Nursery Rhymes

There is a song which I used to sing and have sung to me when I was little. Perhaps you sang it too. It goes like this:

 

            Diddle diddle dumpling, mice and John

Went to bed with his trousers on,

            One shoe off and the other shoe on,

            Diddle diddle dumpling, mice and John.

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, of course, but when I was little, I just accepted that there were things which made no sense to me, but since it was the grown-ups who were running the show, as long as it made sense to them, that was what counted. I trusted them implicitly.

Well, I believe I was well into my early adult years before I discovered that the words of this song are actually:

                Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John.

The song, it turned out, did make sense after all! But how was I supposed to know? I was naïve and trusting, remember? All those years that I was going around singing those ridiculous words, and all the grown-ups around me, instead of kindly and responsibly setting me straight, abused their privileged knowledge and sat there sniggering at me!

Well, this realisation set me to thinking – about many things. About how different the world looks viewed through eyes of different ages, about how ignorant children can be and to what extent they are justified in being so, and about what dumplings have to do with anything. But most of all, it set me to thinking about how a great number of children’s songs and nursery rhymes do, in fact, have some quite serious holes in their logic, and that it is small wonder that when I came across a song which made sense, I saw fit to warp it a bit.

The literary offerings with which we are presented as children range from the sober (few and far between) to the quirky and/or peculiar, to the downright outlandish – and they are all presented as suitable material for a child’s cerebral, personal and cultural development experience.

Here is a small sample of these musical and poetic works.

1. Rock-a-bye baby

Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop,

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock,

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,

Down will come baby, cradle and all.

Now this song raises a number of quite serious issues. First of all, what on earth is a baby doing hanging from a tree? What sort of unstable, depraved parent or carer would go to the trouble of depositing a child there? If the parent were merely negligent, they he or she would simply shut the baby in its room and go and watch TV. But to engage in what is likely to be a fairly complex process in order to place a baby at the top of a tree demonstrates a particularly wanton brand of deliberate malevolence.

The song, you will note, states that “when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall”. Will fall. Not might fall. Not may fall. Not runs a slight risk of falling. The auxiliary verb “will” (and I can tell you this because I am an English teacher) is used when we predict something which we know or think is going to happen. The baby’s carer, it is clear, is hardly placing the cradle in a spot where he or she sincerely believes it will be safe.

Secondly, how do you get a baby up there? Climbing a tree is a tricky exercise at the best of times, but to do it bearing a baby in a cradle is likely to prove impossible. So the person involved probably used a ladder. But how many ladders have you seen, apart from those used by firemen and window-cleaners, that will reach up to the top of a tree? And even if it did, you wouldn’t be able to lean it against the top branches. They would be too flimsy to support it. So how do you propose to get to the top of the tree in the first place to deposit the baby?

And this leads us neatly to the matter of what you are going to attach the cradle to when you get there (if you get there). The topmost branches, as we have noted, are weak and pliable, and no sooner have you hung the cradle on one of them than it will slip off. It is highly unlikely to hold for long enough for the “wind to blow”, and certainly not long enough for you to sing a song to the baby about the whole business.

There are probably more issues with this song, but let’s move on to the next one. The next one is:

2. There was an old woman who lived in a shoe

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe

She had so many children she didn’t know what to do

She gave the some broth without any bread

And whipped them all soundly and sent them to bed.

The first question that springs to mind is: just how “old” is this woman? 45? 60? 93? If she has children still young enough to require feeding, beating, and sending to bed, then she can’t be that much past child-bearing age – say mid to late forties. But I would hardly say that qualifies as old. And it can’t be an issue of rhythm, because “There was a young woman who lived in a shoe” has exactly the same rhythm. It is just sloppy thinking, as far as I can see.

The other significant issue here is this woman’s place of residence. If you have ever, ever, even just once, seen a person living in a shoe, then I will drop this whole argument here and now.

But let us, for the sake of open-mindedness, assume that a family can live in a shoe. So the first question is this: what size is this shoe? Is it a normal-sized shoe with a miniature woman and miniature children living in it, or is it a house-sized shoe with normal people living in it? (Well, I say “normal people” – what I actually mean is “normal-sized people”. )

Secondly, and this is so obvious that I need hardly point it out, a shoe does not have a roof.

The third thing is this: can you get planning permission for a house which is, to all intents and purposes, a shoe? I was bothered enough by the question to put it to someone who knows about these things, and can report back to you that the construction proposal would run into problems right from the word go.

For a start, buildings have to fit in aesthetically with the surrounding environment, in terms of height, shape, building materials, position relative to the street, etc. Are we therefore to believe that this old woman lived in a whole street full of shoe-shaped buildings made of leather?

Secondly, from the point of view of safety, the shoe would need to be fire-resistant. Now, I don’t know if you have done a fire test with your shoes recently, but if not, I can save you the trouble and tell you that while leather itself is not particularly flammable, the softeners, colours, and other products which are applied to the leather in the shoe-making process can certainly be.

Still on safety, the shoe would need a sturdy superstructure to keep it from collapsing in fires or earthquakes. I can’t say I’m convinced that standard-issue steel toe-caps would be sufficient.

And on to environmental issues, and here we are into slightly murkier territory, because this old woman’s location is not clear. If she is in the UK, however, which she may well be, then she is going to find herself running up considerable expense over the next few years, as she invests in roof-mounted solar panels and wind turbines (except she can’t, because she doesn’t have a roof to mount them on), rainwater harvesting, and special insulation, in line with the government’s plans to increase the number of carbon-neutral buildings by 2020.

Finally, if you apply for planning permission for anything that is a bit unusual, it will be refused, and you have to reapply several more times, with something more toned down each time. So if you want to build something very odd (a shoe, say), you apply for permission to build something completely outlandish, get refused, and then gradually tone it down to simply very odd. So my question is this: what on earth did the architect suggest in the first round of applications?


Having developed something of a headache, we may wish to move, at this point, on to the next song, about a family of cats.

3. The three little kittens

Three little kittens, they lost their mittens

And they began to cry,

“Oh mother, dear, see here, see here,

Our mittens we have lost!”

“What? Lost your mittens? You naughty kittens!

Now you shall have no pie!”

“Meow! Meow! Now we shall have no pie.

Meow! Meow! Now we shall have no pie.”

The three little kittens, they found their mittens

And they began to cry,

“Oh mother, dear, see here, see here,

Our mittens we have found!”

“You’ve found your mittens! You good little kittens.

Now you shall have some pie.”

“Prrr! Prrr! Now we shall have some pie!

Prr! Prr! Now we shall have some pie!”

My questions here number two.

1)      Kittens? Mittens? Which planet?
2)      Have you ever, at any point in your life, no matter how remote, encountered a cat which, when informed, “You may not eat this food” simply replies, “OK. I accept that without protest”?

We shall now look at a meteorological phenomenon - and, come to think of it - a corporeal one.

4. I can sing a rainbow

Red and yellow and pink and green

Purple and orange and blue

I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow

Sing a rainbow too.

Listen with your eyes

And sing everything you see.

I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow

Sing along with me.

The line that particularly bothers me here is “Listen with your eyes”. Even when I was little, I was aware of the illogic of this.

“How can you listen with your eyes?” I would wonder. “You see with your eyes. You listen with your ears.”

But I just assumed it was one of those things that only grown-ups understood (those same responsible grown-ups who didn’t tell me that it wasn’t “mice and John”), and that I would understand it one day when I was older.

Well, I grew older, and older, and I regret to inform you that this line still makes absolutely no sense to me.

Here is our final song:

5. She'll be coming round the mountain

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes

She’ll be coming round the mountain

She’ll be coming round the mountain

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.

A fairly pedestrian song, as songs go, about an approaching visitor, but an effective enough way of keeping a group of small children occupied for five minutes or so. There is nothing in the first verse, as far as I can see, which is particularly lacking in sense. We have to go to the second verse for that:

                She’ll be wearing silk pyjamas when she comes, etc.

Now tell me this. If you were going to visit someone far away, at least as far as a journey round a mountain, do you not think it would occur to you to attire yourself in something marginally more appropriate than silk pyjamas? The only people, to the best of my awareness, who regularly venture out in pyjamas are mothers dropping their children at school. But you will have noticed that the words are “when she comes” and not “when they come”, eliminating the possibility of the school run. But there may be a rational explanation. Perhaps her house caught fire during the night, and she had to leave in a hurry and didn’t have time to get dressed. But that doesn’t account for the next verse:

                She’ll be riding six white horses when she comes, etc.

Did you get that? She’ll be riding six white horses. Not “a white horse”. Not “she’ll be riding one white horse and leading another five along beside her”. Not “she’ll be walking six white dogs”. No. She is, if we are to believe the song, effectively perched on the backs of six large animals simultaneously.

A quick search on Google yields a number of songs in which a woman “drives” six white horses, that is to say, she is travelling in a coach being drawn by six horses. Which makes rather a lot more sense. But it does not leave me entirely satisfied, because I am certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that what I was taught at school was the version I have given you here.

IN CONCLUSION

The world is a confusing place, and you can't always trust people. This does not change as you get older, and is the reason why a person's cynicism is directly proportional to their age.

Clothes Shopping

I have been clothes shopping recently. Now, this is not something I tend to do very much, and certainly not if I can avoid it, but I am graduating soon (hello, any fellow graduands reading this) and I don’t really know what I’m going to wear for the occasion. Yes, I know the gown will hide a multitude of sins, but there will be a point before I go to pick up the gown when I will be wandering among chicly-dressed, perfectly coiffed, sophisticated-looking people, resembling something that has washed up on a beach, unless I manage to pull off this shopping mission.

My usual practice is to wait until my wardrobe is populated entirely by tatters, and people are giving me pitying glances in the street, and at that point, I decide precisely what I want (“A light blue V-neck t-shirt” or “A black, knee-length skirt in soft material”, for example), and I trawl the shops in a single-minded fashion, with a blinkeredness and short-sightedness bordering on imprudence, until I find precisely the thing that I am looking for.

All this takes considerable time, as you might appreciate, since it is not as if all those designers out there are designing with me in mind. In fact, I would venture to speculate that not a single one of them is having even the remotest, haziest thoughts about me, as they churn out one preposterous design after another.

The ironic thing, the thing which never fails to seem like a malicious joke, is the quantity of clothes in the shops which just miss being wearable. The problem is that none of the aforementioned designers has a grandmother like mine. And I know this because if they did, then they would know these words of wisdom: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

And so these stupid, stupid designers have an apparent compulsion to take a very serviceable item of clothing, regard it thoughtfully, tut a little, shake their head, and declare, “What this top really needs is a big, floppy flower sewn on right here”, or “Only two seams, one down each side? We’ll have to fix that. Let’s put fifteen seams, all higgledy-piggledy across the front and one side. And we’ll add some ribbons, for good measure”, or “You know, all we need to do to make this top perfect is to put a lovely frill round the bottom!” or “Oh dear, that solid colour is so dull. Let’s liven it up with some splotches, some improvised-looking paisley, and a dopey-looking teddy bear printed on the front!”

This graduation is in December, and in this part of the world, you generally spend December shuffling around in scarves, gloves, and boots, with your chin buried into your chest, in defence against the wind, and your hands thrust in your pockets. Except when you are partying, that is. Because December is also party season! Well, whoop-de-doo, I’m very happy for you, enjoy the champagne and all that, but for goodness’ sake, must you overrun the shops with your sequinned mini-skirts,  your spaghetti straps, and your little chiffon babydoll dresses? I’m trying to find some serious clothes here! Something that I can wear in the snow and wind without looking like a case for medical science.

Now, I knew you would think I was exaggerating, so, just to prove my point, I sallied forth on my mission equipped with a camera. Herewith the results of my expeditions – what I believe is a very representative sample of what is to be found in the shops at the moment. (You will notice that the clothes in these pictures are all behind glass. This is because, as I discovered, if you try to take pictures in a shop, you get a large, aggressive, noisy security guard bearing down on you asking if you would like to delete those pictures. Well, I say “ask”, but the question actually goes like this: “Would you like to delete those pictures!”

It’s a copyright issue, apparently, because then you can go and put the pictures of the clothes on the internet and then… I don’t know. Something bad happens. But apparently you’re welcome to take as many pictures as you wish outside the shop, because having a sheet of glass between the clothes and the camera makes all the difference.)

                     

 

   

 

 

The above are not, I hasten to add, let’s-get-rid-of-our-summer-stock sale items. They are deliberately designed, intentionally marketed, winter clothes.

So if I turn up at graduation in a pink mini-skirt and a sequinned gold top with one spaghetti strap, or dressed as an elf, please don’t make any sarcastic comments, and just pass me a gown. Thank you. 

Boot Camp

I went to boot camp the other day. Now, I imagine you are sitting there wondering what boot camp is, so I’ll tell you.

The routine goes like this. You are in either the Inside group or the Outside group. If you are Outside, you work your way round the periphery of the room, using a variety of painful and unnatural styles of locomotion. If you are Inside, you station yourself at a bench in the middle of the room, and you are bullwhipped through a series of activities designed to wind you, send you into convulsions, and leave you curled up in a whimpering heap. Sensational fun all round.

Since I was among those who had not been to these sessions before, I was instructed to start off in the Inside group. At first I thought the rationale behind this was to start the newcomers off with the easier exercises. However, I soon laughed heartily at the very idea, as it became clear that we newcomers were planted there for the simple reason that the trainer could focus his full attention on us and not let the tiniest lapse or sign of laziness slip by unnoticed.

The trainer, whom I had previously understood to be a sweet, gentle creature, was suddenly the size of a small mountain, erupting in explosions of molten rock and castigations, and bellowing things like, “Jump! Lift your knees as high as you can – all the way up to your chin! Jump! Jump! Jump!” and “Press up! And down – and hold. HOLD IT! I DIDN’T SAY TO GO BACK UP! Hold it till it BURNS!” and “Mountain climbers! Lift those knees! LIFT THOSE KNEES! DON’T slow down why are you slowing down keep it MOVING! FASTER!”

At one point, he had us doing press-ups, with our hands on the bench. Then he added an extra dimension, called a “gecko”, to each press-up. Doing a gecko, we learn, involves bringing your left knee up to your left elbow, then your right knee to your right elbow. So we were going: press-up, gecko left, gecko right.

Then he decided to add yet another dimension to this press-up. 

“Press-up, gecko, gecko, neo,” he instructed, demonstrating. And I swear he did this:

Humour me for a moment. Stand up, and put your hands on a knee-high surface, or, failing that, a chair seat. Now, throwing all your weight onto your hands, hurl your feet up behind you. Try to get them up above your head. I will wait a moment while you do so.

….

OK? Did you manage? No? No, of course you didn’t. It’s impossible. And yet, not only did this ambulant volcano of a trainer do it, but he expected – nay, he demanded – that we do it too! I have never heard of such a thing in all my days.

Just as I was starting to seriously worry that my lungs were going to rupture, and wonder why I couldn’t feel my hands or feet anymore, the trainer suddenly stopped, smiled cheerily, and said, “OK, change over. Inside group, go to the outside; outside group, come to the inside.”

Well, a change is as good as a rest, they do say, but it depends what kind of rest. In some cases, a change is only as good as a rest if a rest involves throwing your body alternately at the floor and at the ceiling, at intervals contorting yourself into a variety of uncomfortable positions, and impairing your sense of up and down in the most violent manner imaginable.

So this is what you do if you are in the Outside group:

You start in a corner. There, you do five burpees. This is what a burpee looks like:

(But faster than that. As fast as you can, in fact.)

Then you go to the next corner. But you don’t just stroll across – what on earth were you thinking? No – you jump across. And not the sort of frivolous jump you used to do with your friends in the playground, but a big, painful, grownup jump, starting with a squat, then propelling yourself forward in a magnificent parabola, and culminating in a hint of a thud and another squat, ready for the next launch.

When you get to that corner, you do another five burpees. In fact, you do five burpees in every corner you get to. (And this apparently rectangular room appears to develop a quite unjustifiable quantity of corners, I might add.) When you have finished burpeeing, you arrange yourself with your hands and feet on the floor and your back straight, so that the floor, your arms, and your back make an isosceles triangle. So far so good, you think. Yes, well, just wait. You then throw one hand and one foot out to one side, then bring your other hand and foot across to join them, so you are effectively crawling your way sideways across the floor. Have you ever tried to do such a thing? Of course you haven’t. Why would you? It is a ridiculous, unnatural thing to do, and makes for an incredibly uncomfortable journey across the room.

When you finally reach the next corner, you do the requisite five burpees, and then apply yourself to the task of crawling – yes, crawling – on your stomach, much in the manner of an agitated lizard, down a row of mats (by now smeared with the sweat of a dozen clammy, hyperventilating people).

Five more burpees, and now comes the only uncompromisedly fun part of the whole ordeal – hopping merrily from one Bosu ball (  )to another, as if you were crossing a river on stepping stones.

You breathe a sigh (or rather wheeze a gasp) of relief at this point, congratulating yourself wholeheartedly for having survived an entire circuit of the room. You look proudly across at the trainer, reckoning that at any moment now, he will say, “OK, change over again”. (What you would like him to say, of course, is “OK, folks, that’ll do for today”, but you are not living in Fairyland.) But the trainer pays not the slightest bit of heed to you or to any other member of the Outside group, because he is so taken up with thundering commands at the gasping, trembling, and occasionally collapsing, members of the Inside group.

So you cast your eyes to the floor in resignation, mop the sweat from your brow, and start off on another set of burpees. And round the room you go again. At intervals, you hear, in the distant corners of your consciousness, through a fog of searing pain and discomfort, the trainer shouting “30 seconds more!” and each time, your heart lifts a little, only to sink again after 30 seconds elapse and it turns out that he just meant 30 seconds until the Inside group started the next exercise.

Finally, once you have effected at least another two laps of the room (the crawling leg of the circuit slightly easier each time, due to the steadily accumulating film of sweat on the mats, which eliminates some of the resistance), the trainer yells out, “Get some water! You have ten seconds! Ten – nine – eight – “

And he actually counts the seconds you are permitted for the consumption of several litres of water.

Then it’s back to the grindstone. Insiders and Outsiders exchange places, and you start the whole traumatic ordeal again.

You know those sci-fi horror stories where someone gets sent back an hour in time? So they live that hour again, until they arrive at the point at which they get sent back an hour? And they just find themselves looped into this hour which, no matter how enjoyable it might have been the first time round, quickly becomes tortuous? Well, that is exactly what this Inside-change-Outside-change-Inside-change business was like. I don’t know how long it went on, but it seemed like days. It just didn’t end. Except that eventually, it did.

I had by that point downed enough water to irrigate a small farm for a week. And I’m just one person – there were fifteen others too. These boot camp classes must cost the gym a fortune in water bills. And as for my clothes… Have you ever had occasion to plunge a t-shirt into a bucket of water? You know what it looks like when you take it out? Well, that is what my t-shirt looked like. 

Well, I felt indescribably virtuous by the end of all this, and I went straight home and ate a large portion of chocolate fudge pudding to congratulate myself. But not before I had informed the trainer that his profile on the gym website, despite being very beautiful, contained an apostrophe which had no business being there. He didn't tell me to get lost, although he might have been justified in doing so, but just shook his head sadly.

“I hate writing that sort of stuff,” he sighed. “I’m trying to put together a new profile, but I really hate doing it.”

So I wrote a profile for him. I also wrote a glowing testimonial, and meant every word of it. And I’m going back for another session tomorrow. 

Back in the classroom: a lesson in Saudi culture

I have been doing some teaching at an English school this week. There are a lot of Saudi Arabians studying at this school, and they are a source of constant fascination. Of course, I have only come into contact with Saudis who travel, who may be very different from the Saudis who stay at home. But even so...

What springs to your mind when you think of Saudis? I have to admit that my preconceived ideas were: religion controlling every aspect of life, to an almost debilitating degree, distant men who wouldn't dream of looking a woman in the eye, and much less of talking to her, meek, silent women hidden in swathes of black cloth, and the necessity of constantly treading on eggshells to avoid causing any offence. 

Since then, all the Saudis I have come across in my classes have been gracious, pleasant, well-mannered and - here's what opened my eyes – exceedingly tolerant and unjudgemental. If I were from a country where women couldn't leave the house unless they were covered from head to toe and accompanied by a male relative, I am sure I would find it shocking and unacceptable to find myself studying with both men and women - sitting next to each other - and a female teacher, who is comparatively skimpily dressed. 

But in the classroom, the men show no sign of being disturbed by having to, in effect, take orders from a woman (one who is considerably younger than many of them and who doesn't even cover her head). They are extremely respectful and cheerful, and if you didn't know, you would never guess that they were from a country where women are so deferent to men. The younger ones in particular are remarkably laid-back and friendly towards the (non-Arab) girls in the class, chatting to them and even touching them. 

Women in Saudi Arabia, I believe, all wear black abayas and niqabs (so just their eyes show) when they go out in public. But I have never seen any of the students at the school here wearing them. The women all cover up, but they wear pretty tops, jeans, trainers, and brightly coloured scarves. I have had two students who covered their faces, but even they were wearing bright colours. (It is a bit unsettling, incidentally, to talk to someone wearing a niqab if you are not used to it. It is like talking to someone holding their hand in front of their mouth. You fight the urge to say, “Stop covering your mouth! I can’t hear what you are saying!”)

The other thing that surprised me about the women is how educated so many of them are. Many of them have been to university, and they are doctors, university lecturers, managers, or other professionals. Apparently, 58% of college students in Saudi Arabia are women (although they are barred from certain subjects, such as engineering, journalism and architecture, and account for only 14% of the workforce).  

But one incident in class today did make me wonder if, behind the scenes, Saudi Arabia is being run not so much by the princes of the House of Saud as by their mothers. The topic of the lesson was phones and phone calls, and one lanky, melodramatic man with an explosive smile threw his hands in the air and spluttered, “Every day, my mother call me! She say, ‘What you doing?’ I say, ‘I busy!’ She say, ‘Come here!’ And I put phone and I go here.” His shoulders fell, in a gesture of resignation. “My mother,” he declared, drawing his finger firmly across the desk, “she red line!”

This man, I should mention, was 40 years old.