DM has been teaching his kids about Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, West Country boys both. He was setting them the task of writing a poem about Walter Raleigh and I “volunteered” to do one to give them a flavour of what they might do. Apparently they call this modelling.

I must confess it was conceived in yesterday morning’s shower and scribbled down in approximately two minutes in between making his sandwich and putting on the toast. Wordsworth it ain’t! Age-related appropriate notepaper it ain’t!

It was quite an interesting exercise actually for all sorts of reasons. Apparently Raleigh was a poet himself although I have no idea in what style or whether he was any good. There is, of course, no reason to suppose the cloak story was true but what the heck (see a nice seven-year-old friendly “expletive”), neither were the potato or tobacco ones either.

So my limerick needed to have a bit of seven-year-old friendly sauce as well as three lines of “puddle” rhyme and two of “cloak”. They were what I concocted in the shower and the rest dropped into place over the sandwich filling!

I’m not sure that DM even bothered to look at it until much later in the day but he seemed pleased that the sauce quotient was not OTT. I’m not sure I will be considering a new career in poetry any time soon. OK, OK, it IS pure, unadulterated crap - whoops there goes the seven-year-old filter!