Nonsense and outsiders

When I wrote ‘The Shrimp and the Radiator‘, I was thinking of Edward Lear.

It was ‘The Owl and the Pussycat‘ that made me invent a mismatched duo, gloriously happy to live outside convention.

But it was ‘There was an old man of Whitehaven‘ that made me avoid a happy ending for my odd pair.

When I first discovered Lear’s limericks, I didn’t like the fact that the final rhyming word was just a repetition of the first. The other limericks I knew were pleasing because they went somewhere; Lear’s didn’t. But I soon realised that this was the point. Tragically, the old man of Whitehaven gets nowhere, and ends up “smashed” by the people who decide what is and is not acceptable.

In my poem, it is the weather, not society, that defeats the Shrimp and the Radiator. But it seemed important, when I wrote the poem, that my characters should not succeed in their goal of living freely in whatever clothes they chose.

By its very nature, nonsense writing brings together things that do not, normally, go together. It therefore often seems an appropriate medium in which to explore the outcasts of society - or those who live on the edge of acceptability. I like Lear’s limerick because, for all its silliness, I recognise the truth in it.

This is the first kind of nonsense - the kind that actually does make sense, after all. The kind that, like satire, at first seems absurd, but in fact tells the truth.

• A certain kind of sense
• ‘No Escape’
• Photographs and memory

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