Jaspistos

Poor relation

In Competition No 2480 you were invited to supply a song beginning, ‘Oh, what have you done to your …?, the blank to be filled by a relative of your choice.

When you’re young, relatives — barring the family, of course — are automatically ridiculous. ‘Oh, Aunt Jemima, look at your Uncle Jim./ He’s in the duckpond learning how to swim./ First he does the breaststroke, then he does the side./ Now he’s under the water, swimming against the tide!’ I used to sing that giggling when I was a lad. Now I’m an ancient Uncle Jim, it’s less of a hoot. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to David Wood.

Oh, what have you done to your Uncle Sydney?

It’s years since we dined with the boring old sot:

He’d spots on his liver and only one kidney —

Now what did they call the disease that he got?

Ned said he saw him at Doncaster races —

Seemed sober, he said, though he tended to lurch,

And, of course, he then went and kicked over the traces

As he did when poor Agnes once dragged him to church.

Word was, entre nous, that he’d taken agin yer,

Intended to cut you clear out of his will,

Leave the whole shooting match to his niece in Virginia,

Or was it to Percy, who went to Brazil?

Rich as Croesus, of course, was old Sydney de Villier.

Say, isn’t that cane the one Sydney once twirled?

And those cufflinks you’re wearing look awfully familiar:

Good Lord, my dear boy, you’ve gone up in the world.

David Wood

Oh, what have you done to your Maiden Aunt Sue?

She’ll not be the same again.

She was wandering down to her outside loo

On a cold winter’s night in the rain;

Oh, how could you play such a childish prank?

It shook the poor dear to the core.

She was all on her own in the dark and the dank

With no inkling of what lay in store.

Oh, how could you do such a terrible thing?

Do you feel no remorse or regret?

I can still hear her screams as she suffered the sting

Of a sitting she’ll never forget.

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