It’s an affliction. Whenever I see a quirky or unusual place name, or sometimes quite a straightforward one, I just have to compose a limerick.
(Limericks, if you are not familiar with them, are humorous five-line poems, in which lines 1, 2 and 5 rhyme and scan with seven to ten syllables, and lines 3 and 4 rhyme and scan with five to seven syllables. The form was popularized by Edward Lear, and well known examples include the nursery rhyme Hickory Dickory Dock, and The Young Lady of Niger, above.)
A popular blogger I started to follow recently (Going Gently) mentioned he had been caught by a speed camera, and, as an alternative to points on his licence and a fine, he had agreed to be indoctrinated on a speed awareness course in Mold. Well, Mold! What a name. Irresistible. A limerick immediately began to form in my head. I posted it as a comment on his blog:
I went on a short course in Mold,
To be told what I had to be told,
The days are now past
Of me driving too fast,
My right foot must be more controlled.
We play it as a game in the car on holiday (not to be recommended because it’s so easy to stop concentrating on driving and go too fast through speed traps). As Mold is in Wales, here’s another we came up with in that country (although I’m not sure whether the basic idea is that original):
A fragile young lady from Wales,
Tried buttered toast spread with snails,
She shivered and quivered
When all the snails slithered
To the edge of her plate leaving trails.
They don’t emerge only in Wales, or only in the car for that matter. A couple of years ago we went for a walk on Exmoor in Devon, through the village made famous in Lorna Doone, and out came this:
A naïve young fellow from Oare,
Was stopped in the street by a whore,
“Hello love,” she said
Let’s go to bed,
Now he’s not so naïve any more.
(OR - Now he knows what his ***** is for.)
I think that’s quite enough of that for now.
Is anyone else encumbered with this?
And my right foot is no longer so bold
ReplyDeleteThat works too.
DeleteDefinitely, although I tend to write series of limericks. To date I have verses about Victoria Wood, D H Lawrence, Culture and 'On Not Wanting to Write Limericks. To give you a taste, one of them goes:
ReplyDeleteNo-one gives a toss about Lawrence
now sex is cascading in torrents
it's hard now to credit
that folk who'd not read it
once looked on his work with abhorrence
Genius.
DeleteVery
ReplyDeleteAlgie saw the bear
Algie saw the bear
The bear saw algie
The bear was bulgy
The bulge was Algie
Multi-biguous.
DeleteI think the only limerick I came up with was as follows:
ReplyDeleteThere was an old lady from Leicester
Who had an excessive amount of chest hair
So she whipped out some wax
And tried to relax
While she grimaced and groaned until bare.
Brilliant idea but needs a bit more work.
Delete