What is our preoccupation with dicks? We obsess over them, see them when they don’t exist (see my last post about the weather) and talk about them even when they cease to be relevant (Boris, the dick, Johnson).
When you work in a school there will be many moments when they appear in children’s work. Potion bottles, a drawing of scissors, santa’s hat, Henry Moore sculptures and so many phallus shaped objects in R.E. Occasionally, an artist will draw a set of headphones on the toilet door and we will all see a cock and balls. The first cave painting was probably meant to be a sky full of birds but looked more like flying Johnsons.
But is our obsession with the dangly parts a cause for concern? If you work in school, is it a safeguarding issue? Would Ofsted be worried?
I ask because there was an interesting post on a primary school music teacher forum about one of the year six shows. The poster, unironically called Karen, had a bit of a bee in her bonnet.
“How on earth has the line “This spotted dick is hard as a brick” got through writers, editors and publishers?” she wrote.
There were instantly lots of replies.
“It’s pudding”
“It’s about school dinners.”
“British school dinner pudding.”
“The song is called lumpy custard.”
Her post hadn’t stopped there, though. It was long and ranty.
“Has not a single person thought about the safeguarding issues in teaching this line to children. I wouldn’t even teach this in secondary school.”
No one had. It was unanimous. Nobody could see the safeguarding issue of hard pudding and lumpy custard. The idea of a paedophile sidling up to a child and propositioning them with a brick-like spotted dick seemed laughable.
Some were teaching the song with no problems, others thought that double-entendre was a performing skill.
But Karen hadn’t stopped there. She went on. And on. And then on a bit more. She couldn’t understand why the company hadn’t employed qualified teachers, how no one had thought about it, how headteachers could condone it being sung in their schools, how safeguarding leads should be very concerned, how it didn’t cause the warning bulb to be changed in the Department of Education, triggering an immediate Ofsted inspection, which the school would, naturally fail.
The company who wrote the musical replied - perfectly. They confirmed that at no point had any of their fully qualified teaching staff thought there was a safeguarding issue with a hard, raisin-studded suet pudding from a 1970s school dinner however they did suggested that if Karen felt uncomfortable teaching it she could change the line to ‘this spotted dick is making me sick’ or if it was the spotted dick that had terrified her she could sing ‘This rice pud doesn’t taste too good.’
Karen replied to everyone who had commented with, ‘would your head agree?’ and turned off the comments before anyone could tell her. She then edited the original post to say that it was clearly controversial as there were no headteachers in agreement with the line. She was incandescent that she should have to change any words herself.
I started to worry about Karen. Had she had a traumatic incident with a suet pudding? Had someone sewn rohypnol into the raisins of a pudding, like in Danny Champion of the World? She hadn’t really found her audience either, as only the previous day there had been a long thread on favourite tongue twisters to teach as warm ups but she couldn’t see that she was talking to a group of people who had perfected the pheasant plucker song in their early teens and sang ‘roll me over, in the clover,’ in the primary school playground.
Seeing penises where they don’t exist is a recognised phenomenon (although most commonly its faces) called pareidolia caused by the brain trying to make sense of the world but I’m not sure they are always something to worry about.
I’m going to leave you with one of my favourite children’s drawings where I could have got overly excited and raised a safeguarding cause for concern.
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