100 YEARS OLD AND STILL DOUBTING MOON-JUMPERS...

THE phone was ringing with an unbecoming urgency and a slight Wiltshire accent as I arrived at my desk yesterday, the combination giving away the caller’s identity as my long-time correspondent Lady Clamydia Featherlight-Plume.

Under normal circumstances, her Ladyship sends a horseman when she wishes to contact me so I knew that her use of a telephone indicated that something pretty important was afoot.

I picked up the receiver and greeted her with my customary telephone answering cry of “Yo!” which I have long thought superior to Alexander Graham Bell’s suggestion of “Ahoy!”

Her Ladyship evidently agreed, for she replied, “Yo, indeed,” then added, “so much better than Hey! don’t you think?”

“Undoubtedly,” I said, “but tell me, who has been Hey-ing you? It’s a most uncouth form of address.”

“It was a child of some sort,” she said. “He began with ‘Hey diddle diddle’ and I must say I found it most confusing. What did he mean?”

“Hey, as you say, is an uncouth method of gaining your attention,” I said. “There are several meanings of diddle: as a noun it may mean a swindle or deception; as a verb it may mean to toddle or walk unsteadily, as a child. The repetition of ‘diddle’ suggests to me that your tottering child may have had more than one of those meanings in mind.”

“He continued by mentioning a cat and a fiddle,” her ladyship continued.

“Ah,” I said knowingly, “that supports my impression that at least one of the diddles was a swindle, for that is also a meaning of ‘fiddle’. Or the fiddle could be a violin, possibly strung with catgut, which would explain the cat.”

“He went on by telling me that the cow jumped over the Moon,” she said.

“That seems very unlikely,” I replied. “A cow cannot run at more than about 20mph but the escape velocity needed to jump over the Moon is about seven miles per second. At that speed, I think the cow would burn up on take-off.”

“The child also said that a small canine laughed. Can dogs laugh?”

I thought the story was getting more and more far-fetched. “Opinions are divided on the matter,” I said. “Konrad Lorenz and other ethologists have maintained that dogs may emit a laugh-like sound when they are happy but whether that constitutes a laugh is open to question.”

“And the dish ran away with the spoon, apparently,” she said. “Are you sure?” I queried. “No doubt about it,” she said. “That’s what the boy told me.”

“Well ‘dish’ is a slang term for an attractive person, particularly of the female variety and an old meaning of ‘spoon’ was a chip of wood or a roofing shingle,” I explained.

“Do you think it possible that the cow, in its failed attempt to jump over the moon, aborted take-off and landed on someone’s roof, dislodging a shingle which the female dish dishonestly purloined and ran off with?”

“Is that enough to make a dog laugh?” her ladyship enquired, and to be quite honest, I didn’t know.