Hokey Pokey

Hot on the heels (Hey, he’s been busy!) of Hokey Cokey in 2018, Steve Nicholls brought us Hokey Pokey in Jerusalem earlier this year. Apparently, half the world was somewhat confused by the Hokey Cokey and couldn’t quite bring themselves to sing the right words, insisting that it was the Hokey Pokey, so in order to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, Hokey Pokey was born, and duly exchanged at IPP40.

The handsome packaging (replete with encouraging hamsters!) provides the goal: Remove the shackle and Identify the pun. It cradles a brass padlock and a keyring with some of the strangest items you could possibly imagine. Apart from the pair of keys (not that strange I grant you), there is a cork and a wine stopper with a large 40 on top of it… now in fairness the hamsters on the top label are imbibing a good red, so perhaps we’re being encouraged to partake as well? (There is no wine in the packaging – I looked…

The lock helpfully has the name engraved across the top so you’ll always be able to tell you Cokey from your Pokey (DON'T!), and that cork has the name on it too, so you can’t get the keys mixed up… not that the keys seem to be of any use at all – Steve appears to have given us a couple of keys that don’t do anything at all: inserting them into the keyway and turning in the traditional manner confirms that Steve might have given us the wrong keys… quelle surprise!

OK, so if the keys don’t work, what else can we do?

We can tug on the shackle and see it move a tiny bit… but no more. We can take everything off the keyring and examine them, yup, that’s a wine stopper with a big fat forty on top of it (it was exchanged at IPP40 remember?) and the cork can be removed from its eyelet – weird, but not unusual, at least not for Steve…

The first part of the puzzle turned out to be fun and a little surprising and I was dead chuffed when I had the shackle open…

The second half of the puzzle was somewhat more elusive and I ended up spending months toying with various bits of wordplay, trying to work out how all those weird things on the keyring could possibly be described and what to make of some of the other bizarre discoveries that I haven’t mentioned in here for fear of spoiling a surprise… I literally had lists of words and I spent ages trying to combine them and squeeze something funny out of them as Steve had told me I’d know when I had found it…

It turned out I needed a fair amount of nudging on a rather long train trip with Steve before I groaned big time and admitted he’d outdone himself… the pun is definitely worth hunting for – you’ll love it and hate him for it at the same time – it’s perfect!

Chapeau sir!