The perils of keeping your money in your Puss

‘The Salty Sea Cat went to sea To see what she could see. In a swirling mist, two rocks she missed,

Before landing on number three.’

This was a false start for me. I had decided to write a children’s book which used homophones - words which sound the same, but have different meanings or spelling - but quickly hit my own writer’s rock. The difficulty came when I tried to make a meaningful and entertaining story, while at the same time fitting in homophones, such ‘new’ and ‘knew’. Some words readily lend themselves to the Salty Sea Cat’s exploits on the high seas; words such as blew and blue; whale and wail, more and moor, could easily take their place in a nautical tale… or even on a nautical ‘tail’. The main problem was not with the story or the homophones themselves, but with the rhyme scheme. My granddaughter often reminds me that the only true rhyme for ‘orange’ is ‘Blorenge’, but it would be difficult to use a Welsh hill in everyday ditties. I found myself scouring the internet for lists of rhyming words and homophones, in the hope that something would turn up, but failed miserably. After verse one, everything seemed forced when read aloud. Buying a sail in a sale, might have led to the shipwreck, but putting it into a meaningful rhyming story proved difficult. Although I am a fan of ‘Zygolex’, the word-linking game where every word is connected to another by two or more different types of link, such as rhyme, meaning, spelling, etc., I often fall foul of the curse of local dialect. The puzzles are obviously written in the Home Counties, where a ‘bath’ is a ‘barth’ and ‘last’ becomes ‘larst’, resulting in a great deal of head scratching, before I find the correct rhyme. Hailing from the Black Country, pronunciation has always proved to be something of a problem. Many years ago, I was on playground duty in a school in the Forest of Dean, when a five year old tearfully told me that, she had lost her Puss. “Don’t worry,” I said, “he’ll probably be waiting for you when you get home.” My words of consolation had no effect, in fact they seemed to cause her to wail even louder. It was only when one of her older sisters, eyeing me as if I had bats in the belfry, said, “But Miss it had her dinner money in it,” that I realised my mistake. This is why the Salty Sea Cat is still somewhere out there in the mist, and probably will not be missed.