Bugger Botany

‘Bugger Bognor’ are said to have been the last words of some English King or other — was it George the fifth? — who caught the pneumonia that killed him while on holiday there. Serves him right for not going to the Greek islands, where he could have caught ‘Grippi’, just like everyone else in Greece at the moment.

Anyway, I shall no doubt write more botanical verse soon, but we haven’t quite finished the alphabet of animal limericks. The next letter is ‘W’. Only yesterday my botanical friend told me that in reading famous people’s recreations in 'Who's Who' she discovered that someone had listed ‘Wombats’ among the things he liked to do. She wondered what one could do with a wombat; I suggested one could use it to play wom. So it’s a shame that today’s animal is not in fact a wombat:

Pity the innocent Wildebeest!
How fear of de Boers must fill de beest:
Van der Merwe and Piet
regard him as meat:
they come out with rifles to kill de beest.

Here are three of them:

The one in the middle is an attractive red-head.