Tag: Limericks

A limerick a week #109

C’est la vie (or not, as the case may be)

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with John from his days as a teacher in Kendal and I’ll write of that in a later post, including a couple of his unpublished ditties (sadly neither is a limerick), but this week’s ALAW concerns the diminutive Gallic chanteur, Charles Aznavour.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!

A limerick a week #107

The Blue Peter approach to ALAW

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…”)

A limerick a week #106

A rhyme for the hard of herring… 

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’.

A limerick a week #105

Dear Diary… 

… went on a 38 mile round-trip cycle ride…

…set off from Newton Stewart to Port William all hale and hearty…

…a bit nippy so wore unpadded winter bib tights…

…didn’t wear proper padded cycling shorts underneath this time…

…tried instead some swanky new padded sports boxers for cyclists…

…big mistake…

…no; massive mistake…

…in trouble before the halfway stop in Port William…

…somehow got there…

…spent 45 minutes drinking tea; struggled to get back on bike…

…barely able to sit over another 18 miles of cracked, broken and pot-holed tarmac…

…quick stop at Wigtown on the return for an ice-cream…

…didn’t know whether to eat it or sit on it…

#ShouldHaveBoughtTwo.

While out on a bike ride one day
On the Machar of old Galloway
The absence of padding
To my rear-end cladding
Left my a**e in complete disarray.

A limerick a week #104

Carry On Fenella

How should you remember a stage actor who mastered roles in Ibsen, Shakespeare, Chekov and Pinter among others, and yet whose life’s work is immortalised as a vamp in a skin-tight dress seeking Harold H. Corbett’s assent to smoke?

With a limerick of course!

It will be obvious to ‘Carry On’ aficionados that I am referring to the death, aged 90, of the classical actor Fenella Fielding who lingers in the memory as Valeria, sister to Kenneth Williams’ Dr Watt in Carry On Screaming.

That role is generally considered to have killed-off her career as a serious actor and, if true, is sad, but she never gave a hint of any bitterness. A survivor of physical abuse as a child, her fortitude and personality saw to that.

A reputed muse to Frederico Fellini, admired by Noel Coward, hater of Norman Wisdom (who had also abused her) and an actor whose Hedda Gabler was, according to The Times, “among the theatrical experiences of a lifetime” (although that could be interpreted in contrasting ways).

What more could be said?

Lots, actually, but I’ll stick to this from the Graun, who interviewed her shortly before her death about the forthcoming release of her autobiography:

Fielding’s older brother Basil Feldman is an ex-Conservative member of the House of Lords (unrelated to the Lord Feldman, the former Tory party chairman). Did she ever consider joining the Conservative party? She looks appalled. “It never occurred to me to touch them with a bargepole.

Good for her! This is what I think…

She was one of the ‘Carry On’ folk
Whose death will be sure to evoke
In any old fella
The sight of Fenella
Reclined, as she asked: “May I smoke?”.

Is this the scene that killed a career? If so, then surely her co-star in the scene would empathise. Corbett, who had also received some acclaim as a serious stage actor, was hideously typecast as ‘arold in the long-running UK TV comedy series Steptoe and Son.

Postscript: ALAW #104 – you know what that means! Two years of ALAW and I have yet to miss a week (famous last words!).

A limerick a week #103

TopGran vs the POTUS

A short verse* inspired by the family’s nonogenarian Geordie matriarch who has crossed both the Atlantic and the American continent to holiday in California (with a cautionary note to their President given her penchant for challenging gabshite Americans to a fight).

Howay man, I’m gannin awaw
To the distant American shore,
And I’ll gan proper radgie,
Wi’ that tangerine gadgie. 
Whey aye , man; I’ll give him ‘what for’!

TopGran and her wingmen! (Pic courtesy of the Joneses.)

* best read while effecting a Geordie accent. 

A limerick a week #102

On retirement and the gender of Daleks

In May, I gave my employer notice of my decision to retire at Christmas. I reiterated it this week with three months to go (just to make sure there was no doubt that I had provided the obligatory three months notice!).

Our corporate electronic HR system now requires my boss to press the right buttons to end my employment. I’ve done it for my own staff in the past, so I know that after navigating the system and entering the relevant details, the final button is reached – it’s labelled Terminate!

Here’s what I think…

Although work’s not a thing that I hate
I’ve struggled along as of late.
So please don’t delay
To help me on my way.
“Terminate! Terminate! Terminate!”

Seems a bit harsh!

Whovians will recognise that the limerick works best if the last line is spoken in ‘Dalek’, ie, where the vocal pitch and volume rises dramatically with each repetition of the word ‘TER-MIN-ATE‘ and finishes with an upward inflection known as a high-rising terminal.

The high-rising terminal is also known as the Australian question intonation and, in California, as Valley girl speak (although I first heard of it as the Australian interrogative and blame the Aussie import TV show Neighbours for popularising it in the UK in the mid-1980s, but I think the Daleks got there first with I WILL O-BEY)

According to linguists a high-rising terminal is primarily associated with younger women in both the USA and Australia, which is indirect (albeit entirely specious) evidence that Daleks are predominantly female. QED!

Postscript: If you really do want to sound like a Dalek you can find all the techno-geekery you need here.

A limerick a week #101

ALAW has previously quoted the actor Philip Glenister’s line in his role as Daniel Cotton in the TV series From There to Here:

“I’m NOT angry; I’m just permanently IRRITATED!”

That quote pretty much sums up my current humor when at work these days.

It’s not a question of me looking at the past through rose-tinted spectacles (my ‘good old days’ were peak-Thatcher and all the ills that brought down upon public sector science), but of senior leaders failing to recognise the ills brought about by their handling of the organisation over the last decade and their blinkered view of the present.

C’est la vie, but at least I no longer carry that irritation with me outside of work. Or do I? I’m sure others will tell me😉

Here’s the limerick…

It’s not, as has oft-times been stated,
A fact that I’m infuriated.
It’s rare that I’m angry
Or even quite cranky
And (sometimes) I’m not irritated!

 

A limerick a week #99

The dunny’s done-in (or “Wor netty’s knackered, but you should see the size of the rhubarb!”)

Short and sweet this week ‘cos I’m not proud of it. (Haha! Of course I am, and it’s anapestically correct as well).

A ditty inspired by a friend’s lavatorial break down:

A. A. Milne thought he knew what to do
When he found that he’d broken his loo.
He just said: “Oh, f**k it!”
And peed in a bucket,
But what happened to Winnie the Pooh?

You’re welcome!