‘Hats off’ to those members of the UK Parliamentary women’s football team who decided to have a kick-about in the Chamber of the House of Commons after their scheduled match was cancelled due to a possible late sitting and vote.
Apparently, the Parliamentarians told the Chamber’s doorkeepers that they had permission for their antics; something the Speaker of the House later insisted was not given by him!
Just like naughty schoolkids.
Of course it just cries out for a limerick…
Within Parliament’s sanctified halls There’s nothing, it seems, that forestalls The sense of unease When our female MPs Start playing around with their balls!
This week’s ALAW draws on the anatomy of certain fish species, notably salmonids and many catfishes, and concerns what was once considered to be a vestigial feature, the adipose fin.
‘Somefin in the way she moves…’
Adipose means fat, but ironically the root of the adipose fin is no longer considered to be a site of fat storage. The name stuck anyway, and recent research suggests that it is not, in fact, vestigial, but may act as a flow sensor ahead of the tail fin to improve manoeuverability in turbulent waters.
Close-up of an adipose fin.
However, ‘manoeuverability’ is not a word that I would associate with this week’s theme; a Finnish fisheries scientist (who I shall not identify) that a former colleague nicknamed with reference to his gargantuan size; the pun is obvious, but it still makes me laugh:
A scientist whose girth was akin To a humongously large garbage bin Studied fish in the sea With Finnish esprit So we called him ‘The Adipose Finn’
It’s late afternoon in November in the German town of Ettlingen and I’m sitting outside at an Eiscafé eating ice-cream, as one does, whilst trying to compose this week’s ALAW.
Mine’s on the left😎
Germany? Sausages? Bad puns? Here it is:
I’m sat here all starving and glum
With an empty and aching old tum.
In a café so German
The waiter’s called Hermann,
And I’m hungry, but the wurst’s yet to come!
It’s well-known in my family that I have strong opinions on what comprises a ‘proper’ rocket and I can say without fear of contradiction that, as rockets go, the Saturn V is peerless! Which is why I’ve just seen the film First Man, a biopic of Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon and an event that I remember watching as a kid. In fact, the Saturn V launch sequence was the highlight of the movie for me and I suspect it is no coincidence that Lego produced its version of the rocket in the same year that the film was released; a commercial tie-in, perhaps?
Which brings me to the events of a couple of years ago when shortly after watching SpaceX launch a re-supply mission to the International Space Station, one that succeeded in ‘landing’ the launch vehicle’s first-stage propulsion unit (upright!) on an ocean barge for re-use, ‘Firstborn’ messaged me about its awesomeness and significance (having watched it in the presence of an astrophysicist who had explained the various goings-on).
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 first stage landing upright on a barge. Wow! But it’s not a Saturn V!
Awesome indeed, and a terrific technological breakthrough; however, my subsequent suggestion that there was only ever one ‘proper’ rocket, the Saturn V, was met with some disdain by the astrophysicist concerned: “Saturn V was a glorious rocket, but SLS will be even better. Also F*** YOU!”. Charming, eh?
(Actually, although our young wordsmith had been telling Firstborn about SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle, his comment about ‘SLS‘ refers to NASA’s Space Launch System, a bigger re-usable launch vehicle that can chuck a whole lot more metal into the sky than the Falcon 9, but one that is still delayed in production, over-budget and yet-to-perform)
The thing is, my reasoning about the Saturn V had nothing to do with technology. It’s all about ‘soul’. To anyone that stayed up all night as a youngster in the UK in 1969 to watch the TV relay of the first-ever moon landing (on a 405-line black and white vacuum-tube TV), the image of the Saturn V still resonates. So despite the subsequent technological advances, for a youngster whose first-ever Airfix-kit model was that of a Saturn V rocket bought as a result of watching those fuzzy pictures of ‘Eagle’ landing on the moon followed by Neil Armstrong’s timeless declaration, there can only ever be one rocket with soul, only one ‘proper’ rocket; the Saturn V!
(Apollo 8, shown above, was the mission that first entered lunar orbit, paving the way for Apollo 11’s successful moon landing.)
Anyway, here’s what I replied to the errant astrophysicist…
An astrophysicist once thought that he knew Of a rocket that could easily out-do The outer space jive Of an old Saturn V But it can’t, so go F*** yourself too!
Postscript #1:N.B.Apollo 13 is by far a better movie than First Man and, if you are interested, a charming recreation of events surrounding the TV relay of the Apollo 11 mission can be seen in the Australian movie The Dish.
Postscript #2: Did you know that you can become your own man or woman in the moon by taking a selfie through the cardboard tube from the innards of a roll of paper towels…
My last post hinted at a family connection with John Cunliffe, the author of the Postman Pat and Rosie & Jim series, who died recently. The connection was that for several years he, John-the-teacher, taught alongside my mother (‘The Matriarch’) at Castle Park Primary School in Kendal. He was already a published children’s author and started his Postman Pat stories while still teaching at the school.
John Cunliffe, whose gentle tales were commemorated in the Graun’s obituary of him with these words: “Kindness and generosity, together with selflessness and community spirit, were virtues worth celebrating in the autumn of 1981 as the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, entered her second year in office.” ‘Amen’ to that!
‘Tis a little-known fact that one of his book titles, a book of poems for children, was actually inspired by the Matriarch. She had been on dinner duty at the school one day when one of the children responsible for serving at a table (John-the-pupil) let drop a strawberry from one of the dessert dishes. Having seen it fall, and concerned that the poor lad might slip on it, the Matriarch yelled: “John, you’re standing on a strawberry!”.
On looking around afterwards, she saw John-the-teacher slip-sliding down his seat at the staff’s dinner table in a fit of laughter at what he’d just heard. I don’t know if John-the-pupil realised it at the time, or whether he ever knew, but his runaway strawberry and the Matriarch’s yell inspired this:
‘You’re standing on a strawberry, I heard the teacher say. It was an end-of-term school dinner and we’d had strawberries that day. ‘You’re standing on a strawberry, and it isn’t very good, to put your great big feet, on what’s left of someone’s pud!’
On another occasion, John advised the Matriarch to take mega-doses of vitamin C to ward off the colds that the school’s pupils invariably passed on to their teachers. Boots the Chemist’s 1000mg vitamin C tablets were the order of the day and, dutifully, the Matriarch bought a packet and, without reading the label, immediately popped one into her mouth.
It was effervescent! Now, in a small town like Kendal, teachers often meet parents of their pupils in the high street and this day was no different. Not wishing to froth visibly, she kept her mouth shut and nodded at parents who wished to stop and chat – whilst swallowing furiously. When she told John he once more laughed hysterically and, later in the afternoon, he sent one of his pupils through to her classroom with a note for her. Here it is:
Some months later, when John asked if she still had the note, it wasn’t immediately to hand otherwise it may have comprised a verse and the epitaph of yet another anthology of his poems.
Here’s my take on it
‘Twas the author of ‘Pat’ who confessed That vitamin C was the best Cure for colds, But the story unfolds Of a teacher who then effervesced!
Blimey! Another tranche of celebrities just bit the dust: Chas from Chas ‘n’ Dave, Geoffrey from Rainbow, Charles Aznavour from France and John Cunliffe from the Ragdoll via Greendale.
We had family connections with John from his days as a teacher in Kendal and I’ll write of that in a later post, including a couple of his unpublished ditties (sadly neither is a limerick), but this week’s ALAW concerns the diminutive Gallic chanteur, Charles Aznavour.
Both of Aznavour’s UK hits charted in the 70s during my teens and I remember them well, but I also remember thinking that he was an unlikely purveyor of romantic ballads. It must have been the French accent that did it – la langue de l’amour – as Aznavour himself demonstrated when sweet-talking Miss Piggy on The Muppet Show:
(Perhaps Don Estelle, ‘Lofty’ in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum should have affected such an accent; he had a terrific tenor voice, but at four foot nine and rotund, he stood little chance of being taken seriously as a balladeer – although Aznavour himself only reached five foot three).
Anyway, here’s my eulogy to the little Frenchman…
A singer of beaucoup chansons Le petit Français has now gone And his fans can’t rejoice ‘Cos now Charles ‘as ‘n’ a voice. Le chanteur à chanté his last song.
Postscript: Is French La langue de l’amour as the subtitles in the clip from The Muppet Show suggest, or Le langage de l’amour as Google translate implies? I don’t know, but from the days when a French waitress used to make me go weak at the knees simply by greeting me at the door of the Findlay Clark garden centre café in Aberdeen in heavily accented and broken English, I do know this: le Français est la langue la plus sexy au monde!
It’s impossible, I think, to downplay The hoolie that’s blowing today. On the mariner’s scale ‘Tis a storm not a gale In fact, it’s quite blown us away!
I read recently that this year’s Formula One Grand Prix may be one of the last to be held at Ferrari’s ‘home track’ of Monza and, as I was struggling for this week’s ALAW, it put me in mind of a limerick that I wrote a few years ago.
Red Bull gives you wings! (If only! Ralf Schumacher’s spectacular crash in 2002 was with the Williams F1 team. He never actually drove for Red Bull).
I’d been inspired by a friend that had just been to Monza and had posted a few photos of the F1 race on his Facebook page (none as remarkable as the one above, sadly). This is what resulted:
I’ll drive down to Monza and go see Some Formula One virtuosi, And then, just perhaps, I’ll shoot off some snaps And become ‘one’ with all the Tifosi!
Hopefully, normal service will be resumed next week with a fresh-out-of-the-oven limerick instead of a ‘Blue Peter’ one (aka “Here’s one I made earlier…”)
One of the first ‘expert’ groups to which I was privy was convened in the mid-1980s to consider the sprat fisheries in the North Sea (I wasn’t one of the experts; just a junior learning the ropes).
I remember listening to a few hours of interesting and animated conversation before being asked to write-up the entire discussion.
Unfortunately, no-one had asked me beforehand to act as the meeting’s rapporteur so I hadn’t taken notes and couldn’t recall the detail. I can’t remember how my subsequent text was received by the real experts, but it was a lesson well and truly learned: always take notes juste au cas où!
That all came back to me this week when I read a friend’ s contribution to our workplace newsletter. She had written about the link between a pair of dried-up clupeids in our collection (a herring, Clupea harengus, and a sprat, Sprattus sprattus) and the notorious Edinburgh murderers and body snatchers Burke and Hare.
An Atlantic herring (top) and a European sprat. Both species were originally described by Linnaeus in 1758 and included as separate species in the genus Clupea, Sprat was later accorded its own genus, Sprattus, in 1846.
The link was the anatomist Robert Knox FRCSE who was asked by the ‘Commissioners of British White Herring Fishery’ (sic) in 1836 to examine small pelagic fish caught in the Firth of Forth and who consequently identified a mixed fishery of herring and sprat. Knox was the self-same anatomist that had previously benefitted from Burke and Hare’s murderous nocturnal forays.
The kind of observational anatomy that Knox used to separate the two species can’t have been too far removed from the methods I was taught (and used) in the mid-1980s (‘meristics and morphology’); methods far removed from the modern-day techniques of DNA sequencing and gene mapping.
Here’s the limerick:
Nowadays we have flash apparatus To discern what the oceans throw at us, But the anatomist Knox Just had fish in a box One herring and one Sprattus sprattus.
(Hint: pronounce it appa-RAH-tuss and not appa-RAY-tuss or it doesn’t work!)
Postscript: ‘White herring’ are fresh herring as opposed to ‘red herring’ that have been cured by smoking. As red herring are highly scented they can be dragged along the ground to lay a false trail to divert a hunting pack of dogs from its prey; hence the idiom ‘a red herring’ popularised by the writer William Cobett.
In a similar vein, hound trailing that originated in the English Lake District uses a rag soaked in a mix of aniseed and paraffin oil to lay a trail for the racing hounds to follow; nevertheless, I can’t see ‘aniseed trail’ catching on as idiomatically as ‘red herring’.
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