Woking Writers Circle Christmas Dinner. We had all anonymously written poems about each other and they had been put in the crackers. A great evening.

I put a lot of effort into writing a well constructed limerick, but being as I didn’t know the person I was writing it for and his name was rather hard to rhyme, my attention to detail in the construction was entirely lost!

For those in the slightest bit interested the limerick, though perhaps associated with a medieval latin verse form, was populazied by Edward Lear in the nineteenth century; some speculate that the name corrupts Lear-ick. More often it is attributed to the refrain “Will you come up to Limerick” (an Irish county and City), said to have been sung between extemporised verses at convivial Irish gatherings. Limericks are judged by the elegance of their structure, the wittiness of their conceits, and often their ribaldry. There are five lines, and the rhyming scheme is a-a-b-b-a. The first, second and fifth lines have three feet each–an iamb an two anapests. The third and fourth have one iamb and one anapest each.

Okay, here goes… (Spellings altered for effect, and technically, yes, the last word of the lines should have been one syllable.)

There once was a man we’ll call Derrick
Whose job was a bore and generrick
Deciding one day
To go his own way
He took up a life as a clerrick

Not exactly earth shattering I grant you, but I had fun working it out!

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