Tales from Cambridge Yesteryear: Limerick lessons

"Excuse me", says a German tourist, who has approached us in the Copper Kettle, where Simone and I are eating cake, drinking coffee and giggling over our homework, "Are you Cambridge students? You look like you're having great fun doing your work!"

And indeed, fun is exactly what we were having. We had been instructed, nearly a week before, to write two limericks: one happy, one sad. It was supposed to teach us about generic expectations, and the difficulties of subverting form with content. We had half an hour left until the class, when we would have to hand our poems in. Mine had already been done - my sad limerick bewailing the demise of an affair with a married man (a fictional case study, of course!).

Simone had not been so well organised and thus it came to pass that we were trying to find poetic inspiration with not much time remaining. Her other poems (10 lines of iambic pentameter and 10 of trochaic tetrameter, if you must know) had all been about squirrels - she had composed them in the Wolfson clubroom as the squirrels scampered around outside. So we decided it would be best to continue the theme in her limericks, in order to turn her work into a ready made poetry collection. Here is what Simone, poetess of squirrel love, came up with:

There once was a squirrel called Skiffy
Who could nip up trees in a jiffy
Along came a whore
with an AK-44
And now Mr Skiffy's a stiffy

Now, there is one obvious flaw in the poem: namely, the confusion over weaponry. Thankfully, we noticed this before she handed the poem in, so she footnoted the fact that the AK-44 was an early prototype of the now more common AK-47. And we didn't have time to write two limericks, so she also put in a note, helpfully pointing out that this limerick was tragi-comic and therefore sufficed to represent both a happy and a sad limeric simultaneously.

Fast-forward to the following week. We get our homework back, and the tutor has presented his comments on our work in the form of limericks.

This was mine:

Alas! You are telling no lies
Extra-marital screwing's unwise
And you'll find quite apart
from the pain in your heart
Greater joys behind bachelors' flies.

Hm. It felt a bit wrong, and I hope he knew it was a mature student he was writing it to, as it would have been slightly wrong had I been an 18 year old.

However, the best comment of them all was to Simone:

Simone! Why the squirrel fixation?
Dirty nuts get no standing ovation
And I'm afraid Mr Skiffy
Whether lively or whiffy
Does not help your versification.

He'll regret his cruel words when Simone becomes famous as the Cambridge Squirrel Poetess. He shall rue the day, I tell you - in fact, he has probably starting rueing already!