Call me Thomas. I live in the northern United States with my wife, Nancy. We both are retired and enjoy traveling a great deal. I write limericks while on trips for my own amusement while waiting for trains or airplanes or in hotel rooms or other situations where travelers might work crossword or Sudoku puzzles. Limerick writing is the perfect hobby for the itinerant. It requires only a writing instrument and scrap of paper.

When Nancy and I take trips, I sometimes write a recap or memoir of the trip in verse. If the group is small I occasionally write limericks featuring the other members of the tour group or write a toast in verse for the tour leader(s). On some occasions, these are parodies of verse written by real poets; on others they are written as multiple-verse limericks.

In retirement, I try to follow the advice Jesus gave his disciples in Verse 6 of The Gospel of Thomas: “Do not lie; and that which you hate, do not do.” In writing limericks, I’m definitely doing something I don’t hate, but I’ve been less successful in truth-telling. As you have probably already decided, Laetitia and the quirky people she meets are made up; some of the locales are real but others are imaginary; and real locales are sometimes embellished with features that they don’t actually have.

I’m a retired scientist from a field where data are considered more important than writing style. The offerings in this blog are perhaps not “a gob of spit on the face or art,” as Henry Miller said of his The Tropic of Cancer, but stylistically-challenged writing is a habit with me, and I have the dubious honors to prove it, including winning the Vile Puns Category and two Dishonorable Mentions in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest run by San Jose State for bad novel first lines.