Limericks – Page 22 – A View From The Lanterne Rouge

A limerick a week #98

HR – working hard to underwhelm you!

I was ‘put before the beak’ a few weeks ago by an HR zealot that didn’t like the fact that I had challenged some weasel words spoken by a senior member of staff at an ‘all-programme’ meeting.

The zealot’s recollection of the event was intriguing as, when I challenged it, she had then to acknowledge she hadn’t even been there, but was simply parroting the words of a ‘leader’ that couldn’t, it appears, accept challenge!

It seems that in her little world it is an HR violation for scientists to be questioning; that is, of course, the antithesis of the way that science works in the real world (and if it operated according to her rules then we would still be living in the Dark Ages).

As an aside, I work in an organisation whose management culture across the piece seems to “overemphasize control, as opposed to fostering creativity, to meet their goals”. Neither our HR zealot nor the organisation’s leadership recognise this despite the motherhood and apple pie vision they propound to the world.

More recently, my domestic ‘Management’ had an exchange with the HR bods at her place of work (not the same as mine) when she questioned a decision about staffing levels in her department.

Their HR team’s response to her enquiry demonstrated a risible grasp of the facts coupled to an heroic level of condescension.

So, is it any wonder that folk who carry out the real business of an organisation have simultaneously to suspend both belief and disbelief at the inept administration of their organisation by idiots in HR and out-of-touch management from senior leadership teams?

I’m sure that many of my colleagues would agree with Peter Drucker’s view that:

“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.”

Oh well, at least it has inspired this..

It’s a pity, and truly bizarre,
That the most vacuous people by far
In our places of work
Are the pillocks that lurk
In the ‘abode of the damned’ that’s HR!

A limerick a week #97

Giving it the bird…

When I started out in fisheries research, one of the issues that I was involved in concerned the possible impact of the Shetland fishery for sandeel, a so-called ‘forage fish’, on the then current breeding failures of seabirds around the islands.

It was clear that a shortage of young sandeel, as food for the chicks, was to blame for their failure to fledge. Meanwhile, the fishery data strongly implied that the reason for the shortage of young sandeel was not the fishery, but natural environmental effects in the egg, larval and ‘pre-recruit’ stages of the fish.

Actually, we used a semi-annual catch at age analysis and seasonal research vessel survey indices of abundance (a form of fishery-independent catch per unit effort)

Lengthy discussions with the British Trust for Ornithology and professional marine ornithologists from academia and the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology concluded this was the most credible perspective.

Unfortunately, that was not good enough for the RSPB:

So, the RSPB sought instead to destroy the professional reputation of my first boss (a true gentleman) and to damage my, ahem, fledgling career at the same time.

Long story short: later work by a consortium-funded research fellow showed that we were right; something only grudgingly accepted by the RSPB.

We then went on to develop a ground-breaking management regime for the fishery in which we provided data and annual assessments, but devolved management of the fishery to the local fisherman’s association and environmental groups. We would only intervene on management decisions if the local groups couldn’t develop a mutually acceptable plan (we never did have to intervene!).

The RSPB, of course, never ‘corrected’ itself to its million-plus members and never apologised for traducing my boss’s name and reputation or that of the Shetland Fishermen’s Association.

Slight diversion: Many years later, a policy push was instigated to compel warring aquaculture and wild-salmon angling interests to agree between themselves a management regime of some sort. It was touted by a here-today-gone-tomorrow senior policy official as a ‘first’ in Scottish fisheries management. In fact, he told a ‘porky’ because he ignored what we had achieved more than two decades earlier at Shetland (and our initiative actually worked).

(That’s the sort of behaviour that you get with greasy-pole-climbing yes-men who need to to validate themselves in the eyes of their political masters).

So, what was it that started me on this historical ‘avian and piscatorial’ polemic? It is simply that I took a childish and immature delight this week in the irony of reading that a pair of RSPB workers had killed a protected osprey chick when trying to ring it in its nest.

Here’s the limerick:

When I read it I thought “What the heck!”,
It seemed no-one had bothered to check
Which part you pick
When tagging a chick:
‘COS IT’S THE LEG THAT YOU RING, NOT ITS NECK!

(“Yes”, I know the chick fell from its nest and didn’t have its neck wrung – but it’s a limerick not a news report!)

A limerick a week #96

Trump, making Russia great again…

The problem with narcissistic sociopaths is that when they concoct risible explanations for their faux pas they expect the world to believe them. In truth, despite their brass necks, they just demonstrate their complete idiocy.

Which brings us to Donald Trump, who this week expects us to believe that he merely ‘mis-spoke’ when favouring Vladimir Putin’s assurances of ‘doing no wrong’ over the hard evidence provided by American intelligence analysts that Russia did, indeed, meddle in the election that brought Trump to power.

It is no surprise, then, that bipartisan political opinion in the States is that he has now brought the office of the American President into disrepute (as if he hadn’t already)!

Indeed, the Graun reports that:

John Brennan, CIA director under Obama, said Trump’s conduct was “nothing short of treasonous” and more than amounted to “high crimes and misdemeanors” – the benchmark for impeachment. “Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”

“In the pocket of Putin” they say? Hmmm! For any conspiracy theorists out there, the Russians have a word for when they hold compromising information on a person; it’s ‘kompromat‘ (just saying!)

Arnold Schwarzenegger called the imbecilic President “a little wet noodle” which has helped greatly with this week’s ALAW. The OddSocks Theatre Company also helped (the ‘encore’ to its production of The Tempest that I saw last week was a terrific rendition of Green Day’s American Idiot in honour of Trump’s visit to the UK – brilliant!).

So, with a little help from Arnie, OddSocks and the Green Day gang, I give you…

The truth, when you come to consider it,
Is that Trump’s a political illiterate.
And Putin’s wee poodle,
That “little wet noodle”,
Is truly an American Idiot.

Fake noodle, fake President. Wet noodle, Trump. Same difference!

A limerick a week #95

Up, up and away…

It’s taken 18 months for my visits to the English Lake District to coincide with the sort of fine weather that has now enabled me to ‘cash-in’ a birthday present from 18 months ago.

You can read here about the earlier gift of an ‘introductory flight’ in an autogyro (gyrocopter), and this week it took off.

The Magni M-16 Tandem Trainer that I flew in.

The booking arrangements via the ‘mature’ flight instructor were rather chaotic and didn’t inspire much confidence, but once in the cockpit, his 46 years as a pilot took over and the flight, in difficult downdrafts, was a dream.

There was too much low-flying RAF traffic for us to traverse the Lake District completely, but we flew down Ullswater to view the Helvellyn range then crossed to the Eden valley and Pennines beyond before returning to ~~the airstrip~~ a grassy field.

It would cost about £6k to qualify as a gyrocopter pilot and would, I think, be money well spent if my colour vision was up to scratch. Unfortunately, as a mild deutan, I’d certainly fail the required medical. The Ishihara test for colour blindness and I have a long and incongruous history!

Fortunately, I can always be a passenger!

Here’s the limerick:

There was an auld bloke that once copped a
Flight in a red gyrocopter
An ambulatory
Autogyratory
Trip with a fly-boy ‘spin doctor’!

A limerick a week #94

Happy birthday, Georgy Girl!

Being a sickly child I spent a fair amount of time off school. As my Grandma lived with us, she looked after me on a number of occasions so I got to hear a lot of her favourite music. She liked musicals (South Pacific was played a lot), Frank Ifield (still touring; he even appeared at the Castle Green Hotel in Kendal, my childhood home town, as recently as the 3rd of June this year, aged 80!), The Bachelors (I wasn’t a fan) and The Seekers (who I liked a lot).

Judith Durham who fronted The Seekers has been described by Elton John, as possessing “the purest voice in popular music”. She celebrated her 75th birthday on the 3rd of July this year by releasing a new album although she will not be touring it (I suspect it comprises old, but previously unreleased recordings).

A young Judith Durham, singer and classically trained concert pianist!

I Googled her for old times’ sake and YouTubed The Seekers and revisited their songs. It was interesting to read the BTL comments of the YouTube videos. A number of young folk had chanced upon the recordings and expressed wonderment at never having heard of Durham (or The Seekers) given the power, timbre and clarity of her voice.

Google also held a surprise for me. ‘Durham’ was not Judith’s original surname; it was her mother’s maiden name. The enchanting songstress with a spellbinding voice was christened Judith Cock! No surprise, then, that she changed it. I wish I could have penned a more respectful limerick-as-tribute, but I’m afraid I couldn’t overlook that!

Judith, a singer, became
A Seeker of stardom and fame
But her surname was ‘Cock’
So it wasn’t a shock
When she changed to her mum’s maiden name!

I knew I must be getting on a few years ago when a very much younger colleague told me she had never heard of Telex, but that was not really surprising unlike when a friend, then in her late thirties, told me she had never heard of The Seekers (it’s not the grey hairs that make me feel old, but revelations like that!).

Postscript #1: For the young or ill-informed, ‘Georgy Girl’ was a 1960s film starring James Mason, Lyn Redgrave, Alan Bates and Charlotte Rampling for which The Seekers performed the titular theme song.

Little-known fact #1: The lyrics of the theme song were written by Jim Dale, a Carry On star, whilst the music was penned by Tom Springfield, brother of Dusty, another powerful voice from the sixties.

Little-known fact #2: The film was based on the book ‘Georgy Girl’ written by Margaret Forster which just happens to be my mum’s maiden name.

Postscript #2: When The Seekers disbanded, their manager put together another group, The New Seekers, one of whom’s leads was Eve Graham, a Scottish singer who also turned 75 this year. Management and I saw her perform in Aberdeen in the mid-1980s in her solo show and, although The New Seekers was a successful group, Graham as a solo artist was a revelation. Shamefully, due to a contractual dispute, Graham has never received any royalties from The New Seekers’ hits since 1973 despite sales of 25 million records!

A limerick a week #93

Some like it hot…

My goodness, it’s been quite warm in Aberdeen this week (relatively speaking!). There’s no real sign of the haar, you see. The haar is a cold east coast sea fog that specialises in turning warm sunny days into a chilling, soul-extracting gloom; a ghostly apparition that rolls in from the sea and whose glacial dankness obliviates life’s vital force as readily as Azkaban’s Dementors.

The haar is an advection fog in which warm, moist air cools as it passes over the North Sea. As the moisture condenses out, a prevailing easterly wind pushes the resultant fog landward and it may even travel a mile or two inland.

When the haar is ‘in’ anyone sashaying eastwards towards the coast is met by a cold wall of fog and instantaneously transported from glorious summer into a dreich, late-autumnal day. But not this week…

It could almost be an English summer up here (okay, that’s not quite true) and long may it last.

It is also limerick-inspiring weather, recalling the day when Management and I were wandering the streets of Stratford-upon-Avon during a heatwave. We’d arranged to meet mon frère who, being a lawyer, turned up in a tweed jacket when everyone else was in T-shirts and shorts. A little while later he confessed “I’m beginning to regret the tweed!”.

So, here’s one from the archives…

If a walk in the sun’s what you need
The least you can do is to heed
The advice that exhorts:
“Wear T-shirt and shorts”!
Or you’ll end up regretting the tweed.

Meantime, Matthew McConaughey wears herringbone tweed in a Californian summer. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

Postscript: I spoke too soon 😣

Bonus feature:

Germany’s premature departure from soccer’s World Cup seems to have delighted the sort of folk who take pleasure in the misfortune of others. That appears to include most of England’s football fans whose team usually falls prey to Germany.

My take on it is that the German fans will now understand the air of despair that usually surrounds the English. Moreover, when it all goes belly-up for England later in the tournament, at least it won’t be at the hands of their usual nemesis!

The Germans trudged home all annoyed
When their World Cup hopes were destroyed.
“Their loss is our gain”
Was the English refrain.
As they revelled in pure schadenfreude!

A limerick a week – not!

There once was …

Tom Gauld’s cartoon strips are among my favourites. Somehow I missed this one when it was published earlier this year…

A limerick a week #92

A harsh reality

It struck me as odd in the 1980s that the red-top-newspapers’ page three girls attained celebrity status without doing anything other than to show-off their boobs to the readers of down-market tabloids.

The rather superficial nature of that kind of fame hit home again soon after when a then-defeated former world boxing champion was asked how he saw his future. Instead of wanting to get young kids off the street and into boxing clubs, or helping to heal the sectarian divides that existed in his country, he said that he wanted to become a celebrity.

How vacuous is that? And what happens after your fifteen minutes of celebrity fame? How do you deal it?

Sadly, the newspapers have this week been reporting the death of an apparently vivacious young woman who seems to have struggled when opportunities dried up after her fifteen minutes came to an end. A friend that had shared her experience of fame-through-reality-TV commented that the producers of such shows should invest in aftercare for the participants:

“It’s like you’re constantly reaching for some kind of high and when work dies down and things go quiet you’re constantly trying to chase it – and that’s where depression can kick in.”

I’m not a fan of reality TV. It seems to be the antithesis of reality as well as being shallow and voyeuristic so I don’t watch it. Indeed, ‘professional celebrity’ is an odd way to live your life and clearly it can take its toll if you’re soon forgotten.

In that context, I don’t think ‘aftercare’ is what is needed, but an appreciation that not all participants in reality shows are resilient to the loss of transient celebrity and shouldn’t be exposed to it in the first place. As an individual, you don’t have to seek fame (or infamy); true validation comes from within, not from the perspective of others, so it’s a rather serious limerick this week:

There was a young woman who seemed to be
A modern-day TV celebrity,
But how awful it seems
That the end of her dreams
Reflected a grievous reality.

A limerick a week #91

Czech-ing out one’s ancestry

I occasionally get out for a social meal along with a few photography chums, but you would hardly believe how difficult it can be to arrange a date that five people can make.

So, a while ago I introduced the group to Doodle and its eponymous Doodle Poll. It’s a bit easier to make arrangements now, although still tricky even on the rare occasion that everyone actually completes the poll!

Why am I telling you this? Well, I recently reminded the others of a poll that needed to be completed.

A subtle hint for recalcitrant Doodlers!

Not that it helped, and I’m still waiting, but someone did at least respond, saying: “We should call you “Phil the Poll” which, given my (literal) Bohemian background, led to this:

When I read it, I thought “What the heck?
The lad’s got a really brass neck
And turned into a troll
‘Cos he called me a Poll
When he knows it’s not Polish – IT’S CZECH!

A limerick a week #90

Itch-hiking in Scotland

I learned something on a trip to the Scottish west coast last week. Despite any number of anecdotal claims, Avon-Skin-So-Soft is not an effective deterrent against the Highland midge, Culicoides impunctatus.

The first few lines of the Wikipedia article on the midge sum it up quite well:

As do a few of my ‘war wounds’…

So my advice to travellers is, quite simply:

The midge is an evil wee beast
Whose hunger for blood’s never ceased.
So it’s best to avoid these
Damned Culicoides
And their haematological feast.

Postscript: I was well-bitten by the little horrors, but thanks to my choice of deterrent I now have beautifully soft hands!