This week was the launch of Over the Hills and Far Away, a bumper treasury of nursery rhymes from all around the world, collected by Elizabeth Hammill of Seven Stories Centre for Children’s Books.

Here’s my page – first featuring escaping cutlery and crockery.

Then there was a strange rhyme about pulling fish out of one’s eye. Nursery rhymes are very weird and random. I just couldn’t find out what it was all about – was threescore and ten the years you might live? What are the fishes? Wishes? Golden riches? I had a vague memory that in a lecture once I had heard about fish being a symbol of remembering things – you’d hook a fish, but you wouldn’t pull up just one, because each fish would have another fish biting its tail, so you could pull out a great chain of fish. And in the days before google and books, remembering huge amounts of things was really useful.

But I still have the notes to the lecture (if was by Professor Bruce Brown) – and there’s no mention of memory fish.

So is my memory of memory fish a false memory?