G’day! There is an Australian flavour to this week’s Melissa’s Fandango Flash Fiction Challenge #245, so I wrote a limerick about a kangaroo playing bowls (well you would, wouldn’t you?). Then I wrote three more.
Limerick No. 1
There was a kangaroo called Skippy. He played bowls with a girl wearing lippy,
They played bowls because, they both came from Oz,
And fell on the floor ‘cos it was slippy.
Lesley Scoble, December 2023
Limerick No. 2
A kangaroo hopped off a high ledge, and hopped straight into a hedge,
A leaf sheared off his ear—it was sharp like a spear,
And that’s what did for his ear. Oh dear.
Lesley Scoble, December 2023
Limerick No. 3
The kangaroo likes to dance ballet; that’s where he met his girl called Sally.
They ate a bowl of rice, which was ever so nice,
Now they both live in a chalet.
Lesley Scoble, December 2023
Limerick No. 4
The kangaroo plays bowls down the alley. He plays with his girlfriend called Sally,
The best thing that he likes, is to win all the strikes,
And he thinks anyone who doesn’t is doolally.
Lesley Scoble, December 2023
The Book of Nonsense
Yesterday I went to an Advent Fayre at the local medieval church of St Giles. They do wonderful book sales. For a couple of quid, I came away with an old copy of The Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear. Lear’s humorous drawings fill this book. They are brilliant cartoons that illustrate each of the 109 riotous limericks.
Most limericks I know, follow the five line AABBA. Edward Lear wrote his limericks on only three lines, and places the first and second lines as a single top line. He placed the third and fourth lines side by side on the same line.
All the poems in this magnificent volume use the same format. Therefore, I did the same formatting in my limericks.
Please enjoy a few of his limericks picked at random from The Nonsense Book below in the slideshow.
The Book of Nonsense
I thought I’d have a go at sketching Melissa’s prompt photo in Lear’s style (ish).
Time Lapse Video
See below a time-lapse video of how I drew it. Are you aware that the kangaroo is missing half his right ear in the photograph? In the final drawing, I repair it and make his ear whole again.
If you’d like to watch the video to music please play the audio below. The music is Kangaroo by Evgeny_Bardyuzha from Pixabay. (I picked this tune because it is called Kangaroo, but if this music is about a kangaroo—it’s an electronic one.)
Kangaroo
A little bit of history…
NOTES
Bowls
Bowls goes back for millennia. They first played it in ancient Egypt with shiny polished rocks as a game known as Bocce (Bocce is the ancestor of modern bowls). They played it in Rome in Julius Caesar’s time. Coming forward to the 13th century, the Scots played it. The Scots introduced the smooth flat greens to play the game on. In 1588, Sir Francis Drake was famous for playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe while the Spanish Armada approached the Devonshire coast. The story goes that while playing the game; he received the news of the imminent threat of the mighty Armada. His response was, “Time enough to play the game and then thrash the Spaniards afterwards.”
In the 1860s the game migrated to New Zealand. It was getting closer to reaching the kangaroos.
Bowling strikes
Strikes are when all ten pins are skittled in the first bowl. In other words, you knock ‘em all down in one go. Then mark the strike on your scoresheet with an X.
If you win a strike twice, it is called a double. If you get three strikes, it’s known as a turkey (so, it’s not three strikes and you’re out then?). Why turkey, I wonder?
It stems from the Thanksgiving holiday in America. The prizes for winning in bowling were most likely food baskets. Turkey was the most popular prize.
Edward Lear
NOTES
Edward Lear (1812—1888)
Artist, illustrator, poet, musician, composer, author
Edward Lear’s birthplace was in Holloway, North London. He was the penultimate child in a family of 21 children (goodness me!).
The Napoleonic Wars caused financial upheaval on the Stock Exchange, where his father worked as a stockbroker. Straightened circumstances followed, and Edward needed to live elsewhere to be brought up by his elder sister, Ann.
[The quotes below are from autobiographical letters that Lear sent during his lifetime to a ‘lady of acquaintance’.]
“Born in 1812 (12th May), I began to draw, for bread and cheese, about 1827, but only did uncommon queer shop-sketches—selling them for prices varying from ninepence to four shillings: colouring prints, screens, fans; awhile making morbid disease drawings for hospitals and certain doctors of physic.”
“I became employed at the Zoological Society, and, in 1832, published “The Family of the Psittacidae,” the first complete volume of coloured drawings of birds on so large a scale published in England.”
“The first edition of the “Book of Nonsense” was published in 1846, lithographed by tracing-paper.”
“In 1835 or ‘36, being in Ireland and the Lakes, I leaned more and more to landscape, and when in 1837 it was found that my health was more affected by the climate month by month, I went abroad, wintering in Rome till 1841.”
[Lear suffered poor health, which led him to leave England to live in Italy for a warmer climate where he spent time travelling and oil painting.]
“In 1845 I came again to England, and in 1846 gave Queen Victoria some lessons, through Her Majesty’s having seen a work I published in that year on the Abruzzi, and another on the Roman States.”
“In 1862, a second edition of the “Book of Nonsense,” much enlarged, was published, and is now in its sixteenth thousand.”
[The book that I bought at the advent fair is the thirtieth edition of this book. Published by LONDON: FREDERICK WARNE AND CO., AND NEW YORK. 1895]
Edward Lear died at his villa in San Remo in 1888. He lies in the Cemetery Foce in San Remo.
Musician and composer
Lear composed music for many of his nonsense poems and The Owl and the Pussycat. He also illustrated and wrote music for Tennyson.
The inscription on Lear’s tombstone are words from a poem On His Travels to Greece by Tennyson, for whom he wrote this poem.
— all things fair.
With such a pencil, such a pen.
You shadow’d forth to distant men,
I read and felt that I was there.
~
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Thank you, Melissa, for the inspiration of your photo in Melissa’s Fandango Flash Fiction Challenge #245
Lesley lives in the City of London Square Mile. An artist, actor and sculptor (her first ceramic sculpture won the V&A inspired by… Award). Scenic artist & book illustrator, playwright, (her musical play, Rapscallion performed in inner city schools and theatre school); TV dancer; Animator and illustrator for TV production. Set up Pinecone Studios Ltd and IIMSI Ltd drama and filmmaking workshops in London – producing award-winning films made by children.
LesleyScoble.com 
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