doggerel

If a piece of bar room doggerel and a fanciful interpretation of statistics is the best vaudeville that the Salmond and Sturgeon double act can come up with on the opening day of their showcase conference, heaven help us for the next two years.

Even stranger, is the decision to tell some of these stories in verse which is, sadly, little better than doggerel.

Ob-la-di Ob-la-da, that doggerel, that faux-reggae wet-fish slap in the face, is the song that appalled Lennon so much he called it "granny music shit".

The doggerel of McGonagall, much beloved by my grandfather who would ironically quote it, as he raised a glass, still makes me laugh:

Sendak, however, lightens the doggerel text with wonderfully wild and vibrant illustrations that dance through the pages.

However, Steve said Tychyna survived by writing collections of Soviet doggerel.

But, only days after the city council leader declared he no longer wanted to be part of the PM's big idea, because the level of cuts imposed on Liverpool made the whole thing untenable, the gloves have come off, and Mr Cameron is raking up political doggerel from years ago that simply shames him and his party.

Often described as a song of Gen X malaise," Kelman and Rosen write, "'Loser' is actually a headier concoction: some folk, some hip-hop, and some Dylanesque doggerel, all mashed-up with the nebbishy neurosis of Alexander Portnoy and Alvy Singer.

A representative (though far from exhaustive) range of possibilities appears when one poem begins in a mock formal register (befitting its title, "Fate Will Realize the Three Sisters Whenever Possible"), then dips into broad doggerel, before concluding with a complex blend of deadpan and darker tonalities, when the poet's mother responds over the phone to her son's complaint about his mortality: "Pity.

Well, this humble attempt at doggerel does not do justice to the rollicking rhythms of "Hot Cha Cha," of course, but it really does present a fabulous combo of poetry, color, and motion cleverly packaged in a great little story jingle song.

Dorothy even wrote a poem against developers entitled 1990 which appeared in her published anthology Dorrie's Doggerel which reads: "The developer came in the springtime, destroyed all the trees and their nests.

Added to which dream sequences, reworkings of Shakespeare and lapses into rhymed doggerel, Moonlightng was quite an individual and heady brew.

After the Bard of Castleblayney had finished regaling the assembled masses with his doggerel, he said: "I bought him from Godolphin 18 months ago as an unraced three-year-old because he had bad front joints.

Many of the poems are street ballads and bits of doggerel, while others are masterful and worthy of the Irish poetic tradition.

As this is near the junction of Cannon and Denmark Streets, where I still have unhappy memories, I wrote these lines of doggerel which I know are rather miserable, but that was the situation in 1932.