PART 1: Limericks
A) What is a
limerick /ˈlɪmərɪk/?
KEY
Limericks are humour poems. They begin by introducing a person and a place.
Examples:
There was a young man from Spain.
There was an old lady from Bath.
They consist of two long lines that rhyme with each other, followed by two short lines that rhyme with each other and ending with a long line that rhymes with the first two.
E.g.
There was
a young lady of Niger /'naɪdʒ ə/ ,
Who smiled
as she rode on a tiger;
They
returned from the ride
With the
lady inside,
And the
smile on the face of the tiger
B) Predict the following lines:
Limerick 1:
There was an Old Man of the Border,
Who lived in the utmost disorder;
He danced with the Cat,
And made tea in his Hat,
Which vexed all the folks on the Border.
vex somebody to annoy or worry somebody
Limerick 2:
1. There was
an old woman from Kent,
Whose
nose was remarkably bent.
One day,
they suppose,
She
followed her nose,
And
nobody knows where she went.
Limerick 3:
There was
an old man from Crewe
Who
dreamed ( [dremt] ) he was eating his shoe.
He woke up
in the night
With a
terrible fright
And found
it was perfectly true.
Limerick 4:
There was
a young cannibal called Ned,
Who used
to eat onions in bed.
His mother
said “Sonny,
It’s not
very funny.
Why don’t
you eat people instead?“
_______________________________________
C) Put the lines in order
Below there are three jumbled limericks. Sort the lines into the correct order. Some have been done for you.
There was a young lady from Gloucester (1)
One day for her tea
Who grew exceedingly tall.
He could stretch out his leg
Who was awfully fond of small gherkins.
The trouble was how to defrost her.
From the fridge came a sound
There was a young lady called Perkins (6)
And turn off the light in the hall.
There was a young man called Paul (11)
And pickled her internal workings.
And at last she was found.
Whose parents thought they had lost her.
She devoured forty-three
When he got into bed.
KEY
Limerick 1:
(1) There was
a young lady from Gloucester ( [‘gloste] )
Whose
parents thought they had lost her.
From a
fridge came a sound,
And at
last she was found.
The
trouble was how to defrost her.
Limerick 2:
(6) There was a young lady called Perkins.
Who was awfully fond of small gherkins.
One day for her tea
She devoured forty-three
and pickled her internal workings!
pickle something to preserve food in vinegar or salt water. Sp. envinagrar.
Limerick 3:
(11) There was
a young man called Paul,
Who grew
so exceedingly tall,
When he
got into bed
He could
stretch out his leg
And turn
off the light in the hall.
_____________________________________________
PART 2: Outside my window
What can you tell from your window view?
Use relative clauses, and linking devices to express purpose (in order to, so as to, so that, in order that, ...) concession (nevertheless, despite, but for all that,
E.g.
From my window view amidst the trees I
watch the path I have walked on so many times.
From my window I see
the sea, whose waters are more transparent than ever before
Out of my window I look at
the sky, where clouds are drifting away freely.
From my window I can also see
the stars shining as brightly as ever in the black sky.
I have been on lockdown for seven weeks
, but for all that I can still keep abreast of
all the latest developments outside my window.
More ideas:
the sun
climate change
the people across the way...
PART 3: Under Europe’s Strictest Lockdown, the World Is Only As Big as Our Windows
Homework:
Read this interesting article:
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/coronavirus-quarantine-spain/
Can you predict what word is missing in each gap?
One of the uncannier tortures of the current disaster is that so much of it has occurred out of sight. A microbe is not a tornado or a tsunami. It spreads without us seeing it. Then, for a lot of us, quarantine slapped blinkers on our eyes, blocking out the world.
We can’t see (1)_________ other anymore, and we can’t see our families—except for those of us who have no choice (2)________ to see them all the time.
KEY
1. each
2. but
If you’re lucky,
the crisis (3)__________ unfolds where you can’t see it. If you get sick enough yourself or if you’re
homeless or you drive a taxi or work in a hospital, a morgue, an old folks’ home, or an Amazon “
fulfillment center,” you have no choice but to glimpse the wider scope of things, if not the virus itself then at least its world-halting consequences.
The rest of us have our phones and laptops to try to make (4)__________ of the moment, plus whatever we can see out our windows.
KEY
3. itself
4. sense
So far I’ve been among the lucky, locked down in a small Barcelona apartment with two people I love, and lots of windows.
The strictest lockdown in Europe went into (5)____________ here on March 16. Since then, except for five memorable strolls to the grocery store and increasingly leisurely expeditions to take out the trash, my world has shrunk to the narrow, intersecting (6)__________ I can see through the windows, the parked cars that never move, the slivers of sky above it all. Some days it all feels tiny, like the buildings are just stage props, two-dimensional, and the sky has been painted on. When it rains, the windows fog and the whole world contracts into a small, soft, wrinkled, box.
KEY
5. effect
6. streets
Other days, the sunny ones, the world feels huge out there, like this block really does still connect to other blocks, to other streets and other cities, other countries and continents, other worlds, to a future as well as a past. It helps that the air is cleaner now than I’ve ever known it, probably cleaner than it has been for most of the last 150 years since textile factories, built with money from the slave (7)____________ and the sugar (8)_____________ of Cuba, began to make this city rich. Those connections were never easy to see here either, except in the smog that stained the horizons.
KEY
7. trade
8. plantations
Some of what I can see is almost reassuring. I rarely spot a single passenger, but the buses swing around the corners like they used to
. The street cleaners come every day, and the garbage trucks empty the bins. These days I don’t (9)____________ the racket they make, even when it wakes me: a sweet lullaby of farting engines and shattering glass announcing that the city is still alive. It was too easy to miss them before, to imagine oneself alone in a city that somehow functioned on its (10)____________. Now, more alone than ever, we see the lives that make it work, and the work that lets us live.
KEY
9. mind
10. own
I see things I never used to. People in masks, of course. That would have been disturbing just weeks ago. Now it’s the bare (11)_______________ that provoke an involuntary twinge of mistrust. Last week I saw a woman walk by with two small children, all three of them wearing white fabric masks. For a moment I was shocked at the (12)____________ of those little masks on those tiny, little-kid faces, but the kids didn’t seem to mind them. They were poking each other, playing and screeching and racing ahead of their mom. Seeing them was the best thing that happened that day.
KEY
11. faces
12. sight
I see a lot of the neighbours (13)_______________ live in the building behind ours. Maybe too much. Their apartments have spacious balconies about 15 feet from our kitchen window, (14)_______________ puts us on intimate enough terms with the couple opposite us and the couple in the apartment beneath them that my partner thought to name them. There’s the “upple,” or upper couple, and the “lupple,” the lower one. The upple, sour and depressed, have always avoided eye contact. The female cleans, hangs the laundry, smokes resentfully; the male rolls endless joints, plays video games, and watches porn on his phone.
KEY
13.
who
14.
which
The lupple, beneath them, are newcomers. They moved in at the beginning of the year, cheerful and in love. Sometimes they wave up at us. In the early weeks of lockdown, we would see them doing yoga together every day and sometimes, unbearably, singing to each other, as one strummed at guitar, in the evenings. For a while last winter, before the virus hit, we were sure the upple was breaking up, but quarantine seems to have been good for them. They’ve been talking more. Sometimes the male even helps out with the laundry. The lupple, meanwhile, have been looking more and more listless. They haven’t sung to each other for weeks. I fully expect the two couples to have switched roles before this is over, if it ever ends.
The police are out there too. I see them drive by at least once an hour, cruising in slow loops. Our upstairs neighbor tells me they’ve set up a checkpoint at the bottom of the hill and they’ll fine you if you can’t convince them you have a good reason to be out, but from the window I’ve only seen them stop someone once. It was a young African guy. Pandemic or no pandemic, some things don’t change. I watched as four of them made him empty his pockets onto the roof of their car. They finally let him go, then stood around laughing and spraying disinfectant on each other’s hands.
For a while, before the infection curve began at last to flatten, we were hearing sirens all the time. We still see ambulances pulling (15)_____________ to the buildings across the street. I (16)_____________a point of not looking to see whom they cart off. I would rather keep the sick and the dying in the category of the Things I Cannot See Out the Window. That category is a large one. It includes the tens of thousands of dead, of course, and all the people toiling to keep the rest of us from joining them. It includes the young African men I used to see scavenging scrap metal from the trash, and the migrants of a different sort, the herds of sunburned, moneyed tourists who have all flown home by now.
It includes the teenaged boys, mainly Moroccan, who live in the center for unaccompanied migrant youth up the block. They must be going crazy behind those grated windows, their shelter transformed into a prison. I don’t see the people in the actual prisons either, or any of the things I know are there but didn’t see even in circumstances that counted once as normal: all the invisible labour, hidden theft, and not-so-secret violence that make a city and a society run.
KEY
15. up
16. make
make a point of (doing something)
: to give one's attention to (doing something) to make sure that it happens
She makes a point of treating her employees fairly.
But that’s how it always is, isn’t it? Many of us don’t usually see the people who pick our vegetables and slaughter the animals we eat, and we don’t see them now. We’re suddenly more anxiously aware of things called “supply chains,” which are not things or chains but people: people working in fields, mines, factories, warehouses, ports, people whose health our health depends on, a vast web of interdependency that we also cannot see. We can’t see the spiders lurking in it either: the rent we can’t afford to pay, the management companies we’re supposed to write the check to, the private equity funds that hide behind them, skimming off the profits. Just as they always did, things we cannot see set the boundaries of the possible. The enforced isolation of quarantine is just life under capitalism, only more so.
Then there are the birds, who see far more than us, and who gossip even more than we do. They start at about five each morning and keep at it all day, chattier and bolder than they ever were back when the streets still clanged with our foibles. Should it tell us something that this pause in the system is being celebrated by so many other living things? It should. Our absence looks different to the birds. They see the promise of a world no longer driven by the furies of consumption. They see life opening up again, a different kind of web. And surely they see us behind our windows gazing out at them, remembering in our misfortune how much we have failed to see, and doing our best—some of us—to see it all anew.
