RABBIT PUNCH

As another first day of the month passes, people are quick to shout out 'White Rabbits' or 'Pinch. punch, first of the month' and I'm guessing that they have no idea why they do it except that everyone just does.

So my curiosity gene kicked in and I can inform you that not surprisingly, saying 'White Rabbits' is  supposed to bring you luck. The superstition is a purely British one and there is a variant in which you say 'rabbit, rabbit, rabbit' three times to achieve the desired effect. Ideally the word 'rabbit' should be spoken up the chimney apparently. What a curious nation we are to be sure.  

As for 'pinch, punch, first of the month' this is another British oddity. The phrase was used to banish witches with a pinch of salt (which weakened the witch) followed by a punch to send her on her way. 

Over time this altered to playfully pinching and punching a friend or relative but it is important to add '...and no returns' or else they may do it back to you!

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We all know that if you sit an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards, they will eventually type out the complete words of Shakespeare. However, I very much doubt that they would ever have sufficient time to list the things that I do which drive my dear wife to distraction.

One example from the astronomically long list, is that I am prone to singing along to music in the car - worse still, I sometimes whistle. When this occurs, my aforementioned spouse says something like 'If you don't stop that whistling, I shall go completely doodlealley'.

I often use the phrase myself, but of course the true word is doolally. Somehow though, I find my wife's version rather endearing - so much so that I have been known to provoke it.

To go doolally means to go insane with utter boredom. The word comes from Deolali which was a British army camp north of Bombay (Mumbai) where troops who had finished their turn of duty before and during the second world war would be sent to await their passage home. Clearly they often had to wait a long time.

The full phrase is 'doolally tap'. 'Tap' was a Persian/Urdu word for malarial fever and so 'doolally tap' meant 'camp fever'. I imagine that those poor troops must have felt something like I do when sitting in the car waiting for my dearly beloved to finish getting ready to go out for the evening.

I'LL TRY NOT TO BOAR YOU

My daughter has always been very fond of pigs which may be due to the fact that she appears to have been born on National Pig Day, which incidentally is on March 1st.

The pig is a much maligned animal I discover. In my constant quest to research old sayings I find that in 1732 it was said that

'A hog in armour is still but a hog'. This was recycled in 1887 when it appeared as 'A hog in a silk waistcoat is still a hog'. More recently of course we have have the American version 'you can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig'.

I have recently found that the modern equivalents of some of these old sayings are not necessarily as aesthetically pleasing to the ear. When my daughter and I were discussing a mutual acquaintance of mature years who let us say, has overestimated her attractiveness I quoted 'You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear'. My daughter readily agreed adding 'Yes, you can't polish a turd'.

I suppose I could have said that our friend was 'mutton dressed up as lamb' but then that's a whole different animal.

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During my formative years, a common expression in our house to describe a chilly day was 'it's cold as charity and that's pretty chilly' but there was an alternative.

My mother wasn't normally vulgar in her remarks so during that rather short period of innocence which I went through as a child, I was somewhat taken aback when hearing her complain about the cold temperature during a particularly severe winter as being 'cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey'. Sounds very rude doesn't it? I certainly thought it was at the time but it seems that I did my Mother an injustice. It is in fact a very innocent expression with no reference to bodily parts whatsoever. Let me enlighten you, should you require enlightening that is.

Our seafaring ancestors needed to keep a good supply of cannon balls near the cannons on old war ships without them rolling about the deck. They were stacked with sixteen balls at the bottom, nine on top of those, then four and finally one on the top of the pyramid totalling thirty in all but if the bottom sixteen rolled about ... disaster.

The solution was a metal plate with sixteen round dents in it to hold the bottom layer in place. For some reason the plate was called a Monkey. To prevent rusting, this needed to be made from brass so they were known as 'Brass Monkeys'.

However, if the temperature dropped dramatically, the brass dents would shrink and the cannon balls would roll off the monkey.

So it was 'cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey'.

Sorry for doubting you Mum.

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My dear Mum, rest her soul, wouldn't hurt a fly. I had my wicked moments as a child and was a real test of her parenting skills and yet I cannot remember her ever hitting or slapping me which of course was commonplace when reprimanding children in those days way back when Adam and Eve were toddlers.

However threats were another matter entirely. When I was sent on an errand for instance, in order to ensure my close attention to the matter in hand and my prompt return having accomplished the mission, all manner of hellfire and brimstone would apparently fall on my head if I failed in the task.

Her favourite and most frequently used threat was to disembowel me and make practical use of what she discovered within. A good example of this would be 'If you're not back by 10 o'clock I'll have your guts for garters'.

It seems that the first reference to 'guts for garters' appeared in Robert Greene's The Scottish Historie of James the Fourth, which was written around 1592:

"Ile make garters of thy guttes, Thou villaine."

I'm pleased to report that my intestines are not only complete but are also in reasonable worki

ng order.

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I remember a time when I was small and the world was very big. I was feeling hungry and opened one of Mum's cupboards in search of something to fill the void. What I discovered was a huge hoard of tins. On closer inspection, they were revealed to be of just two types, spam and curried baked beans.

These were very familiar to me as the key ingredients of my mother's 'signature dish' which we commonly referred to as Letts' Lash-Up. This item was always cooked in a huge pan and contained a large quantity of the aforesaid spam and curried beans with the addition of an ever-changing list of other ingredients playing a supporting role.

My mother, bless her, had a great many endearing qualities and was skilled in multifarious tasks none of which included cooking. As we sat expectantly at the dinner table and she carried steaming plates of lash-up towards us this was always a time of great mirth. My father would offer something like "Oh I do enjoy these regular voyages of culinary discovery". During the meal my brother and I would, while chomping, come out with such gems as "So that's what happened to that cricket ball we lost".

My Mum always put up with it all with good humour and would often retort "Sometimes, I feel I'm casting my pearls before swine". The meaning of the phrase is self-evident but since my Mother didn't have a religious bone in her body, I was somewhat surprised to find it to be biblical (Matthew 7-6 "Nether caste ye youre pearles before swyne"). It is perhaps less surprising that Letts' Lash-up might have existed almost 2000 years ago.

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I was in Sweden back in 1967 when they made the change from driving on the left of the road to driving on the right. It was very impressively handled. All the new road signs were already in place but covered over and at the appointed hour of 4 a.m. on September 15th, the covers were whipped off and after an initially massive traffic jam everyone just adjusted.

Such a huge shift in motoring rules carried many more implications than just the road signs of course. Over a period of years, the Swedes had to gradually change over to cars with the steering wheel on the left instead of the right. There was also a massive program of repainting needed to alter the white lines and arrows on their 70,000 miles of roads.

I believe that we Brits have decided that the whole task is just too daunting, not to say expensive and so it is very unlikely that we shall ever change sides here.

However, we proved that we were just as capable as the Swedes in making major changes just a few years later when we dispensed with the shillings and sixpences which were so familiar to everyone in favour of 'new pence'. After a few years the 'new' was dropped along with pennies. Indeed our natural laziness soon had us calling pence simply 'p'.

I soon adapted of course, as did everyone else, but I still have happy memories of those lovely old coins such as the farthing and the thrupenny-bit. There was no ninepenny coin of course, though a few centuries ago such a coin did exist.

This made it all the harder for me to understand what on earth my parents were talking about when they said that something (or somebody) was 'as right as ninepence' .

I now discover that the saying has nothing to do with coinage at all but everything to do with the game 'ninepins' or skittles. When the nine pins are set up in readiness, they have to be placed exactly right in terms of spacing just as the modern bowling pins are which is why those are set up by a machine. So the phrase is essentially a mis-hearing of 'as right as ninepins'.

Finally, after all these years, the penny has dropped.

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My dear old Auntie Monica was a real character. She used to run a dog kennels and having been put out to stud herself she had produced two boys. (She would kill me for saying that!) She wasn't actually a relative, just a very close friend of my mother's since their childhood. My Mum had also produced two boys and this allowed them to compare notes on a regular basis.

They both seemed to agree that they were better off having boys than girls. Their reason, which they freely admitted, was that they remembered how dreadfully behaved they had both been as little girls. I remember Auntie Monica talking about what trouble it would have been to bring up daughters. Her main concern was about protecting them from the attention of boys.

Her suggested solution was that if she had given birth to daughters instead of sons, she would have started secretly putting the contraceptive pill in their cereal every morning from the age of nine onwards.

My Mum's mother had a different method. Apparently, she would urge her wilful daughter to "Keep your hand on your ha'penny". This lovely old phrase was in very common usage and was a gentle way of telling them to keep their hand firmly between their legs so as to deny their boyfriends access.

In the circumstances, I am very grateful that my Dad was able to persuade Mum to spend her halfpenny - to coin a phrase.