My son came and sat on the bed at 5.30 this morning. He is often prone to early-morning pondering. “I’m puzzled about something, Mum,” he said. My eyes were bleary and my head was aching. We are in the midst of moth season and I had been up all night with a rolled-up newspaper and a fly swat trying to eliminate the possibility of one of my mothy little friends lodging itself in my ear in the middle of the night.
‘What’s he been thinking about this time?’ I wondered. Last week it had been preservatives in food, the role of religion in wars, the plight of polar bears and the oil crisis. Moth-battling Mum was cranky Mum, I wasn’t sure if I was up for discussing one of the big issues so soon after finally settling to sleep at four in the morning.
“I think songwriters should be more careful when they name their songs,” said the boy. “It can be very confusing and misleading. There’s a song from Wayne’s World that has rap in the title but the song has got nothing to do with rap.”
‘He’s right,’ I thought. ‘Wayne’s World and rap just don’t fit. There’s Aerosmith, Hendrix, lots of rock – but no rap.’
“What’s the name of the song?” I asked.
‘You know it,” said the boy. “The one by Queen. Bohemian Rap City. It just doesn’t make sense. There’s no rap whatsoever.”
“It’s rhapsody,” I said. “Bohemian Rhapsody. Look it up in the dictionary – it’s a style of musical composition with an ecstatic kind of feeling, just like I’m going to have when I catch up on some sleep.”
The boy ran off to find his dictionary and I sighed with contentment as I attempted to capture the sleep which had previously eluded me. Ah, Rap City, here I come.
Selma In The City 
Aren’t misheard songs marvellous? For years, I thought Elvis sang ‘You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog/crapping all the time’ And, my mother once told me how, as a little girl, she sand ‘Gladly, my cross-eyed bear’
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