Category: A Limerick A Week

A brief discourse on avian contraband …

Having enjoyed a couple of trips to the thermal baths during my recent foray to Germany (see posts passim), I was interested to hear that a colleague on a visit to France had also indulged, but being in the land of the Gauls he was, of course, confronted by the French ban on the wearing of swimming shorts in public pools – a ban on any swimwear that is baggy and not skin-tight. In other words, Speedos were the order of the day for him.

I first came across this bizarre constraint a couple of years ago when attending a wedding in France. The Speedo requirement was enforced in all public pools including the one on the campsite at which we were staying. We were told this was for hygiene reasons and I have since read that this is, indeed, the case. So, whereas I’m quite happy in my baggy dookers (as they are known en Écosse), we looked for, and found, a tighter-fitting pair that passed muster in the French pools; a sort of hybrid between so-called budgie smugglers and boxers.

Meantime, back in Germany, my sister’s family always dread the moment their pater familias emerges from the changing cubicles at their local spa as he is a relict of the golden age of  budgie smugglers and an unapologetic advocate of the Speedo approach to swimwear. Slim, athletic youths may be able to carry it off, but late-middle-aged men can’t and that is not debatable!

Anyway, the point of all this is to bring you a limerick, so here it is:

A chap should know when he goes
To France, they will always impose
A sartorial rule
When you bathe in a pool,
That forces you into Speedos.

Postscript: I don’t think that it is widely appreciated that the person to blame for the Speedo blight on the world was, in fact, a Scot.

According to the Rampant Scotland website, Alexander MacRae was born in Kyle of Lochalsh around 1890 and emigrated to Australia in 1910 where he established a hosiery business at Bondi Beach in 1914. Ultimately his business marketed Speedo swimwear in 1928; a product that eventually evolved into the abomination that are the budgie smugglers of today.

After her all-too-close an encounter with a canine’s canines, sympathies go to my Ice Cream Buddy via the medium of a limerick where the guilty mutt discovers the power of speech and serves a contrite warning to others:

While out for a walk in the park
Misuko was heard to remark
“I wouldn’t come near,
In fact, I’d stay clear.
‘Cos my bite is much worse than my bark!”

It could be verse …

I’m never quite sure why the Japanese literary art of haiku is so revered.

I get that (traditionally) a haiku has a strict structure and comprises three lines with a sequence of five, seven and five moras. (Apparently moras are sound structures in Japanese that are similar to, but not the same as, syllables).

… I get that they mostly don’t rhyme.

… I get that they comprise two phrases placed together for contrast.

… I even get that at times (usually?) they seem to lack meaning.

What I don’t get (and this is what I really don’t get) is why they are held up as examples of high literary art when the humble limerick is looked down upon from those immersed in ‘high’ culture

After all limericks have a defined structure like haiku, in their case comprising five lines in which, strictly, the first, second and fifth should each have nine syllables and the rest only six. Admittedly they differ from haiku as the longer lines each rhyme as do the two shorter ones, but that just makes them harder to construct.

You can even get technical in their definition as they are quintains with a strict rhyme scheme and anapestic meter in which the first, second and third lines are triplets, comprising three anapests and the others are couplets with only two. As an anapest is a three-syllabic clause usually with emphasis on the third syllable, a limerick is phrased thus:

Tee tee tum, tee tee tum, tee tee tum
Tee tee tum, tee tee tum, tee tee tum
Tee tee tum, tee tee tum
Tee tee tum, tee tee tum
Tee tee tum, tee tee tum, tee tee tum.

Although that is strict definition of a limerick’s meter they don’t all follow such an exact scheme; however, modern conventions in haiku also break from strict tradition, so clearly both forms are flexible. (It’s rare that my limericks are precise enough in their meter to correspond to the strictest definition, but sometimes a chap has to compromise as you’ll see later).

The modern tradition of limerick writing almost compels them to incorporate clever word play and, if possible, subtle innuendo. If you can get meter, word play and innuendo matched, then you have the perfect limerick. I’m still striving for that. I struggle to achieve more than one out of the three in my efforts in A limerick a week, but it’s fun to try.

Last week’s offering was close to a strict anapestic meter, failing only due to a missing syllable in the last line. In fact, I had a version that did match correctly, but it didn’t read as well as the syllable-deprived version. The final version was:

When a Teutonic torso arose
I was tempted to yell: “Thar she blows!”
‘Cos the scene that I viewed
Was an adipose nude
Afloat in a supine repose.

The alternative, and anapestically correct version, had as its final line:

All afloat in a supine repose.

Try both endings and see which you prefer (hopefully you’ll agree with me that the sacrifice of a single syllable was worth it – either that or you’ll think I’m a complete pillock for letting such things bother me).

So, how did an interest in limericks arise? Surprisingly, not from an introduction to the work of Edward Lear (famous for popularising limericks in the 19th century, although his commonly ended the first and fifth lines with the same word in contrast to current practice).

No, the first that really grabbed attention in my early years was this one:

There was a young fellow called Clyde
Who fell in a cess pit and died.
He had a young brother
Who fell in another
And now they’re interred side by side!

It was the double meaning implied by interred that made it memorable. It is quite a well-known limerick, with lots of variants, but this is the version that I remember and it is still one of my favourites.

I first heard another favourite on a old vinyl record. As an undergraduate I’d won a couple of such LPs in a raffle. One featured a Scottish folk duo, the Corries, on a ‘live’ album that included one very short track, ‘Abigail’:

On the bosom of young Abigail
Was written the price of her tail
And upon her behind
For the use of the blind
Was the same information in braille!

Not very PC nowadays, but still, I think, very clever.

So, there we are. There are many bloggers and twitterers producing limericks today. Not all are clever and too many are crude rather than rude, but there are some really good ones out there and, for me, they hold their own against haiku.

Meantime, here is this week’s none-too-clever, but anapestically-correct limerick of the week:

A limerick’s a kind of a verse
Of the sort that I like to disburse,
But it seems that sometimes
I don’t quite get the rhymes
Or the metrical foot is perverse!

Postscript#1: I’ve only ever written one haiku. It was after a tedious work-related discussion on producing guidelines for almost anything and everything that we do.

Chris, a now-retired colleague, had expressed his frustration in the following way that also reflected our collective practice of resorting to limericks in our business planning:

Generally
Users
In
Denial,
Ensuing
LImericks,
Never
Ending
Storms (in tea-cups).

To me, that sounded like it should be a haiku, but it wasn’t, so with a wee bit of thought it was turned into a wannabe Japanese aphorism in which the juxtaposition of contrasting phrases delivers a meaningless expression – except that in this case it is surprisingly meaningful (to me) in the work context outlined above:

Storms brew in tea-cups
As guidelines grow profusely
Into limericks.

Postscript#2: Limericks are generally thought to be named after the city or county of Limerick in Eire, possibly drawn from a version of nonsense verse popular in the area.

Postscript#3: The ex-Python, Michael Palin, has published two volumes of limericks. Some good, some not-so-good, but with the advantage of having an artist to illustrate them. That’s cheating!

Just add water …

Thermal baths are ‘big’ in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg, as is much of their clientele to the extent that I feel positively slim when I saunter to the local spa on visits to my family in Spielberg. I always think it ironic that such health spas sell a lot of beer and jumbo portions of cake; goods that are hardly commensurate with the philosophy of ein Kur machen.

At the moment, my sister’s local thermalbäder requires swimwear to be worn in its spa pools as you are massaged (pummelled!) by high pressure water jets. That is a good thing, because I am too culturally hidebound (ie British) to take advantage of its saunas which require you to strip off completely (although plans are afoot to create a separate ‘nude only’ spa pool at the Albtherme – surely  something to be avoided at all costs, but handy inspiration for this week’s limerick).

So, in honour of the unadorned Teutonic approach to saunas and health spas, an approach that also encompasses both beer and Kaffee und Kuchen, I give you:

When a Teutonic torso arose
I was tempted to yell: “Thar she blows!”
‘Cos the scene that I viewed
Was an adipose nude
Afloat in a supine repose.

So, Dame Vera Lynn hit 100 ‘not out’ this week and, in recognition of that, here is a limerick that I penned a few years ago along with some recycled verbiage to go along with it …

I suspect that nowadays only a few people will know of more than two Vera Lynn songs: “We’ll meet again” and “The White Cliffs of Dover”. The latter wistfully imagined bluebirds soaring and sweeping dreamily over the white cliffs of Dover. In fact, the song’s author was an American that had never visited the UK and, as pedants of the world will tell you, neither had the bluebirds! And this is my take on how the cliffs got their name:

The song says that birds will be over
Some cliffs by the sea and, moreover,
I’ll tell you outright
It’s all the bird sh*te
That makes them the ‘white’ cliffs of Dover!

La La Land – The Musical Debacle 

We can now add PWC, the ‘professional services’ group, to the list of folk that couldn’t organise a p**s-up in a brewery – sorry, an Oscars ceremony in LA. Some professionalism. Some service. At least they’ve admitted guilt; a sort of Mia culpa!

So this is for them:

Now the sun’s finally set on the Oscars
‘Tis Moonlight the movie that prospers,
Because PWC
Screwed-up big-time, you see,
Leaving La La Land as impostors.