No Whey!

‘WE don’t like to blow our own trumpets here at Anorak, but yet again the world of academia is only now catching up with what we have been saying for years.

An accident just waiting to happen

Was it not us who first called for safety nets to be installed beside all the country’s walls after Humpty Dumpty fell off and was irreparably damaged?

Was it not us who argued that hills should be paved with a non-slip surface to prevent a recurrence of Jack and Jill’s infamous accident?

And was it not us who campaigned for health warnings on thistles after Simple Simon (Cerebrally Disadvantaged Simon, in our version of the rhyme) pricked his fingers with one?

Now, at last the world is coming round to our way of thinking with a report in the Times suggesting that nursery rhyme characters expose children to ten times the amount of violence of an evening in front of the TV.

A team from the Bristol Royal Hospital for Children says the frequency of violence in traditional rhymes is far higher than in early evening TV.

And it lamented the fact that most rhymes offer little by way of instruction on the importance of post-injury care.

‘Researchers working on the tongue-in-cheek study,’ the Times reports, ‘said that it underlines the more serious point that television could not be singled out for encouraging aggression in the young.’

But perhaps now public health professionals will join us here at Anorak in campaigning for an improvement in the diet of nursery rhyme characters.

Curds and whey, for instance, are not only high in saturated fats, but they are highly unsuitable for those children who are dairy intolerant…’

Posted: 18th, November 2004 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink