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.