Less prose and more poem in this blog. I've always loved nursery rhymes, for their music and for their simple memorability. Once learnt, rarely forgotten it seems, even after a gap of decades.
I've just started reading some beautifully illustrated nursery rhyme books to my new grand-daughter and have been fascinated both by her present enchantment and the deep chord that resonates within me at the merest mention of the first few words of many of them. Like many adults, I'm sure, I've searched for the derivations of popular rhymes but there always seems to be a dispute about who, say, the real Jack Horner was or which King was in in his counting house - and in the end, of course, it doesn't really matter. But in my mind those characters and simple yet magical situations have achieved a sort of reality of their own.
So I wrote this poem:
Finally, a few years ago, I had some fun transforming some of the old nursery rhymes into ones that might fit our modern world - they certainly weren't intended to be used with young children. Here's an example:
