Inventing nursery rhymes for the modern age

There comes a time in a parent’s life where they realise their child will not have a notion about things in the past we took for granted, writes Colm O’Regan.

See them approach a television and attempt to swipe it? That moment when they look at you and wonder why a touch-screen is not working can be quite jarring. You think back to the sepia-tinted days when screens were roundy and had a layer of static on them and didn’t give a shite whether you touched them or not. There was no ‘interaction’. There was no swiping.

But don’t worry. Our children have not lost complete touch with the past. In fact they still have a direct arterial line to a time long before flat tellies and swiping. A link to when a screen was little more than a simple structure used to hide m’lady’s modesty as she disrobed from her petticoats, and swiping was stealing: The time of the nursery rhyme.

For a start nursery rhymes are a handy repository of old things. The Crooked Man goes a crooked mile and finds a crooked sixpence next to a crooked stile. “What’s a sixpence? Actually what’s a mile?” Your young’uns might ask. “A crooked man?” Ok that’s always going to be around.

It was still a time of different professions all having their own shop. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker seem to be quite close. Straight away a child is brought back to an economic system where candlesticks were made in this country in a little inner city workshop and not in Special Free Trading Industrial zone near Shanghai. if you’re a Trump supporter you might use this to make a point about trade-tariffs and the death of white working-class jobs.

Old MacDonald’s farm is non-intensive. He only has a few of each animal. Remember those farms? It gives a clue about what farming used to be like. Although you can’t see any of the young MacDonalds taking it on. They’re all in college doing Digital Marketing.

Goosey gander takes an old man by the leg and throws him downstairs for not saying his prayers. When would you get that kind of punishment now from a gander? Not since the mid-90s at least.

And then there is the world history buried within the rhymes. Mary had a little lamb, for example is about a girl called Mary who brought a lamb to school. Mary, Mary, quite contrary is about Queen Mary I filling English cemeteries with the bodies of her persecuted subjects. Heartwarming stuff.

The question is — are we creating any new nursery rhymes which retain the durability of the ones we have now? You know, the sexist, racist ones that endorse domestic and other types of violence that our children often cheerfully recite.

Somehow it feels in these more regulated times it feels like nursery rhymes would not be able to escape literal constraints. I tried a few examples but the premise always falls apart.

“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, Who had so many children she didn’t know what to do. She was judged and shamed in an online debate/ And told the whole story on last night’s Late Late.”

“Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pale of water/ Jack fell down and wasn’t hurt but Jill encouraged him to sue and now the hill is closed.”

“This is the sales target big and far/ that encouraged the estate agent with the Audi car/to unsettle the couple in the nice part of the city/to unlock the potential positive equity/That lay in the house that Jack built.”

Nursery rhymes often originated as silly songs sung by adults in pubs and on the streets. So will the nonsense songs of today be the nursery rhymes of tomorrow?

Will “Under my umbrella/ella hey hey”, “We are the Cheeky Girls”, “I’m a Barbie Girl”or “Boom Boom Shake The Room” resound throughout the nurseries of the future?

Looks like it’s back to ganders.