Thursday, 19th November 2009.

This entry still needs a title

Nursery rhymes are not, by and large, supposed to make sense on a first listen. Many of them are drenched in satire and social commentary – ‘Humpty Dumpty’, for example, is either about a civil war cannon or King Richard III, or neither, depending on who you ask. The innocent-sounding ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’ described the symptoms of the Black Death (even though this may not have been intentional), and ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ almost certainly refers to Richard of York’s unfortunate defeat at the Battle of Wakefield. Popular song has always been a particularly potent means of dealing with social commentary, and there’s no reason why children’s songs should be any exception. As a child I always wondered why the parents mentioned in ‘Daddy’s Taking Us To The Zoo Tomorrow’ didn’t just pick a day when they could all go together, until I read that it was in fact a wry dig at the custody battles and contests of one-upmanship that frequently result from broken marriages where children are involved – something that tends to go over the head of your average seven-year-old.

Nonetheless, some nursery rhymes are simply weird. ‘Round and Round the Garden’ is a prime example. My children love being tickled, and weep with laughter when we reach the punchline, particularly if you draw it out a bit, but I don’t think that any of us have ever really stopped to consider that the simile is hideously inappropriate. I’ve never seen a teddy bear of any sort ambulating round a garden, at least outside of certain areas of Canada (and even then only courtesy of Library Pictures). If we’re talking about a stuffed animal, they tend to be inanimate, and thus the only way of getting them to move in a circular direction of their own accord would be to peg them on a rotating washing line before spinning it. If we’re talking about a real bear, then perhaps the best thing to do would be to stop making up inane tickling songs, and get inside and lock all the doors and wait for Animal Control. (Coincidentally, I’ve just finished proofreading a review of a book that “offers important insights into human/polar bear relations across the Canadian Arctic”. I’d guess that the most important insight that anyone could offer about human/polar bear relationships would be would be to carry a tranquiliser gun, and where possible stay the hell away from the polar bear.)

The sad tale of ‘Incy Wincy Spider’ is, as far as I’m concerned, a proverb not about the importance of persistence but rather of learning from your mistakes; it’s easy to marvel at the staying power of the unfortunate arachnid as he’s washed out of the spout time and time again, but I can’t help thinking that Incy’s climbing time would have been drastically reduced if he’d just found another point of entry. And the tale of the man going to St. Ives is also in dire need of a rethink: the answer is supposed to be one, with the clue being that in the first couplet the traveller announcing that he met a man while he was going to St. Ives (Cornwall, or Cambridgeshire), implying that the Utah-dwelling Latter Day Saint and his entourage (not to mention their small cattery) were all travelling in the opposite direction. This ignores the fact that they could quite conceivably met at a hotel, or even a fork in the road, but sadly this interpretation seems to have been lost in the mists of time, leaving only the literal reading that is generally acknowledged as the solution to the puzzle.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because Thomas has developed a recent preoccupation with Sesame Street, or ‘Ernie-Bert’, as he refers to it. This means that whether I’m in the study or the kitchen, I’m generally interrupted at least twice a day when a greasy DVD box is thrust into my hands, accompanied by the words ‘Ernie-Bert!’. The DVD in question is a German edition of what was known over there as Sesamstraße - specifically, a compilation of the career highlights of everyone’s favourite roommates (Ren and Stimpy aside) that we picked up in Bamburg a couple of years ago. Thomas can’t understand a word of it, but that doesn’t diminish his enjoyment – or his enthusiasm to watch – one iota.

But Thomas probably watches too much television, so we’ve tried to compromise by raiding the CD collection instead. If he’s in an Ernie-Bert mood, the album in question is Platinum All Time Favourites, which features the incredibly catchy ‘Fuzzy and Blue’, the vile and repulsive ‘Sing’ (complete with Spanish translation) and the unforgettable ‘C is for Cookie’. I should point out that I bought this album before I had any children or even met my other half. I could justify it by saying that certain songs were great on hospital radio, which I was doing at the time, and that I simply wanted to cheer up sick people, but I suspect that I’m just a little too in touch with my inner child.

It is the third song on the album that I wanted to talk about today: the irritating-but-sweet ‘The People In Your Neighborhood’, which talks, as you might expect, about the different jobs that you might find in a community. An expanded rewrite completed some years later has about seven verses, but the album version contains only two, which is quite enough. Lead vocals are assigned to Bob, one of the steadfast and reliable humans (in this case, the one that bears an uncanny resemblance to Neil Sedaka) that live in Sesame Street along with Oscar, Big Bird and Ritalin poster boy Elmo. We begin:

Bob: Oh, who are the people in your neighborhood?
In your neighborhood?
In your neighborhood?
Say, who are the people in your neighborhood?
The people that you meet each day.

[Enter a blue nondescript muppet. Muppet #1 sounds suspiciously like Jim Henson.]

Bob: Oh, hi there, little fella.

Muppet #1: Hello.

Bob: Hey, listen, know who you could be if I gave you this little hat and this bag to go over your shoulder?

Muppet #1: I could be a laundry man.

Bob: No, not a laundry man.

Muppet #1: How about Santa Claus?

Bob: No no no, not Santa Claus.

Muppet #1: What’s wrong with Santa Claus?

Bob: There’s nothing wrong with Santa Claus, but –

Muppet #1: Don’t you like Christmas?

Bob: Oh, I love Christmas. But you could be the postman.

Muppet #1: A postman, hmmmm…
Oh, the postman always brings the mail
Through rain or snow or sleet or hail
I’ll work and work the whole day through
To get your letters safe to you

Bob and Muppet #1:
‘Cause a postman is a person in your neighborhood
In your neighborhood
He’s in your neighborhood
A postman is a person in your neighborhood
A person that you meet each day.

So far, so good – although the determination of Sesame Street mail service to deliver the post in even the most adverse weather conditions is to be commended, as it’s an attitude that sadly doesn’t translate to the British Isles. Over here, we get three flakes of snow and civilisation as we know it grinds to a halt. The song continues:

Muppet #1: I’ll see you around.

Bob: Okay.

[Muppet #1 leaves, bumped into Muppet #2 as he enters. Muppet #2 sounds suspiciously like Frank Oz.]

Muppet #2: Hey, watch it. Where ya goin’? To a fire?

Bob: Hey, speaking of a fire.

Muppet #2: Fire! What fire? Help! Help!

Bob: No, there’s no fire at all. But do you know who you could be if I gave you this little shiny red hat?

Muppet #2: Yeah, Santa Claus.

Bob: No, not Santa Claus.

Muppet #2: Little Red Riding Hood?

Bob: No, no, no, not Red Riding Hood, you could be a fireman.

Muppet #2: A fireman? Holy smoke!
Oh, a fireman is brave it’s said
His engine is a shiny red
If there’s a fire anywhere about
Well, I’ll be sure to put it out

Bob and Muppet #2:
‘Cause a fireman is a person in your neighborhood
In your neighborhood
He’s in your neighborhood

Muppet #1:
And a postman is a person in your neighborhood

All:
Well, they’re the people that you meet
When you’re walking down the street
They’re the people that you meet each day.

It would be crass and juvenile of me to make jokes about shining red engines, or the length of a fireman’s hose, or to poke further fun at uniformed organisations by mentioning the similarities between policemen and polar bears (they’ve both got blue helmets). The whole album is absolutely laden with innuendo if you know where to look – the poignancy of Grover’s “What Do I Do When I’m Alone?” is dampened somewhat by the fact that there’s a very obvious answer, and it’s impossible to listen to ‘Rubber Duckie’ without wearing a smirk, particularly when Ernie announces that “Every day when I make my way to the tubby / I find a little fella who’s cute and yella and chubby”. Part of me knows that this is perfectly innocent; part of me thinks that he really ought to see a doctor. Another part of me thinks that I really ought to see a doctor.

Innuendo, however, is not the issue here. Instead, I take umbrage at Bob’s assertion that “a fireman is a person in your neighbourhood”. It’s admittedly true, at least on a technical level. Our nearest fire station is about half a mile up the road, and the community hospital half a mile in the opposite direction: living on a main street means we’re never short of traffic at the best of times, and we’ll often hear the wail of an ambulance siren heading in one direction or a fire engine heading in the other, the Doppler effect in full swing as they streak past.

But that’s the fire station, not the fire crew. In actual fact, we never see any of the fire crew. They tend not to be the sociable type; not unless there’s a village fete or a training event or a national strike. I’m lucky enough to be one of the office fire sweepers – a job with far less glamour than it sounds, as my role is simply to ensure that my assigned floor is empty, before reporting this fact to the facilities manager while sporting an appalling yellow jacket. It’s probably the only occasion I’d be allowed into the ladies’ toilets without getting a reprimand. There is, however, one perk: the occasional refresher courses where the firemen give us an hour’s lecture (complete with disturbing video footage) before taking us into the car park to use the extinguishers to put out several small fires. These courses are few and far between, and I’m still not convinced that in the event of a genuine emergency I’d actually remember what to do, but it’s fun while it lasts.

Still, that’s my one brush with the emergency services. The simple fact is that firemen are not “people that you meet when you’re walking down the street”, unless you’re walking away from a fire, and they’re running in the opposite direction with an axe. If we had the good fortune to live somewhere like Pleasantville or Trumpton, where the resident fire crews were so bored due to the lack of combustible heat sources that they’d leave the station at every conceivable opportunity to rescue a cat or put up some posters, things might be a bit different. But as it stands, they seem for the most part to be holed up in the fire station, eating toast and watching repeats of Jeremy Kyle. (You can almost imagine a bored fireman standing on the upper floor, bellowing “Hey! Does this pole still work?”) One of my friends is married to a fireman, and I never see him as he’s permanently on call. So even though she lives just up the road, thus making him a person in my neighbourhood, our paths never cross.

Perhaps it’s better that way. I’d be happy to see a postman in my neighbourhood, unless he’s carrying a brown envelope towards my front door. If it’s a fireman, it means something’s probably burning, and if something’s burning, I generally don’t want to be near it. So I view the song with a certain amount of suspicion. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but the apparent omnipresence of the emergency services makes me wonder exactly what kind of neighbourhood Sesame Street actually is: if it’s one where the fire crew are kept busy in the same way that they are in, for example, Fireman Sam (where an “emergency” generally consisted of a quick trundle round the model village, a few piddly drops of water on the makeshift flames, and then time for a cup of tea and a chat with the arsonist) then we’re laughing. If, on the other hand, we’re talking about systematic and wilful destruction of public property to the same extent that you’d expect in somewhere like Rotherham, then I suspect that the air in Henson’s urban community is anything but sweet. Still, Thomas likes it, so perhaps that’s all that matters.