conuly

I was sitting there doing the usual - saving the baby from killing herself with leaves, pretending not to watch Ana do things she considered quite death-defying (if she thought I was watching, she'd ask for help. So I carefully looked in the opposite direction every time she glanced around for me), and marveling at the sheer number of Brits packed into that tiny playground. British nannies, British parents, British people all around. (Actually, it strikes me that I run into quite a number of Brits in my real life (assuming I don't have the accent all wrong), so it must just be something about this city or the places I go.)

And one of them was doing ring-around-the-rosie with the children she was with - but after everybody fell down, she keeps going! About cows and buttercups and all.

This is so common there are variations on it, and I bet I'd get more if I took out the quotes. (Well, not *that* common, but Google isn't always right.)

And I've never heard it before.

So now I'm back to looking up variations of nursery rhymes and similar - they always seem so crystallized, so finished, until you realize that they kinda sorta really aren't. I was stunned one day, for example, to find quite randomly a version of The Farmer in the Dell that had the cheese "take a run" instead of "stand alone" (and the person who catches the cheese is the new farmer, instead of the cheese itself).