Back in the early 1990s, the Fife Library service launched a competition. Entrants were invited to create a limerick celebrating any local place name. Helena Nelson had always liked limericks. Over the next six weeks, she submitted thirty or forty entries (there was no limit), some of them cheeky, others naughty, and some extremely polite. None of them won the competition. But never mind. The seed was sown . . .

Decades later, some of those limericks have matured into a pocket-sized booklet of whimsical rhymes, a fanfare for the towns and villages of Fife, Scotland. It is a bit of fun, suitable for young and old, with a few footnote facts about the places it celebrates.

Here, for example is East Wemyss. (You’ll gather how to pronounce the name because the  rhymes make it plain.)

‘The light on the beach at East Wemyss,’
said an artist, ‘is gorgeous. It seems
to grow more divine
with each bottle of wine
and after two bottles, it steams.’