Lady Gaga will never ride a cock horse
You know how they say that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put an omelette together and serve it between them…
… which goes a long way explaining how that king’s head, in the end, came a-tumbling down, Humpty Dumpty style.
Ah yes, those good old nursery rhymes.
Such a pity they are disappearing fast from the communally shared aural landscape. Chances are most young children will know the lyrics from a Lady Gaga or Snoop Dogg song before they will ever get the chance to hear of Humpty Dumpty, Georgie Porgie and the others.
(Probably also because their parents are too busy humming ABBA and Meatloaf tunes to sing the real classics to their kids.)
As most people know, a lot of those old nursery rhymes had hidden and quite often political agendas. As I already hinted at in the first two alineas, Humpty Dumpty was, supposedly, a cannon that went all ‘Challenger’ during a siege in the English Civil War. Many other nursery rhymes have similar, rather cryptic references.
Take that other one, ‘Ride a Cock Horse’:
“Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She shall have music wherever she goes.”
Which (supposedly) had everything to do with Lady Godiva, who rode naked through the town of Coventry, as part of a widespread tax protest that puts shame to any lukewarm Tea Party.
Anyway, it is a pity that we don’t do nursery rhymes anymore – especially with the kind of political issues and leaders that we now have.
From the aforementioned Challenger fiasco to the Afghan war; from George Bush’s pretzels to Bill Clinton’s hard-on. From Gordon Brown’s glass eye, through Putin’s bare-chested holiday snaps, to fully naked prostitutes at Berlusconi’s summer parties.
So many lurid and silly stories – and so little time for nursery rhymes, these days…
Maybe I should try to write some new ones, in the coming days and weeks. it would make for a rather nifty, new category on this blog, next to the sport/sex/politics/satire/etc options.
We’ll see how that one will work out. Time for me now to make one last pot of tea, before I have to leave for work again.
Na shledanou zítra.
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