100 YEARS OLD AND STILL HIGHLY EDUCATIONAL...

BISCUITS, I find, can generally solve most problems. Most people when given biscuits will be very thankful, eat them, and go away which spares one from having to talk to them, thus resulting in considerable time saving. The other day however I found myself on a train facing a woman and her daughter, the latter of whom was repeatedly singing a particularly irritating ditty.

So I gave the mother a biscuit and, as they were particularly attractive sloth-shaped biscuits covered with chocolate, offered one to the girl. She seized it, thanked me politely but apparently missed the subtext of my offer which was “please be quiet now”. Instead of doing so, she addressed me directly with the words “Hickory, dickory dock.”

“What,” I asked, “is that meant to mean?” “It’s a nursery rhyme,” she said. “I didn’t ask what it was,” I said. “I asked what it meant? Hickory, I believe, is a small nut-bearing tree from North America, dickory, as far as I know, isn’t a word at all, and dock is a place for a ship, a joining of two spacecraft or an enclosure in a criminal court for the accused. I cannot see the connection between these.”

“The mouse ran up the clock,” she said, as though it explained everything.

“Ah,” I said, in an enlightened tone, “you should have said that earlier. A mouse, eh? The dock you referred to previously may be connected with the verb to dock, meaning to cut a tail off something. If there’s a mouse involved, I would be most interested to learn whether a farmer’s wife, a carving knife and two more mice were seen in the vicinity. If so, the farmer’s wife may well be in the dock, charged with cruelty to animals.”

“The mouse ran up the clock,” she repeated.

“Is that ‘ran up’ as in running up a bill or a debt? If so, I find it hard to believe that one can run up a clock. Unless, of course, one has lost a wager for which the stake was a clock.” “The clock struck one,” she said. “That must have given the mouse some cause for thought,” I said. “I have at home a chiming clock which I occasionally hear striking one in the middle of the night. I then know that it is either one o’clock or half past something, as it chimes a single bong at the half hour. I sometimes then wait for half an hour, hoping to resolve the issue but if it then chimes one again, I can only conclude that it is either half past one or one o’clock and I must wait another half hour to discover which.” “The mouse ran down,” she said. “Evidently it did not have the patience that I do,” I said. “I’m not surprised. Mice, in my experience, are rather jumpy creatures and not given to wait half an hour to find out the time. Yet you are being ambiguous again I fear, as ‘ran down’ can mean either moved downwards at high speed or generally slowed down as its energy sources were depleted. Which was it?”

“Hickory, dickory dock,” she said triumphantly, so I gave her another biscuit and pretended to fall asleep. That’s the only language these young people understand, I’m afraid.