The third update on my project to revisit nursery rhymes and popular stories for our Covid times. You can find the first and second updates here and here and there are links to rhymes you may have missed.

Mary went back to school and, inevitably her little lamb followed. Teacher didn’t appreciate having a lamb in class. It was quite difficult enough to enforce social distancing as it was without the distractions of a lamb in class.

In Humpty Dumpty territory there has been a rash of people falling off walls. Officials are worried by the rising numbers but the King has an easy solution. They should stop counting. It’s such an obvious answer it’s been adopted in other countries where they have either stopped testing or are not reporting numbers that make them look bad.

Old King Cole, merry as he usually is, is missing the company of his fiddlers and wants this to be over. His pipe and his bowl are all very well but somehow they don’t console him.

Poor Bo Peep feels like she has lost her youth, the best years of her life. She can’t get out and meet friends and stands no chance of romance or fulfilling her life ambitions. Hopefully, if she ‘leaves things alone’ , doesn’t dwell on how grim it all is, her dreams will come home ‘wagging their tails behind them.’

If you want to visit gran is a riff on the nursery rhyme ‘pop goes the weasel’ it points up the irony of having a little more freedom with relaxation of UK lockdown rules as long as you don’t plan on visiting an elderly relative. ‘Pop goes the weasel’ doesn’t make much sense but neither do the rules.

Four and Twenty Londoners baked in a pie is a Covid take on Sing a Song of Sixpence. The latest Government advice is to get back to work but avoid public transport. For many Londoners that’s contradictory advice leading to inevitable scenes of crowded tubes and trains crammed in like blackbirds into a pie. The perfect Petri dish to bake a virus in.

While the Old Folks die is a take on Kipling’s poem the Smugglers with it’s refrain ‘Watch the wall my darling while the gentlemen go by’. It highlights the plight of Care Homes and their elderly residents while the government have been focussed on hospitals.