100 dumplings & 1,000,000 peas: the further adventures of Mr. Greedy

I used to have a tape of kids' songs themed around Roger Hargreaves' deathlessly wonderful Mr. Men characters. There were about five or six songs on each side of the tape, i seem to recall, up to a total of about twelve.

They were mostly third-person narrative tales about the adventures of the better known Mr. Men or some of their character traits: Mr. Happy's track, for instance, was a (rather soppy, i recall) paean to positivity, while Mr. Bump's chronicled his accident-prone nature. The odd few were told from a first-person perspective, a highlight being Mr. Nosey's painful account of the consequences of constantly sticking his ample nose in everybody's business.

(Thanks to this ace site for the cover scan.)

The best song, however, which ended side one, concerned (and was entitled) "Mr Greedy's Little Light Lunch".

One hundred dumplings and a million peas
Twenty marmalade puddings and a cheddar cheese
Bread and butter and a roll or two
Bread and butter and a roll or two, three, four

Then boiled beef and carrots in a casserole stew
And a bucket of custard, vanilla cake too
Bread and butter and a roll or two
Mr. Greedy is having a little light lunch

And then a treat for him to eat
It's roly poly pudding...

Apparently, Greedy also ate "ice cream in tons", "a gallon of soup", "bunches of bananas", and, somewhat underwhelmingly after all that lot, "plum duffs". Dunno about you, but to me that sounds like a hearty meal.

An unhealthy appetite was also the downfall of Mr. Greedy's namesake this week. The suitably rotund-looking Clive Greedy (right) was suspended from his job as a paramedic on the Isle of Wight after eating a stick of celery while attempting to revive a patient suffering from a heart attack.

According to the Beeb:

Darren Claydon, an emergency care practitioner... told a hearing in London on Monday: "My attention was called to Clive Greedy, by him saying, 'Nice celery'"...

This story just gets more and more improbable. Not just because at the time of the celery consumption, Greedy's partner paramedic John Jones was also "jesting with a prawn" and speculating as to whether said seafood would be cooked if the patient was defibrillated while it was on his chin; but also because, who, i ask you, has ever used the phrase "nice celery" before?

Obviously i wanted to give away "Mr. Greedy's Little Light Lunch" with this post, but my Mr. Men tape got lost about fifteen years ago (there's good money in it if you can get me a rip. More for a hard copy) so that went out the window. So here's some good general songs to go towards your five-a-day instead.

MP3: Minor Threat — "Salad Days"
MP3: Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention — "Call Any Vegetable"
MP3: The Vegetable Orchestra — "Greenhouse"