[Ann Drysdale]

I was just sitting here with a quivering lower lip, sadly contemplating a plate of pissed-on chips when I realised that I am guilty, too.

Jayne, did you feel this discombobulated when I rang today and interrupted your games with the U3A to ask you to wave your wand over Jerusalem for me?

If so, I am truly sorry.

And just to prove how bad a person I am, I confess to playing a game like this with innocent primary school children in a classroom situation. We have cards, red ones with a single-syllable adjective, green ones and blue ones with single-syllable nouns (the blue being particularly easy-to-rhyme) and yellow ones with a two-syllable noun. They are many and random. Each child has a fistful.

Then we sing a song (to a tune from Oklahoma) -

You're as red as a green in a yellow
You're as red as a green in a blue
You're as red as a green in a yellow
And the last line is all down to YOU

Then I start picking on children and they start reading out cards of the right colour. We get stupid things:

You're as soft as a pig in a wardrobe
You're as brown as an ape in a tree
You're as warm as a heart in a handbag
(and then after lots of silly laughing, someone will do a line like...
And the last one's a nice thing to be.

Then they start looking at their cards and there's a lot of "Miss, Miss, Miss!" when they see they have one that's really good in the growing quatrain.

"Can we do another one, Miss?"

And then, if I've "played my cards right", someone will feel dissatisfied with an end result.

"In a carpet is silly, Miss - can we say on a carpet?"

"It would be really funny if it was a bee instead of a cork, Miss."

"Could we do the lines differently, Miss, because I've got a really good rhyme for muffin?"

"Can we cheat, Miss?"

And I tell them that poets cheat all the time and we call it editing - and then off they go, clipping and polishing and flying off at glorious tangents. I often go home at the end of a visit with armfuls of flipchart sheets and type and print and laminate all this wondrousness for them.

Am I really doing irreparable damage to their exquisite little corpses?
.