upon-Avon to see a Shakespearean play at the RSC Theatre. (Spoiler: they arrived in Stratford, but the theatrical performances were already sold out.)

The TV production obviously made an impact on me as I have now travelled by narrowboat to Stratford on three separate occasions, most recently just a few weeks ago when two friends and I ventured on to the Grand Union Canal at Warwick to tackle the famous flight of broad locks at Hatton and to enjoy the equally famous mega-breakfast sold by the Hatton Locks café.

We then cruised and locked down the South Stratford canal to descend into the town where we moored in the Bancroft Basin and had a day in Stratford before retracing our steps back to Warwick.

My attempt to reverse park our narrowboat into a tight bay in the Bancroft Basin was successful, so much so that one owner of a private boat, who had emerged to ensure that a mere ”hire boat’ helmsman didn’t damage his pride and joy, reckoned that I’d done it perfectly before adding that “… of course, the wind helped to blow your bow around”. Condescending b*****d!

At the end of our trip I also reverse parked at the hire boat marina into a very tight space with precious little room for manouevre. That went so well that another hire boat returnee asked us where we wanted his boat to be moored. He expressed surprise when he was told that we too were hirers. Our mooring manouevres had looked so professional to him that he thought we were the boatyard staff. And that’s when it nearly went all pear-shaped…

So, I was reversing along a pontoon towards a concrete wharf when I realised I needed to slow down a bit, so I did what I always do to slow down and gunned the engine in reverse.

Whoops! Now I was reversing rapidly into the wharf, so suddenly it needed to be full steam ahead.

Phew! That successfully avoided a collision with the concrete, but in shallow water with a only a metre of it behind us, it created an enormous wash that violently flooded the wharf.

It also flooded our crew member who was standing on the wharf holding our stern line. Laugh? I nearly pooped the deck!

Here’s the limerick:

‘Twas Jerome K. Jerome who once wrote
Of a trio of blokes all afloat
And that’s why, perhaps,
Three modern day chaps
Thought the canals might just float their boat!

Postscript: Hands up if you thought my expression about ‘pooping the deck’ was an unecessarily lavatorial reference made solely for a cheap laugh? Honest answer? It was, but, in fact, I had pooped the deck! In nautical terms, the poop deck is usually the highest deck level at the stern of a boat and, if it was ever flooded by a wave washing over it from behind, the boat was said to have been pooped. My emergency stop when reversing may have created a huge wash that flooded the wharf (and my mate), but it also bounced back off the wharf and flooded the aft deck of the narrowboat – we’d been well and truly pooped!

Mulling over parenthood…

As first time visitors to the Isle of Mull, we took one of the tourist trips out to Staffa to see Fingal’s Cave, and to Lunga, one of the Treshnish Isles, to take part in some puffin therapy (highly recommended!).

On Lunga there were hundreds of puffins and, if you sat quietly near their burrows, they would happily ignore you as they went about plucking grass to line their nesting chambers.

We spent two entrancing hours on Lunga and then it was time to rejoin the boat along with our touristic confreres that included an overly loud family comprising Grandma, Grandad, Dad and two youngsters; a little brat and his older brother.

The two kids, particularly the youngest, were not really aware of any behavioural boundaries, and it was clear to see why. Their dad, you see, was inept. No other word suffices. It didn’t help that ‘Grandma’ constantly shrieked at the youngsters, so folk standing many yards away bore witness to two generations of adults with nugatory parenting skills.

Still, their performance inspired this:

You’d have thought he was trying to spoof us
When he named his kids Torven and Rufus
And they both misbehaved
‘Cos the pillock displayed
The parenting skills of a doofus!

An apology of a limerick

I’ve been on a busy narrowboat trip all week and with all the locks to work and time spent at the tiller (and pub), I’ve had little time to develop this week’s ALAW, so here is all I can offer this week:

A fellow once ran out of time
To produce his once-a-week rhyme
So he put it on hold
And will let it unfold
Next week (or the future sometime) .

Normal service will be restored shortly!

The world has held great Heroes,
As history books have showed;
But never a name to go down to fame
Compared with that of Toad!
(Kenneth Graham)

Last year we attempted to raise tadpoles in a large plastic trug (aka a big bucket). We succeeded up to a point, the point being where the tadpoles had developed legs and lay in the shallows. Unfortunately, despite some netting over the trug, the birds got ’em when, due to heavy rain, the water level rose to the level of the net.

Our tadpoles were from a local stream and were shoaling when we found them which means they were from toad spawn and not frog spawn. NB our trug is an isolated ‘pond’ so unless any toadlets had been liberated there would have been no risk of disease transmission from one natural site to another. Moreover, had any of the toadlets survived, they would in any case have been released at the same place at which the tadpoles had been collected.

So, lesson learned and this year we have an ACME anti-predator ‘cage’ around the trug and all we need now are the tadpoles. Naturally, we revisited our local ‘toad hall’ to look for them, but there was none for the simple reason that we were too early to find them. Instead we were faced with a positive orgy of toad procreation.

Interestingly, they were in a fairly discrete area (although none too discreet in their behaviour!) and there was no sign of any other amphibian bacchanalia either upstream or downstream.

Anyway, although there were no tadpoles and the puddock debauchery was still in full swing, there was some spawn of which we gathered a small quantity and we’ll try to hatch our own tadpoles this year.

So, without further ado, here is a down-market limerick about our tadpole hunt…

We went with the intention of bagging
Some tadpoles, and our search was unflagging,
But we set out too soon
(How inopportune!)
And found that the toads were still sha**ing!

A blonde walked in to a bar…

“Ouch!”, it was an iron bar!

I have two favourite jokes. The longest standing one is:

… and now to the football results. Real Madrid: 1, Surreal Madrid: Fish!

It’s no coincidence that it involves word play as that’s the kind of thing that I really like. My other favourite is one that I heard for the first time about 10 years ago. It, too, involves word play, but is also non-PC and ‘blonde-ist’; however I can’t help finding it funny, so please indulge me:

A blonde went in to a bar and asked for a double entendre…

… so the barman gave her one!

Okay, so you didn’t laugh or you’ve heard them before, but there is a reason for introducing them, the second one at least. That is to show the inspiration behind the last in my series of limericks inspired by Vision and Mission statements. This was my final entry to a senior colleague’s request that we provide a Vision or Mission statement in the form of a limerick. It leans heavily on the tradition of Britain’s Carry On film franchise of the 1960s and 70s, and is also the on that got me disqualified from the competition…

The ‘Carry On’ One

My boss is the facilitator
(Or should it be ‘originator’)
Of a Mission to define
A Visionary rhyme
So I’ll ponder and give her one later

Postscript: It’s Good Friday and I was amused by Tom Gauld’s view of one of the modern-day Easter traditions. Unlike his realisation of Werner Herzog, below, I did manage to return home eggless (for the simple reason that I’m still on a weight loss campaign and I know only too well that if I got one I’d scoff the lot – including the sweeties in the middle).

The Great Escape (not!)

Four years before I was able to retire, I genuinely believed that I was going to be successful in gaining voluntary early severance from my job. Unfortunately for me my application fell at a newly created final hurdle. That was disheartening because, several years earlier, the senior management ethos of the organisation had shifted from a collaborative one to one that was autocratic and authoritarian; something that was contrary to my modus operandi and that of most of my colleagues.

Being denied early severance was a blow that even a shift to part-time working never fully allayed and one result of it was that my performance dropped from ‘going the extra mile’ to being ‘just good enough’. But I shouldn’t have worried, because ‘just good enough’ was all our Director of the time wanted (see ALAW #132), so win-win for her!

Anyway, continuing on my recent theme of Vision and Mission statements in the style of a limerick, here is the third entry that I made to the competition organised by a senior colleague and one that is related to my endeavours to leave the organisation prematurely:

The Personal One

My Vision’s a life full of leisure
That’s something I really would treasure.
So the Mission for me
Is how to break free
And enhance my lump sum for good measure!

Postscript: Despite my failure to get time off for good behaviour, I do know how fortunate I was in being able to retire recently at the age of 60 on a pension based on my final salary. That is something that is less and less common in an era when too little attention is focused on the wreckers from both our major political parties who contributed to the downfall of final salary schemes over the last 30 years. Coupled to a neoliberal doctrine that fails to support anything other than poorly paid jobs for many and obscene salaries, bonuses, dividends and pensions for the few, I know just how lucky I was to be able to finish when I did!