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Hey look, Boris just wandered into the waiting room after being asked to produce a sample of urine. He asked “Is this the queue for giving in the urine samples?" and everyone sarcastically held up their own samples to indicate that it was. All the booze was for anyone who needed to fill bladder so they could do a big wee. Sure, water may have been more efficient, but wine is more fun. And biscuits help too.
Personally I think it's better to have a government that lies about everything, rather than the ones we've had before that sometimes tell the truth. We know where we stand and that's why Johnson will go down in history as the best PM ever.
There’s a lot of weird shit and racism in old nursery rhymes and the songs we were taught to sing as kids. It didn’t use to be a tiger you caught by the toe. And the alternate version I learned in the seventies was happily taught to three year olds as if that word meant nothing. I know that I am talking about 50 years ago. But come on.
Otherwise there’s stuff about blind mice being almost butchered and kids falling down hills and smashing their heads in and blackbirds in pies and sleeping babies falling out of trees and people dying of plague and to be honest it’s hard to find one that isn’t fucked up.
My son has got a bit obsessed with the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons, which seems like it’s going to be an exception to the rule and simply being a fun poem about bells singing about fruit and farthings and aspirations to be wealthy. Just as you’re nodding off to sleep it helpfully provides a candle to light you to bed and then… what the fuck? Here comes a chopper to chop off your head. It has to be the biggest and most unexpected turnaround in the whole of nursery rhyme history. Where did that come from? It was all so nice and now someone has been beheaded. Not just someone in the poem. You! You have been beheaded. On the way to bed. How are you going to sleep now?
One version of the song on Amazon is so shocked that the lady just repeats the candle line rather than scare the fragile youth of today with the threat of capital punishment. As shocked as I am by the song, I feel that editing out the line is even more offensive.
Ernie however, loves the chopper chopping off your head. The nursery rhyme writers certainly knew their audience. Perhaps with this one they thought they could lull parents into a false sense of security, so they leave the room, only to find kids gleefully laughing about lopping each other’s noggins off. Or did the person who wrote this just go crazy right at the end. Bells having a conversation should have been a sign that their grasp on reality was slipping away, but at least it was fun madness until they started singing about executing children on their way to bed.
We just accept all this because we were indoctrinated with it as kids. That’s probably why some people resisted changing the word to tiger in the other rhyme and taking those pictures off of the jam. It must be OK. We were told about it when we were two.
But like I say, I am not changing the chopper bit and am furious that anyone has done that already, If it was OK to terrify me with the threat of a gruesome death (how sharp is that chopper? How many strikes will it take?) then it’s OK to do the same to my kids.
Another name for the Edinburgh RHLSTPs has been revealed in the secret area of rhlstp.co.uk if you're a badger.
