Hello, and thank you for visiting my site. I hope that you'll return often and always find something of interest about my world and what inspires me to pick up a pen. (This is a figure of speech, unfortunately. My handwriting is terrible!) Here's what I've been up to recently...
The Owl and the Pussy-cats
This Christmas Owl was given to us as a joke present and described as a ‘novelty door stop’, but we think he looks just fine where he is. The cats seem to agree.
I learned The Owl and the pussy-cat by heart as a child and fretted for a long time over the ‘runcible’ spoon, which no one was able to define for me. There were and are all kinds of theories, but I’m happy to settle for the idea that it’s a word Edward Lear made up because he liked the sound of it.
Another of Lear’s poems, The Pobble Who Has No Toes, features a ‘runcible cat with crimson whiskers’. Quite what the connection was with my father’s old motorbike I’ve forgotten, but it was generally known by the family as the Pobble. Dad had so many accidents – fortunately only minor ones – that my usually gentle mother threatened to take an axe to the cursed machine and he traded it in for an old banger of a car. At least we as a family retained our full complement of digits!
28 December, 2013 - Make the first comment on this story
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