Sunday 8 November 2009

Modern thinking

We live in a strange, overly politically correct world. Now I don't condone discrimination, sure, but I don't feel that it's necessarily necessary (ha, that flows well) to rewrite things like "Baa baa black sheep". I mean, it's "have you any wool" not "how's life on the cotton farm".
But you know what? Why stop there? Let's take a trip into yesteryear and look at how we could improve old rhymes and songs to better reflect today's nanny culture.

London bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. London bridge is falling down, Gordon Brown has increased our terrorist alert level to red, has sealed off access to all adjacent tube stations and closed all major roads around the area. An investigation is being mounted.
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill filed an accident and injury claim against the local council, stating that the steep, slippery hill was clearly an unmarked hazard. She was awarded £15000 in compensation which they used to dig a well closer to their village.
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, she had so many children she didn't know what to do. But given that shoes don't fall into any council tax brackets, she was able to live nicely off of the child support benefits and eventually moved into a comically oversized terraced Nike training shoe.
Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye. 4 and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie. When the pie was opened, Greenpeace began to firebomb the King's castle.
Rock a bye baby, on the treetop. Your mother has been arrested by social services for being deranged enough to hang you in a tree, because seriously man, what the hell?
Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are? Are you the result of intelligent design or simply an easily explained result of a number of chemical reactions?
Ring-a-ring of roses, a pocketful of posies, atishoo! Atishoo! A national epidemic. Leaflets have been issued to tell the public how to behave when they have a cold, drugs have been stockpiled.
Georgie Peorgie, pudding and pie. Kissed the girls and was issued with an anti-social behaviour order, a restraining order and was registered as a sex offender.

If I ever have a child, I'm reading them the old fairy tales. The real ones. Ones where you expect something bad to happen to the bad people, maybe they even die. Wicked kings, brave heroes and heroines, that kind of thing. They can learn about red tape and being careful to never acknowledge any people's differences in race, age, gender or personal preferences from the rest of the world.