Up The Spout

Lying in a guest bedroom in Newcastle over the weekend, I was woken by a crazy storm outside. I remember thinking about the fact that these days we don’t seem to have weather so much as intermissions and then acts-of-god. I then moved on to greener mental pastures and thought of Intsy-Wintsy Spider (or Bitsy. Couldn’t decide which one).

The rhyme scuttled around my skull a couple of times. I was imagining a spider standing at the bottom of a drain pipe, four hands on hips, looking at the deluge coming out the bottom and thinking to itself that as the construction industry is too prone to weather delays, it might as well go and become a sign writer for a pig.

It then occurred to me that nursery rhyme is one of those ways we get conditioned to thinking that the protestant work ethic is a good and normal idea. Trudge into work, catch the elevator, labour away at task that will be lost in the torrent – and then, quite literally, rinse and repeat.

You know how it is at night, the theme grows on its own.

Jack and Jill - getting us used to earlier mortality age of males.

Humpty Dumpty – inuring us to under-performance of nationalised institutions because of the poor skills management.

There Was An Old Woman Who Swallowed A Fly - as I’ve mentioned before, the dangers of feral and exotic pest management through introduction of predator species.

Punchinello – the general unfathomable meaninglessness of existence.

And, consoled that I had seen through the whole ghastly plot, I rolled over and went back to sleep... until Linda the Hostess's giant boof-headed cat walked through a mass of unwashed glasses and bottles on the kitchen bench-top, breaking a few items and generally frightening the hell out of everyone in the house.

That sent me down a path of mental enquiry where I think I have now worked out how the common household cat is involved with the World Crime League and their bid to burglarise every home in the western world.