Category: A Limerick A Week

When nature calls…

I was amused to read this week of a woman who got more than she bargained for on a wilderness weekend away in Alaska.

She was staying with friends in a yurt with an outside ‘dump through’ latrine (gross!), but when she answered nature’s call she found that nature answered back, and in an entirely unexpected way.

In fact, she believes that she was bitten en bas a l’arrière by a bear when she parked her bum on the latrine seat!

The bear may have entered the latrine’s ‘humous chamber’ through an unsecured hatch and found it to be a cosy den for the winter (also gross!).

Park rangers believe the bear was not fully hibernating and swiped at the descending fundament rather than biting it, but fancy that, a privy with an automatic bottom wiper!

Here’s the limerick:

A young woman was once overcome
By the need to disburden her tum,
But the lav was outside
And she got a raw hide
When a bear bit her right on the bum.

And, for once, it’s anapestically correct!

Beanz meanz …

… brand awareness.

We once visited friends who had asked in advance which breakfast cereal Firstborn and the Tall Child preferred. Towards the end of our stay they remarked that they’d thought ’48’ was the number of biscuits in a carton of Weetabix and not the number of hours it took for my offspring to finish the lot of them.

So, the product doesn’t need to be marketed on our account, but I suspect that whichever agency supports the current Weetabix advertising campaign will be feeling pretty chuffed by the social media pile-on that arose from its tweet promoting ‘beans on bix’ for your morning brekky. Just google ‘weetabix’ and ‘beans’ to see the PR triumph that it spawned. Here’s the tweet that started it:

And here’s the limerick:

A chef got himself in a fix
When he added some beans to the mix
‘Cos he felt quite morose
When the outcome was gross,
So never put beans on your Weetabix!

 

 

Going loco off the rails

Here’s a little something to bring a lockdown smile to the face of anyone that remembers the original TV adaptation of the Reverend Awdry’s ‘Railway Series’ of children’s books.

Thomas the Tank Engine for Seven Cellos (and Percussion) arranged and performed by Samara Ginsberg (@samaracello)…

… and, with apologies for re-gendering her and calling her deranged, here’s the limerick:

There once was a musical fellow
Whose playing was rounded and mellow
But they thought him deranged
When he went and arranged
‘Thomas the Tank’ for the cello!

Your call is important to us…

This is a bit of a Victor Meldrew rant, so please scroll to the bottom if you just want the limerick!

I spent three hours yesterday morning dealing with what younger generations refer to as life admin; bureaucratic chores to you and me.

First up, British Telecom had earlier advised me that my broadband contract was due for renewal and that I could ‘upgrade’ to the same deal that I was on, but for £20 a month less than I was currently paying. So I did.

Consequently, yesterday’s first chore was to contact them to ask why had I subsequently received a letter demanding the return of their hardware, a Smart Hub 2, as it was still needed to fulfil the new contract. It took an hour to wait for a call centre agent to become available and to resolve the issue through an online chat, but eventually they acknowledged it was their mistake and at least I was dealing with a person and not a chatbot. Sadly, I can’t charge them for my time spent wasted correcting their mistake.

Next was a call to Three Mobile. Two years ago I’d got an add-on to a phone upgrade in the form of a Samsung tablet with a SIM and 2Gb of data per month. The full-term cost was significantly less than the outright cost of the tablet alone (cf John Lewis’ price) and it would come in handy, so why not?

Well, the contract is now up and I don’t wish to keep paying for data, so a quick call to Three was in order.

Did I say ‘quick’? After being on hold for an hour I finally got to speak to a call centre worker. It took two minutes to explain that I wanted to terminate the contract and that I wasn’t interested in any inducements to remain.

Did that help? Nope! The guy at the other end had a script to go through and go through it he would. I said “no” to each inducement and reiterated every time that I just wanted to terminate the contract.

Seemingly, no divergence from the script was allowed and, no matter how many times I said “please, just terminate the contract”, the call centre worker kept ‘discovering’ new offers to tempt me to stay on as a customer. It took the best part of an hour before he ran out of inducements so, including being on hold, it took nearly two hours on the phone simply to terminate a contract that had reached its minimum term. Had I wanted to renew it instead, it would have taken one click of a mouse! Grrrr!

Here’s the limerick:

A call centre agent once said
That he was the person you’d dread
To answer your call
Because, above all,
He just wanted to mess with your head!

… and a barrel for the shanty man!

It’s a few years now since I travelled to the London Palladium to see the musical behemoth that was Bellowhead on its farewell tour. In among the group’s set list for the evening were a number of shanties played in a big-band, party style and the header for this post is a line taken from one of them, Whiskey is the Life of Man.

Originally, sea shanties were call and response songs from the days of sail-powered ships and usually accompanied some form of synchronised, manual activity, such as working a capstan to raise an anchor or when hoisting a sail. The caller was known as the shanty man.

Other shanties comprised verse and chorus songs with the shanty man leading on the verse and the crew responding in the chorus. Nowadays, well…

Shanties have been re-discovered by the TikTok generation! According to the New York Times, a 26 year old Scottish postman, Nathan Evans, started the trend with a shanty on TikTok, Soon May the Wellerman Come, a follow-up to his earlier posting of another shanty, Leave Her, Johnny, and, now, even Kermit the Frog has jumped aboard ship and added his dulcet tones to those of Evans.

And the point of telling you all this? A limerick, of course…

A Millennial went down to the dock
Dressed up in a fisherman’s smock
Where he sang out with glee
Of ships and the sea
And gave rise to the tag: #ShantyTok!

🎶You say you want a revolution…🎶

I think the entire mindset of Trump’s dysfunctional politics was encapsulated by the surprised tones of a self-appointed ‘revolutionary’ from Knoxville who complained when her attempt to storm Washington’s Capitol this week was met with resistance from the police and she ended up being pepper-sprayed. You’ve probably seen and heard it, but, if not, you can hear her whinge about it in Hunter Walker’s Twitter post, here.

On a night that has cost five lives so far, ‘Elizabeth from Knoxville’ was lucky that being maced was the worst that happened to her (although I suspect her problems have really only just begun). And what now for Trump, whose seditious rhetoric led to America’s humiliation? ‘Make America Great Again’? He’s turned it into a tyranny of misrule.

A revolutionary said “It’s a disgrace!”
As she wiped clear the tears from her face,
‘Cos her act of sedition
Had met opposition
From the police, who then sprayed her with mace!

New Year, new beginnings?

So, Brexit was all about ‘taking back control’ was it?

Bollocks! It was an object lesson in how lies, sophistry and populism can be used to create a sense of grievance in the populace and to accentuate and make respectable the ‘little Englander’ xenophobia of the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Telegraph, the Times and many of their readers.

Personally, I think a lot of chickens will come home to roost as a result. Indeed, given the emphasis placed by Brexiteers on ‘sovereignty’, I find it difficult to see how the UK government can rationally object to the current Scottish government’s desire also ‘to take back control’ and to assert its own sovereignty (and, ultimately, to rejoin the European project in whatever guise suits, either through membership of the EEA or the EU itself).

I say that as an internationalist, not a nationalist, and as someone who values ‘coming together’ rather than ‘breaking apart’.

As an internationalist, I don’t see that there is any contradiction between maintaining a country’s sovereignty and its ‘independence’ as a part of the European project. That ‘contradiction’ only exists in the minds of sophistrists and xenophobes that confuse sovereignty with interdependence.

So, my prediction for 2021 is that the Scottish government elections will herald a stronger mandate for the SNP (despite its factional in-fighting, and its  own facility to create grievances to suit its political ends) and that the UK government will face substantially increased pressure to legislate for a 2nd independence referendum.

It certainly looks as if the country is on a trajectory for independence whether it be in 2 years, 10 years or 20. For my own part I’d have preferred to remain a part of the UK within the EU, but if the only option to becoming a European citizen again is through an independent Scotland, then perhaps ‘needs must’.

Here’s the limerick…

I think there will now come a day
(And it might not be that far away)
When all due to Brexit
The Scots finally exit
The Union and it’s ‘Goodbye UK’!