Limericks – Page 14 – A View From The Lanterne Rouge

A limerick a week #183

Who let the dogs out?

I’ve got a weird dog! Not weird in the sense of weird-looking, but weird in the sense that she loves to go on a walk but always hides whenever she sees me with her lead. And if you ask “do you want to go for a walk, she dashes over to you (so long as there is no lead in sight), turns turtle and begs for a tummy tickle.

When we are out together, they’re her walks not mine, so, for as long as she behaves herself and keeps a loose lead, then if she wants to stop and sniff a lampost, she can. If she wants to say “hello” to other dogs or people, she can (and does!).

@calliebordeaux enjoying a roll in the park

She’s still a puppy, albeit in those ‘teenage’ years when she can be quite wilful, and her recall is not yet rock solid, but she can explore away from me on a long lead and runs off-lead with the pack at the fully enclosed field at Hazlehead Park in Aberdeen.

@calliebordeaux on a favourite walk around the grounds of Dunecht House.

So, although she really enjoys herself outside, she always plays hard to get when when it’s time to go out. It’s truly bizarre, but I think in these strange days of pandemic and lockdown I know why…

There once was a dog kept frustrating
Her owner ‘cos she kept hesitating
To set foot outside
She’d just stay in and hide.
Seems that puppy was self-isolating!

A limerick a week #182

You are cordially invited…

It’s time, once again, to highlight this year’s ‘short course’ exhibition hosted by Gray’s School of Art. In amongst the enthusiasts’ offerings of ceramics, jewellery, design, drawings, paintings and hand-crafted bags and kilts, you will find an exhibition of old-school, black and white film photography to which yours truly has contributed.

If you are in or around Aberdeen in the next week or two, do pop in to to Gray’s School of Art and have a gander. It’s free!

It’s become a sort tradition
For those of an apt disposition
To add to the mix
Some black and white pics
At the Gray’s School of Art Exhibition.

A limerick a week #181

Dr L Rouge, PhD

And in today’s news it was announced that Nottingham Trent University is to carry out a study on the effect of vehicular traffic on hedgehogs. Given the number of flattened specimens that litter the nation’s roads, I suspect someone might be in line for a PhD thesis that simply comprises a statement of the bleedin’ obvious!

I’m rather fond of hedgehogs because of a familial connection. You see my paternal grandmother was one. More precisely, she was a Ježek, that is she was born in what became the country of Czechoslovakia and her Czech surname translated into English as ‘hedgehog’.

They even brew hedgehog beer there, at the Pivovar Jihlava (Jihlava brewery). As a hedgehog is the symbol of Jihlava, a town found between Prague and Brno, its Ježek lager represents the soul of the brewery.

Another Ježek is the hedgehog in the cage, a Czech puzzle that comprises a small sphere with protruding spikes of various lengths contained within a cylinder perforated with holes of different sizes. The challenge posed by the puzzle is how to release the sphere (the hedgehog) from the cylinder (the cage).

The Trent research isn’t, of course, as trivial as the puzzle or even observing the effects of a 4×4 on an individual hedgehog, but a broader study on the cumulative impact of traffic-induced mortality on the demographics of localised hedgehog populations and whether there is a way to mitigate that through developments in road engineering (ie hedgehog tunnels) or by defining hedgehog-friendly ‘best practice’ in town and country planning. (According to the BBC news website, a study from 2016 estimated that around 100,000 hedgehogs are killed each year on UK roads.)

Nevertheless, rather than await the outcome of the academic research, here is my five-line thesis as a statement of the bleedin’ obvious that tells you all you need to know…

The impact on hedgehogs of traffic
Is to screw up their whole demographic
‘Cos a sickening SPLAT
Soon renders them flat
In a scene that is gruesomely graphic!

Will it qualify me for a PhD d’you think?

Postscript: The eagle-eyed will have noticed that the current ALAW and its predecessor, both have splat and flat as the rhyme in the third and fourth lines albeit in a different order. This purely coincidental and, as a former collegue once stated “Coincidences are the most paradoxical of things – they should never happen, but they always do!”.

A limerick a week #180

To infinity and … splat!

‘Mad’ Mike Hughes told the world that he thought the world was flat (the clue is in his sobriquet) and to prove it, he would launch himself to a sufficient altitude (in a home made ‘steam’ rocket) from which he could photograph the earth as a flat disc.

Unfortunately, he never made it. The parachute that was intended to land the rocket safely, sheared off at the launch and, in the words of Monty Python’s Flying Sheep sketch Mad Mike did “not so much fly … as plummet” and he ended his days as a ‘kicker’ storyline on the evening news.

Rather pathetically, some flat-earthers are claiming that his death was worthwhile as it drew attention to the elaborate hoax that the earth is, in fact, spherical. If so, it’s hoax that has been circulating since the time of Ancient Greece.

Hughes’ PR representative has since stated that “We used flat Earth as a PR stunt… Flat Earth allowed us to get so much publicity that we kept going! I know he didn’t believe in flat Earth and it was a schtick.” No doubt flat earthers will see that as a hoax too.

There once was a man called Mike Hughes
Who thought that an orbital ruse
Would show the world’s flat,
But he came down with a SPLAT
As a footnote in the day’s evening news

A limerick a week #179

On relationships going south…

Mid-february in Aberdeen is not the ideal time to have a new boiler installed. My strategy for dealing with the inevitable disruption and the loss of central heating and hot water was to order in some extra logs and coal.

Management’s solution, along with The Tall Child, was to book flights to Australia and leave me to it.

I’ll leave you to decide who was the wisest!

A chap was once given to wonder
If he’d made an almighty blunder,
‘Cos he stayed on his own
In a cold Scottish home
Whilst the others bu****ed-off Down Under!

A limerick a week #178

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.

A limerick a week #177

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!

A limerick a week #176

I say, Mr Derek…

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.

Foulds as a youthful ‘Mr Derek’ on the Basil Brush Show

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).

An older Fowlds as Bernard Woolley, with Paul Eddington as the politician Jim Hacker in Yes Minister

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.

A limerick a week #174

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.

A limerick a week #173

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.)

Lydia Leith’s screen printed ‘royal wedding’ sick bags, a pair of which adorned my office in my working days.

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!