Over the years, I have been writing down some of the more amusing, striking and strange comments and phrases which my children have uttered. Reading through them, I thought it would be fun to base some poems on them.

“HALF MY ROOM IS HALF TIDY” (AGE 14)

Half of my room is half tidy,
Half of my clothes are half clean,
Half of my carpet is visible,
Though the other half strains to be seen.
Half of my shelves are half dusty,
But it’s just where my special things sit,
And they’re stuck there with half-moons of Blu Tack;
They can’t be moved,
Not even a bit.
Half of my homework is finished,
But all of my bed is half made,
And with curtains half closed to the sunlight,
My whole room is half light and half shade.
Half of my room is half tidy,
But all my intentions are good,
So I wonder if you could half help me
To sort things the way that I should?

“MY ROOM’S A TIP…I LIKE IT LIKE THIS” (AGE 10)

My room is a tip,
But I like it like this,
Its shape is not ship,
But the chaos is bliss!
I feel quite at home
In my own wild creation,
Where I’m warmed to the bone
By my mess insulation.

THE TOOTH IN A TOFFEE NOTE

This was based on the words of an undated note to the tooth fairy, which begins “I was eating a toffee then my tooth fell out. Sorry it isn’t here but please put the money there anyway.”

My tooth’s in a toffee, dear Fairy of Teeth,
You can peer in my mouth if you’re short on belief.
I don’t have the toffee to give you as proof,
As the bin has the toffee that’s stuck round my tooth.
The tooth was a back tooth, I’d just like to state,
In case that’s worth double the usual rate.
I’ll be much more careful when the next one falls out,
Or post it on Facebook so you won’t be in doubt.
Although that tooth’s loss was a sort of relief
It sure proves that toffees are bad for your teeth!

“I LOOK LIKE A STALE APPLE” (AGE 11)

Commenting on legs bruised from playing sports.

I look like a stale apple:
It must be the shoves and the grapple,
It must be the blocks and the bashes,
It must be the slides and the crashes.

It could be the tumbles and thumps,
It could be the trips and the bumps,
It could be the shots to the shins,
It could be the losses, or wins.

It might be the bunch or the scrum,
It might be a knuckle or thumb,
It might be an elbow or boot,
It might be reluctance to shoot.

I expect it’s the legs in a tangle,
I expect it’s a kick’s tricky angle,
I expect it’s just part of the game;
I expect my legs will always look the same –
Like a stale apple.

“I WANT TO LIVE IN THE GAP BETWEEN MY BED AND THE WALL” (AGE 13)

Between the side of my bed
And the wall
Is a gap I could wriggle down
I could snuggle down
And be hidden.
No one
Could make me wake
For school
No one
Could insist I digest
My “five a day”.

There is a drop of dust
To contend with
(Not my responsibility)
But there may be
Long lost treasures
To be excavated.
Plenty of room to read
And there should be wi-fi.
There had better be wi-fi.

Between the side of my bed
And the wall
Will be peace.
No big brothers
Or little sisters
Will bother me.
I will not have to visit
Rare relatives
Or go for long healthy walks
In steely winter countryside.
No space for homework
And my bed will remain conveniently made.
The caress of the duvet’s edge
On my head
Is all the comfort I require.

Between the side of my bed
And the wall
Is a gap I could wriggle down
I could snuggle down.
Just need to work out
How to get the biscuits…

“DIE! DIE!” (AGE 12)

Spoken whilst attempting to chop shallots by stabbing them with the point of a large knife.

What’s a shallot?
I don’t know, but it has to die!
And now that I’ve killed it,
It’s making me cry.
I was kinder to the carrots,
They’re bigger, chop neater,
They look a good colour,
And taste a lot sweeter.

Who needs a swede?
I don’t, but it MUST BE DISSECTED.
And now it’s in pieces
My chopping’s respected.

Have we got to eat these?

“I THINK YOU’LL FIND IF YOU LOOK FOR SOMETHING IN THIS HOUSE YOU’LL OFTEN FIND IT’S MISSING.” (AGE 10)

There’s a basket of socks that is useless to all
Where one of each pair has escaped and run free;
There are things you may lose that have meaningless presence.

How fretful the quest to find things that are small
When the house is a haystack, when clearly you see
There are things that have fibres of life in their essence.

To buy a new pen and to wish to recall
Where it last laid its nib, but the logic may be
There are things you may lose that have meaningless presence.

Waking up in the night with your thoughts in a sprawl
Can extrude from your mind a mislaid memory;
There are things that have fibres of life in their essence.

When you’re wanting that button, that book, or that ball,
They have vanished, along with the chamomile tea:
There are things you may lose that have meaningless presence.

Trinkets and letters and notebooks of scrawl,
Fragments and pieces of trivial history;
There are things you may lose that have meaningless presence,
There are things that have fibres of life in their essence.

“POSSIBLY THE WORST WRITER I HAVE EVER READ.” (AGE 13, on the subject of Shakespeare)

Mr Shakespeare, by the world adored,
I wonder if you know you make me bored.
Can you imagine how I find your words
As difficult as talking with the birds?
You wrote some comedies, so goes the rumour,
But I don’t share your schoolboy sense of humour;
I think your tragedies are barking mad,
It’s not applause to say I find them “sad”.
I bet when you were at your hard school desk
You read a writer you loved to detest,
And now in classrooms up and down the land,
We graze your plays and try to understand
Why everything you wrote is thought so fine,
Or even just to comprehend one line;
Our plodding puzzlement would be yours too
If we gave you our online chat to view.

I’m sure the theatre goers of your day
Loved a good Elizabethan play,
But nowadays there’s film and television,
Computer games and VR goggle vision,
There’s entertainment everywhere we look,
We don’t need ancient scripts plonked in a book.

But do not worry, many people still
Enjoy your writing and in future will;
Perhaps one day I may reach better knowledge
Of how to best digest your verbal porridge.
But, Shakespeare, just for now there will be sighs
Every time your words assault my eyes.

You may be interested to know that the final six lines are entirely composed of words found in the works of Shakespeare. However, I should point out that, according to the great Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary of Alexander Schmidt, the word “porridge” then referred to a sort of soup rather than the oat-based breakfast dish we associate with the word today.

“I USED TO THINK WHIPLASH WAS GETTING HURT BY YOUR OWN HAIR.”

On a dark and stormy night
I awoke in sudden dread;
In the absence of the light
Was there something near my bed?
Was there something creeping close
That was touching-distance near?
Could I smell it with my nose,
Was it rasping in my ear?
Round my throat I felt it most,
Ever more and more aware.
Was it human or a ghost?

Neither.

It was just my own wild hair.